In [ ]:
# Till now we've seen rule-based algos. Now we will use ML based.
# Feature extraction using the bag of words model
# Use K-means clustering to identify a set of topics
# Using the K-Nearest Neigbors model for calssifying text into those topics
# We'll start with a corpus(large number) of articles and identify underlyign themes and then assign themes to the articles
In [37]:
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def getAllDoxyDonkeyPosts(url,links):
request = urllib2.Request(url)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response)
for a in soup.findAll('a'):
try:
url = a['href']
title = a['title']
if title == "Older Posts":
print title, url
links.append(url)
getAllDoxyDonkeyPosts(url,links) #this is like a recursive call
except:
title = ""
return
blogUrl = "http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in"
links = []
getAllDoxyDonkeyPosts(blogUrl,links)
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-09-09T07:34:00-07:00&max-results=7
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-08-28T20:08:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-08-17T19:24:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=14&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-08-07T20:30:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=21&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-07-26T19:55:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=28&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-07-17T19:47:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=35&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-07-06T19:34:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=42&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-06-26T19:36:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=49&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-06-15T19:23:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=56&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-06-06T18:50:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=63&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-05-26T20:08:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=70&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-05-17T18:52:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=77&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-05-06T19:26:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=84&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-04-27T19:03:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=91&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-04-19T19:36:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=98&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-04-10T19:19:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=105&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-03-30T19:12:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=112&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-03-20T18:41:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=119&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-03-09T18:38:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=126&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-02-28T17:47:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=133&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-02-17T18:44:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=140&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-02-08T18:13:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=147&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-01-28T19:45:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=154&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-01-18T18:30:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=161&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2016-01-07T19:03:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=168&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-12-28T18:26:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=175&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-12-16T18:24:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=182&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-12-07T18:24:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=189&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-11-26T17:49:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=196&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-11-17T18:18:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=203&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-11-05T20:15:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=210&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-10-27T20:04:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=217&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-10-12T19:45:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=224&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-09-30T19:33:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=231&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-09-20T19:11:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=238&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-09-09T19:32:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=245&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-08-31T19:31:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=252&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-08-20T19:29:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=259&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-08-11T19:32:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=266&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-08-02T19:04:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=273&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-07-22T19:39:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=280&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-07-13T19:38:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=287&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-07-02T21:15:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=294&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-06-23T19:30:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=301&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-06-14T19:36:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=308&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-06-02T19:38:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=315&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-05-24T20:16:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=322&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-05-13T20:18:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=329&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-05-04T20:23:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=336&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-04-23T20:19:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=343&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-04-14T19:40:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=350&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-04-05T20:22:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=357&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-03-24T20:12:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=364&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-03-15T20:41:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=371&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-03-03T19:30:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=378&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-02-22T19:55:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=385&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-02-11T20:02:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=392&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-02-02T19:46:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=399&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-01-22T19:50:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=405&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-01-15T19:17:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=410&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2015-01-06T19:48:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=417&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-12-25T21:30:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=424&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-12-15T19:24:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=431&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-12-05T01:52:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=438&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-11-26T01:44:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=445&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-11-17T01:41:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=452&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-11-06T01:38:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=459&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-10-28T01:24:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=466&by-date=false
Older Posts http://doxydonkey.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2014-10-17T01:20:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=473&by-date=false
In [38]:
def getDoxyDonkeyText(testUrl):
request = urllib2.Request(testUrl)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response)
mydivs = soup.findAll("div", {"class":'post-body'})
posts =[]
for div in mydivs:
posts+=map(lambda p:p.text.encode('ascii', errors='replace').replace("?"," "), div.findAll("li")) #First encode the text into the right paradigm
return posts
In [39]:
doxyDonkeyPosts = []
for link in links:
doxyDonkeyPosts+=getDoxyDonkeyText(link)
In [40]:
doxyDonkeyPosts
Out[40]:
['What s Really Missing From the New iPhone: Dazzle Forget about the headphone jack for a second. Sure, it s pretty annoying that Apple s newest iPhones the 7 and 7 Plus, which were unveiled in San Francisco on Wednesday and will start shipping to customers on Sept. 16 will not include a port for plugging in standard earbuds. But you ll get used to it. The absence of a jack is far from the worst shortcoming in Apple s latest product launch. Instead, it s a symptom of a deeper issue with the new iPhones, part of a problem that afflicts much of the company s product lineup: Apple s aesthetics have grown stale. Apple has squandered its once-commanding lead in hardware and software design. Though the new iPhones include several new features, including water resistance and upgraded cameras, they look pretty much the same as the old ones. The new Apple Watch does too. And as competitors have borrowed and even begun to surpass Apple s best designs, what was iconic about the company s phones, computers, tablets and other products has come to seem generic. This is a subjective assessment, and it s one that Apple rebuts.Yet there are signs that my critique of Apple s designs are shared by others. Industrial designers and tech critics used to swoon over Apple s latest hardware; nowadays you witness less swooning and more bemusement.And while Apple has slowed its design cadence, its rivals have sped up. Last year Samsung remade its lineup of Galaxy smartphones in a new glass-and-metal design that looked practically identical to the iPhone. Then it went further. Over the course of a few months, Samsung put out several design refinements, culminating in the Note 7, a big phone that has been universally praised by critics. With its curved sides and edge-to-edge display, the Note 7 pulls off a neat trick: Though it is physically smaller than Apple s big phone, it actually has a larger screen. So thanks to clever design, you get more from a smaller thing exactly the sort of advance we once looked to Apple for.',
'Amazon Cuts Delivery Times in Threat to Alibaba, EBay, Wish.com: Amazon.com Inc. is speeding the delivery of USB cables, smartphone screen protectors, cosmetics and other small, flat items in its continuing push against rival marketplaces that help overseas manufacturers and suppliers sell directly to U.S. shoppers. The Seattle-based company notified merchants Wednesday that such items would now be delivered to Amazon Prime members within five business days, down from eight previously, according to an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg. That makes Amazon delivery of small, inexpensive items from China, for example, much faster than the two weeks to 30 days it can take using marketplaces owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., EBay Inc. and Wish.com. Amazon wants quick delivery, which has helped it dominate online shopping in the U.S., to further differentiate itself from competitors in cross-border e-commerce. U.S. online shoppers will spend about $30 billion this year on cross-border transactions, a 10 percent increase from 2015, with China the leading source of goods purchased, according to a February report byEMarketer. ',
'OfferUp raises $119 million for resale marketplace: It s like Craigslist, but with auctions. OfferUp is an app that makes it easy to buy and sell your goods. The fast-growing Seattle-based company is raising $119 million to continue its global expansion and continue hiring. The round is led by Warburg Pincus and includes funding from GGV Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and T. Rowe Price. OfferUp users snap a photo of their used items like clothing and furniture and then check the app to sort through the highest bids. The built-in messaging feature also makes it easy to communicate with prospective buyers. Hans Tung from GGV Capital said that he invested in OfferUp because Craigslist hasn t innovated for a long time and there is unmet, pent up demand for classified on mobile. He points out that OfferUp makes it easy to communicate with prospective buyers, without having to share one s personal cell phone number. OfferUp launched just last year and already has 29 million installations in the U.S. They claim that their user engagement rivals Snapchats.I personally tried OfferUp last fall when I was selling items before a cross-country move. I was surprised to see how easy it was to find bidders for seemingly undesirable things, including my used trash can! OfferUp previously raised over $91 million in funding. ',
'After a quiet summer, Twitter s board will take a hard look at what comes next: Twitter s quiet summer may soon be coming to an end. The social communication company s board of directors is set to meet this Thursday in San Francisco, and there are plenty of things to discuss. That includes, said sources, its fate as a standalone company. That s no surprise, since Twitter has been the subject of numerous takeover and acquisition rumors over the last few months, each one sending the stock up as investors hold out hope that Twitter will find a buyer. There are the big corporate names that might take another close look at Twitter, such as Google (there s an unusual scenario one source mentioned in which it becomes part of some Alphabet media spinoff), Apple and even media mogul Rupert Murdoch, either via 21st Century Fox or News Corp. Other possible bidders include private equity firms that may want to take the company private, where it can solve some of its issues out of the public eye. But finding a buyer won t be easy, given the Twitter s estimated cost. Using the same multiple LinkedIn got from Microsoft in its recent $26 billion acquisition deal, a Twitter buyer would have to fork over about $18 billion. That s a steep price tag for a company that has had persistent issues with growth and also one that is still losing money each quarter.',
'Postmates is raising at least $100 million to fuel its on-demand ambitions: We re hearing from sources that Postmates, which is among a few companies that are seen as operating in the difficult on-demand space, is raising at least $100 million in a round led by Founders Fund. Sources stressed that the round has not closed, and that things may change over time. Despite the challenges of working in an on-demand economy which can sometimes lead to punishing gross margins and high operational costs we ve heard that Postmates is actually in okay shape. Some leaked financial documents earlier obtained by TechCrunch dated last year highlighted gross margins of around 20%. Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann has said before that the company is on track to hit profitability in 2017 which, at the time we reviewed the leaked documents, we also heard was on track.The company is operating in an area of steep competition with the likes of DoorDash, which recently raised $127 million in a down round. That moment was somewhat of a microcosm of the financing environment at the time: DoorDash sought a valuation of $1 billion, but inevitably had to settle for something lower. However, in Postmates situation, we hear that this round is not a down round. The company last raised $80 million at a round that valued it at nearly $500 million. Obviously this is good news for Postmates.',
'A look at three players in the 3D printing world: Carbon is backed by notable investors, including Google, Autodesk and Sequoia Capital as the company managed to raise $141 million to date. Their debut printer, the M1, is priced at $40,000 per year with a minimum three-year term a subscription-based model that is quite new to the 3D printing industry. After a decade s worth of research and development, and $25 million in funding from Autodesk and Catalyst, XJet revealed its technology at RAPID 2016 in May. The company now has seven machines operating in its Rehovot, Israel HQ, but is yet to announce an official launch date and its first product. Once on the market, XJet could potentially disrupt the production of short-runs of complex metal parts in major areas of production.Offering an end-to-end solution for $155,000, HP s machine is priced rather competitively. Currently there s only one available material (nylon), but the company is planning to roll out more materials in the coming months, showing vast potential for future development.',
'How Uber Drivers Decide How Long to Work: For nearly 20 years, economists have been debating how cabdrivers decide when to call it a day. This may seem like a trivial question, but it is one that cuts to the heart of whether humans are fundamentally rational in this case, whether they earn their incomes efficiently as the discipline has traditionally assumed. In one camp is a group of so-called behavioral economists who have found evidence that many taxi drivers work longer hours on days when business is slow and shorter hours when business is brisk the opposite of what economic rationality, to say nothing of common sense, would seem to dictate. So who is right That s where Uber comes in. When one of the company s researchers, using its supremely detailed data on drivers work time and rides, waded into the debate with a paper this year, the results were intriguing. Over all, there was little evidence that drivers were driving less when they could make more per hour than usual. But that was not true for a large portion of new drivers. Many of these drivers appeared to have an income goal in mind and stopped when they were near it, causing them to knock off sooner when their hourly wage was high and to work longer when their wage was low.Whatever the case, the result seems to have one very obvious implication: Anyone trying to make it in the gig economy should probably pick a favorite platform or two and stick with them rather than constantly jump around from one type of gig to another.',
'Goodbye, Ivory Tower. Hello, Silicon Valley Candy Store. Silicon Valley is turning to the dismal science in its never-ending quest to squeeze more money out of old markets and build new ones. In turn, the economists say they are eager to explore the digital world for fresh insights into timeless economic questions of pricing, incentives and behavior. It s an absolute candy store for economists, Mr. Coles said. The pay, of course, is a lot better than you would find in academia, where economists typically earn $125,000 to $150,000 a year. In tech companies, pay for a Ph.D. economist will usually come in at more than $200,000 a year, the companies say. With bonuses and stock grants, compensation can easily double in a few years. Senior economists who manage teams can make even more. Businesses have been hiring economists for years. Usually, they are asked to study macroeconomic trends topics like recessions and currency exchange rates and help their employers deal with them. But what the tech economists are doing is different: Instead of thinking about national or global trends, they are studying the data trails of consumer behavior to help digital companies make smart decisions that strengthen their online marketplaces in areas like advertising, movies, music, travel and lodging. Tech outfits including giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoftand up-and-comers like Airbnb and Uber hope that sort of improved efficiency means more profit.',
"Satellite owner says SpaceX owes $50 million or free flight: Israel's Space Communication Ltd said on Sunday it could seek $50 million or a free flight from Elon Musk's SpaceX after a Spacecom communications satellite was destroyed last week by an explosion at SpaceX's Florida launch site. Officials of the Israeli company said in a conference call with reporters Sunday that Spacecom also could collect $205 million from Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the AMOS-6 satellite. SpaceX said in an email to Reuters that it does not disclose contract or insurance terms. The company is not public, and it has not said what insurance it had for the rocket or to cover launch pad damages beyond what was required by the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial U.S. launches, for liability and damage to government property. SpaceX has more than 70 missions on its manifest, worth more than $10 billion, for commercial and government customers. The space launch company is one of three major transportation and energy enterprises Musk leads. The others are electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc and SolarCity Corp, and Musk faces separate challenges at each of those money losing companies. Spacecom has been hit hard in the aftermath of the Thursday explosion that destroyed the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its payload. The Israeli company said the loss of the satellite would have a significant impact, with its equity expected to decline by $30 million to $123 million. Spacecom shares dropped 9 percent on Thursday, with the explosion occurring late in the last trading day of the week.",
'SpaceX Rocket Explodes at Launchpad in Cape Canaveral - Destroying Facebook Satellite: A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company. The blast is likely to disrupt NASA s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agency s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts. The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., intensified questions about whether Mr. Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities. This is not the first problem Mr. Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. Theowner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges. The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity. Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page that SpaceX s launch failure destroyed our satellite, a swipe at Mr. Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.',
"Google shelves plan for phone with interchangeable parts - sources: Alphabet Inc s Google has suspended Project Ara, its ambitious effort to build what is known as a modular smartphone with interchangeable components, as part of a broader push to streamline the company's hardware efforts, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The move marks an about-face for the tech company, which announced a host of partners for Project Ara at its developer conference in May and said it would ship a developer edition of the product this autumn. The company s aim was to create a phone that users could customize on the fly with an extra battery, camera, speakers or other components.Axing Project Ara is one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Google s various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones. Former Motorola president Rick Osterloh rejoined Google earlier this year to oversee the effort. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo Group in 2014. This was a science experiment that failed, and they are moving on, he said. Project Ara was one of the flagship efforts of Google s Advanced Technology and Projects group, which aims to develop new devices, but it had various stops and starts. Last year, the company shelved plans to sell the modular phone in Puerto Rico with Latin American carriers.",
'When Things Go Very Wrong at a Start-Up: For many young engineers and business people, Silicon Valley is their version of Hollywood. If you want to make it big, go there, create your own company or sign on with a start-up on the way up, and get ready to make a fortune. Maybe you will even become famous. But Hollywood, it turns out, is not the only California destination with a boulevard of broken dreams. Last week, a Medium post about how things went south badly at an unnamed tech start-up drew attention to a side of Silicon Valley not many people talk about. For all the Googles and Facebooks and Oracles, there may be hundreds of companies that never make it. And in some cases, the employees who sign on may walk away poorer financially for their effort. As Katie Benner writes, it wasn t long before online commenters figured out that the company in the Medium post was called WrkRiot. The unraveling of this company is, of course, a cautionary tale about the many things that can go wrong at a start-up, like questionable bosses and plain old bad ideas. Is it indicative of a larger problem in Silicon Valley Industry veterans would probably say no. Some people view working for a dud of a start-up as a rite of passage like a bad relationship that teaches you a lesson about what to avoid in a partner. Others figure that even if things go bad, there are so many good jobs in the area, you won t be down on your luck for long. But just in case, do a little extra homework before you move across the country to take a start-up job.',
'EU hits Apple with $14.5 billion Irish tax demand: The European Commission ordered Apple Inc to pay Ireland unpaid taxes of up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) on Tuesday as it ruled the firm had received illegal state aid. Apple and Dublin said the U.S. company\'s tax treatment was in line with Irish and European Union law and they would appeal the ruling, which is part of a drive against what the EU says are sweetheart tax deals that usually smaller states in the bloc offer multinational companies to lure jobs and investment. Analysts said the size of the claim underlined the Commission\'s aggressive stance, but since each case involves different circumstances and tax rules, lawyers said it was hard to see if further big claims were any more or less likely. Apple, which had more than $200 billion in cash and readily marketable securities at the end of June, is likely to see the case drag out for years in EU and possibly Irish courts. Apple warned investors in a July regulatory filing that the Commission\'s investigation could lead to "material" liability for further tax payments, but that it could not estimate the impact. On Tuesday the company said it expects to place "some amount of cash" in an escrow account. Tax experts say the European Commission faces a tough battle to convince courts to back up its stand. While the EU has found that certain tax regulations are anti-competitive, it has never before ruled whether countries have applied tax regulations fairly in the way it has with Apple, Starbucks and others. As a result, some lawyers and accountants said they doubted Apple would end up paying back any tax.',
'Twitter is finally paying its best users to create videos: Twitter wants the kind of video creators YouTube has and the massive audiences that come with them. To make this dream a reality, the company is pulling a page from YouTube s playbook: It s going to sell ads alongside creator videos and share that ad revenue with the people making the content. And Twitter is offering very appealing terms. Unlike YouTube, which gives 55 percent of the money to creators and keeps 45 percent, Twitter is using the same revenue split it already offers other Amplify video partners, like the NFL: 70 percent to the content creator and 30 percent back to Twitter, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. Of course, Twitter needs to offer an appealing revenue split like this. It s nowhere close to the video destination YouTube and even Facebook have become, and it s late to the game when it comes to paying creators. The network s high-profile stars have wanted a revenue split for some time it s been a point of contention for the company s stable of Vine stars, many of whom have left for places like YouTube where their videos actually make money.',
'A few dozen Nest Labs employees just headed to Google; here s why: Nest Labs, the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors, is parting ways with a few dozen employees who work on its Internet of Things platform. According to a Fortunereport that we ve independently confirmed, those employees are joining Google per a restructuring. Both companies are subsidiaries of parent company Alphabet. The move would seem to make sense. Like Nest, Google has delved into the business of the connected home, including with its OnHub wireless router and Google Home, a portable speaker that s powered by voice assistance technology and will take direct aim at Amazon s popular Echo product once it ships later this year. Nest s thermometers and cameras promise to communicate with Google Home. Nest employs roughly 1,000 people, including in engineering, product marketing and product management. Though its platform team was responsible for building out Nest s APIs (so Nest products can communicate with other devices), as well as Nest s Weave protocol (which allows Nest devices to communicate with each other), Nest will continue to build and develop software around its app, site and other services.',
'Alphabet s Legal Chief Steps Down From Uber Board: David Drummond, the chief legal officer at Alphabet Inc., has stepped down from Uber Technologies Inc. s board of directors as the two companies move further into each other s territories. Drummond joined the board in 2013 when GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet formerly known as Google Ventures, led a $258 million round of financing for Uber. It remains GV s largest investment, and the two companies worked together on projects, including the ability to call a car through Google Maps. However, relations between Alphabet s Google unit and Uber have become strained in recent years. Bloomberg reported last year that Google had been working on a ride-hailing service using self-driving cars. Uber acquired Otto, an autonomous driving startup staffed by former Google employees, and is working with Volvo on driverless vehicles of its own, which the companies expect to begin rolling out in Pittsburgh this month. Uber has been developing its own mapping operation and is shooting street photography to create an alternative to Google s map data. ',
"EU to hand Apple Irish tax bill of $1.1 billion, source says: The European Commission will rule against Ireland's tax dealings with Apple (AAPL.O) on Tuesday, two source familiar with the decision told Reuters, one of whom said Dublin would be told to recoup over 1 billion euros in back taxes. The European Commission accused Ireland in 2014 of dodging international tax rules by letting Apple shelter profits worth tens of billions of dollars from tax collectors in return for maintaining jobs. Apple and Ireland rejected the accusation; both have said they will appeal any adverse ruling. The source said the Commission will recommend a figure in back taxes that it expects to be collected, but it will be up to Irish authorities to calculate exactly what is owed. A bill in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) would be far more than the 30 million euros each the European Commission previously ordered Dutch authorities to recover from U.S. coffee chain Starbucks (SBUX.O) and Luxembourg from Fiat Chrysler (FCHA.MI) for their tax deals. Apple employs 5,500 workers, or about a quarter of its European-based staff in the Irish city of Cork, where it is the largest private sector employer. It has said it paid Ireland's 12.5 percent rate on all the income that it generates in the country. Ireland's low corporate tax rate has been a cornerstone of economic policy for 20 years, drawing investors from major multinational companies whose staff account for almost one in 10 workers in Ireland. Some opposition Irish lawmakers have urged Dublin to collect whatever tax the Commission orders it to. But the main opposition party Fianna Fail, whose support the minority administration relies on to pass laws, said it would support an appeal based on the reassurances it had been given by the government to date.",
'You earn a million dollars a year and can t get funded If you re in the position of struggling to raise funds, here are some reasons why your pitch may not be resonating. You paid $1.2 million to make $1 million: The most common case of seemingly successful businesses struggling to raise funding is when they are paying $1.2 million to generate $1 million. Or, it s not clear how you ll turn $1 million into $10 million: We seriously don t expect every company to be a billion-dollar business. Our model works with $50 million and $100 million exits, but if you re going to raise venture capital, youshould also be able to explain how you ll achieve step-function growth convincingly. A hockey-stick growth path to a billion dollar valuation isn t required; it can be as simple as taking revenue from $1 million to $10 million. So If you ve built a million-dollar business and are struggling to convince VCs, we d love to talk to you! Just know that when you re pitching investors, not all revenue is valued equally, and it s just one factor among many that investors will use to evaluate your business. Bryce Roberts put it well when he tweeted Not all good businesses are good investments. Not all good investments are good businesses. Your favorite neighborhood restaurant might generate a million dollars a year in revenue, but it would be a bad bet for VCs. Facebook lost money for years before going on to dominate global communication. If youdecide you want to play the VC game, just be sure to learn how the score is tallied.',
'China s Murky World Where E-Commerce Meets Student Lending: Across college campuses in China, a small army of marketers is recruiting students to borrow money at interest rates many times that charged by the nation s banks. Those without a credit history or parental approval can borrow money to buy a smartphone, pay for holidays, or get the latest sneakers through a raft of apps such as Fenqile. The market leader, whose name literally means Happy Installment Payments, has 50,000 part-time marketers across more than 3,000 universities and proudly touts the slogan Wait no more; love what I love. Welcome to the regulatory gray area where peer-to-peer lending meets e-commerce in China. In the last three years, tens of millions of students have taken out micro-loans with the tap of a button to buy things. Once just the realm of startups, the sector has attracted heavy hitters in China s online industry, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. s finance affiliate and JD.com Inc., which are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the lending model. In a nation with 37 million college students, the market is expected to reach $15 billion, according to the Beijing-based market research firm Analysys. The apps sell everything from cameras to concert tickets sourced from third-parties, charging students annualized interest rates typically above 10 percent. The loans are then packaged and sold to wealthy individuals, who find the expected return of as much as 10 percent much more attractive than the central bank s benchmark savings rate of 1.75 percent.',
'How long before Amazon forces its Indian rivals into a merger or sale Three years into Amazon s aggressive push in India, the country s two home-grown e-commerce competitors are feeling the pressure. Both Flipkart and Snapdeal have raised more than a billion dollars, but have historically recorded big losses as they ve engaged in discounting battles with each other and with Amazon. Amazon has made it clear it is willing to spend big to become the No. 1 e-commerce player in the country after failing to make a dent in another huge international market, China. Now, it seems like every week there s a new rumor of the two homegrown players considering a merger or sale. Alibaba, which owns a stake in Snapdeal and another Indian player, Paytm, is often in the conversation. In any potential talks, however, Flipkart and Snapdeal s frothy valuations could be a problem. Flipkart was valued last year at $15 billion while Snapdeal most recently secured a $6.5 billion valuation.',
'Four years and $22 billion later, WhatsApp has decided ads aren t awful, after all: First rule about being bought by an advertising company: You re probably going to end up selling advertising. WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting. Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service. [B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp, WhatsApp writes in a blog on the change today. Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you ve never heard of. WhatsApp will also be sharing the data with the Facebook family of companies so presumably its user data could also be fed to VR firm Oculus Rift, another Fb acquisition, and photo-sharing network Instagram. WhatsApp data that will be shared under the new T&Cs includes the phone number a user used to verify their account, and the last time they used the service. Two pieces of data which on a creepiness scale of personal intel you d rather not hand over to a data-mining tech giant are both right up there.',
'Google Fiber is pulling back on its broadband rollout as pressure grows to cut costs: For the past year, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and its parent Alphabet, has told Wall Street that Google Fiber is her most expensive unit outside of the core business and is well worth the costs. Her bosses may be telling Fiber employees the opposite. According to a report in The Information, Alphabet chiefs Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently instructed Fiber to severely trim staff and expenses, frustrated with mounting costs of delivering high-speed internet by digging up dirt. Creating broadband networks via traditional pipes is enormously expensive. And Fiber still hasn t proven that it has figured out a better way to do it. The Information story comes on the heels of reports that Fiber has put plans to build broadband networks on hold in two cities as it ponders ways to roll out experimental wireless tech. Fiber, like the Other Bets businesses outside of Google, is facing ongoing scrutiny about its operations. Here are the key parts of The Information s report. The unit initially shot for five million broadband subscribers in its first years, but has fallen short of that. Last month, Page told Craig Barratt, the CEO of Fiber (or Access, as it s known), to halve his staff down to 500. Porat, who has developed a reputation as a cost cutter, interceded on Fiber s behalf, arguing to Page that Fiber s business model is defensible. Barratt considered leaving earlier in the year, reportedly irked by the changes at Alphabet. If he did, he would not be the first Other Bets exec to do so.',
'Uber Loses at Least $1.2 Billion in First Half of 2016: The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. is not a public company, but every three months, dozens of shareholders get on a conference call to hear the latest details on its business performance from its head of finance, Gautam Gupta. On Friday, Gupta told investors that Uber\'s losses mounted in the second quarter. Even in the U.S., where Uber had turned a profit during its first quarter, the company was once again losing money. In the first quarter of this year, Uber lost about $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to people familiar with the matter. In the second quarter the losses significantly exceeded $750 million, including a roughly $100 million shortfall in the U.S., those people said. That means Uber\'s losses in the first half of 2016 totaled at least $1.27 billion. Subsidies for Uber\'s drivers are responsible for the majority of the company\'s losses globally, Gupta told investors, according to people familiar with the matter. "You won\'t find too many technology companies that could lose this much money, this quickly," said Aswath Damodaran, a business professor at New York University who has written skeptically of Uber\'s astronomical valuation on his blog. "For a private business to raise as much capital as Uber has been able to is unprecedented." Bookings grew tremendously from the first quarter of this year to the second, from above $3.8 billion to more than $5 billion. Net revenue, under generally accepted accounting principles, grew about 18 percent, from about $960 million in the first quarter to about $1.1 billion in the second. Uber also told investors during the call that it was changing how it calculates UberPool\'s contribution to revenue in the second quarter, which had the effect of increasing revenue. Uber\'s losses and revenue have generally grown in lockstep as the company\'s global ambitions have expanded. Uber has lost money quarter after quarter. In 2015, Uber lost at least $2 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Uber, which is seven years old, has lost at least $4 billion in the history of the company.',
'First driverless taxi hits the streets of Singapore: The first driverless taxi began work on Thursday in a limited public trial on the streets of Singapore. Developer nuTonomy invited a select group of people to download their app and ride for free in its "robo-taxi" in a western Singapore hi-tech business district, hoping to get feedback ahead of a planned full launch of the service in 2018.The trial rides took place in a Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric vehicle, with an engineer sitting behind the steering wheel to monitor the system and take control if necessary. The trial is on an on-going basis, nuTonomy said, and follows private testing that began in April. Parker, whose company has partnered with the Singapore government on the project, said he hoped to have 100 taxis working commercially in the Southeast Asian citystate by 2018.',
"Most Americans streamed the Olympics from PCs, not mobile devices. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, accounted for almost 20 percent of the evening's Olympics stream. An additional 17 percent went to set-top boxes, such as Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Of these, Roku boxes were the overwhelming favorite among Olympics viewers, eating up a 10 percent share. In the end, however, PCs took the prize, accounting for more than 60 percent of consumption. Why is this so interesting Well, much of the narrative surrounding entertainment and technology these days has to do with mobile devices becoming a more dominant platform. Sandvine's data show that iPhones, Android devices and iPads account for almost one-third of general Internet consumption, much higher than what we see from the chart above. Analysts say this discrepancy highlights the particular way in which Americans could access their Olympics coverage online. To watch the Internet live stream, viewers needed to log in through their cable subscription. The downside to this meant being chained to a cable provider, but the upside was that once you authenticated you could watch from any device mobile or otherwise. Although much of our media consumption is increasingly shifting toward mobile devices, live-stream events such as the Olympics may be one area where PCs could remain dominant for some time.",
'HP Inc. Forecasts Earnings That Fall Short of Estimates: HP Inc., which sells personal computers and printers, forecast fiscal fourth-quarter profit that may fall short of analysts estimates, hurt by slumping demand for its products. The shares fell as much as 5.8 percent in extended trading after the announcement. Sales fell 3.8 percent to $11.9 billion, compared with estimates of $11.5 billion. Sales of personal systems, which includes the computer lines, of $7.5 billion was unchanged from a year earlier. That compares with a decline of 10 percent in the second quarter. Commercial sales fell 3 percent while the consumer business climbed 8 percent in the personal systems unit. Printing revenue declined 14 percent to $4.4 billion, compared with a decline of 16 percent in the previous quarter. Consumer printing sales fared worse than the commercial business.',
'Ford leads $24M investment in India-based vehicle rental company Zoomcar: Hot on the heels of a deal with a self-driving sensor technology startup, the automotive giant has backed Zoomcar, a Zipcar-like company that operates in India. Subsidiary Ford Smart Mobility led a $24 million Series B round, with participation from returning investors Sequoia Capital, Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) and Empire Angels. The company s valuation was not disclosed. Four-year-old Zoomcar closed an $11 million Series B round last summer following an $8 million raise in late 2014. This new round which had been reported in Indian press as early as July takes it to over $46 million in VC money to date. Zoomcar is a car rental service based on successful Western models like Zipcar, which wasbought by Avis for $500 million three years ago. The startup is based in Bangalore and it currently claims to offer 2,000 cars around seven of India s tier-one cities, with 75 percent occupancy and 1.5 million app downloads. Ford was Zoomcar s first OEM partner, and the startup said Ford provides most of the vehicles on its platform.',
'Tesla s new 100 kWH battery makes it the third-fastest accelerating car ever: Tesla s Model S and Model X vehicles just got faster. On a call with journalists today, Elon Musk unveiled a larger battery pack 100 kWH that enables the Model S to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds in what the company calls ludicrous mode. That makes the Model S the third-fastest production car ever made, after the Ferrari LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder, but it s the quickest pure electric vehicle that has the capacity to seat up to five adults and two children, according to the company. In an industry first, the battery also enables the car to drive an estimated 315 miles on a single charge. This is the first electric vehicle to go above a range of 300 miles, according to Tesla. The Model S P100D will start at $135,000 compared to a $125,000 MSRP for the Model S P90D equipped with ludicrous mode and the Model X P100D will start at $135,500. The Model X P90D started at $115,500.',
'Narrative Science can now describe your Tableau charts for you: Tableau Software s shares soared 13 percent on Tuesday following the announcement that the data analytics provider has partnered with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that develops natural language generation (NLG) tools. The result of the partnership is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau graphics. Let s say, for example, that you have a chart made with Tableau of sales and profits of your business for a certain amount of time. The extension, which works with Tableau Server 10.0 or the free Tableau Public service, will generate a narrative description of the data by writing sentences such as Sales and profit ratio moved in opposite directions from January 2011 to December 2014, as shown in this example. Narrative Science is best known for Quill, a platform that can take data say, sports scores and turn them into stories. Narratives for Tableau is one example of applying Quill s capabilities, Frankel pointed out. Once Narratives for Tableau has generated the text, users can customize it by choosing a paragraph- or bullet point-style for the description, among other things. If users are not satisfied with the results, they can also make changes to the text.',
"Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles: Pinterest Inc. is buying Instapaper, the app that lets you save an article to read later, as it works to understand the technology behind recommending stories for people. The acquisition of Instapaper, which has expertise in saving, curating and analyzing articles, aligns with Pinterest's goal to provide content that fits users' interests, the company said in a statement. Pinterest declined to comment on a price for the deal. Instapaper, started in 2008 by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, is known for helping people save longer-form stories they don't have time to read. Pinterest said people use its application to save articles, though they often tend to be image-based how-to stories about recipes or from inspirational do-it-yourself blogs. Instapaper's technology could help improve Pinterest's ability to match content with its users' interests.",
'One Kings Lane sold for less than $30 million after being valued at $900 million: One Kings Lane, an online home-furnishings retailer, fetched less than $30 million in its recent sale to Bed Bath & Beyond, according to three people familiar with the deal. The purchase price marks a massive discount from a valuation of $900 million that the startup had secured when it raised more than $100 million from investors in early 2014. In the wake of Dollar Shave Club s $1 billion sale to Unilever and Walmart s impending $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet, the One Kings Lane outcome is a reminder of how brutal the e-commerce industry can be for many startups.',
'Former Flipkart CEO s Employee Clash Shows Indian Startup Trauma..: India s largest online shopping service is heating up, and not in a good way. Flipkart s regular Friday townhall grew tense after employees incensed by hundreds of job cuts openly accused management of betrayal. Taken aback, chairman Sachin Bansal countered that the departures stemmed from poor performance and he lost his job as chief executive for the same reason. The co-founder admitted the company had missed financial targets in recent months, prompting an overhaul of its top rungs, according to employees who attended the meeting. He didn t elaborate but recent moves -- including a brief decision to go mobile app-only after ditching its fashion site -- may have granted an opening to a hard-charging Amazon.com Inc. Bansal s unusual candor, which drew applause, underscores the plight of the country s technology sector as competition intensifies and funding begins to dry up.',
'..Even as analysts opine that Amazon overtook Flipkart in India July e-commerce sales: Barely three years after launching in India, Amazon (Amazon Seller Services Pvt. Ltd) likely exceeded Flipkart in terms of gross sales in July. Flipkart reported gross sales or gross merchandise value (GMV) of less than Rs.2,000 crore in July, while Amazon s gross sales crept up above Rs.2,000 crore, according to five people familiar with the companies numbers. Another local online marketplace Snapdeal (Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd) reported gross sales numbers of roughly Rs.600 crore, a fall of more than 50% from the sales it had been generating until the end of last year, said two other people, familiar with the company s numbers. Gross sales refer to the value of goods sold on a site, and not net revenue. (Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon are structured as marketplaces because of regulations; their net revenue comprises the commissions they charge their third-party sellers on every transaction and fees for services) To be sure, the numbers are only for the month of July and the market share battle between Flipkart and Amazon is far from over. Flipkart s numbers also exclude revenue at Myntra and Jabong, the two large fashion retailers it owns. Snapdeal s numbers exclude sales at FreeCharge, its payments arm. Including Myntra and Jabong revenues, Flipkart is still comfortably ahead of Amazon. Yet, the numbers confirm reports in Mint and other publications since the start of the year that Flipkart and Amazon are running neck-and-neck in the e-commerce market share battle and the latter is close to overtaking it. This is the first time the exact picture has emerged.',
"Chinese investors buy ad tech startup Media.net for $900 million: Advertising technology startup Media.net, founded by tech entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia, said on Monday it had been acquired for about $900 million by a group of Chinese investors. The deal would represent the third-largest in the ad tech industry, after Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft Corp's for aQuantive. More here: Ad-tech firm Media.net Sells to China Group for $900 Million: The startup, which powers contextual ads offered by Yahoo! and Microsoft s Bing, plans a move akin to a reverse merger that would make it a public company in China.Media.net, which is based in Dubai and New York, is touting this as the third-largest ad-tech acquisition in history. However, the complex deal more closely resembles a reverse merger, where a private company takes over a public one and bypasses the formalities of an initial public offering. Technology entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia started Media.net in 2010 and bootstrapped the business. The company provides the technology powering contextual ads offered by Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. s Bing search engine. The system is similar to one offered by Google, choosing which ads to show based on the content of the web page they appear on. The deal comes as merger activity involving ad-tech companies is declining. There were 43 deals during the first half of the year, according to research firm PitchBook Data. That s a 45 percent decline from the same period last year. Media.net generated $232 million in revenue last year, more than half of which came from mobile visitors, Turakhia said. The U.S. accounts for 90 percent of Media.net s revenue, but the company is hoping to make a big push into China after the deal, he said. ",
'Amazon wants to sell a cheaper music subscription service that will only work on its Echo player: Spotify, Apple Music and everyone else cost $10 a month. Amazon wants to charge half of that. Amazon wants to launch a music subscription service that would work the same way services from Apple, Spotify and many others work: $10 a month, for all the music you can stream, anywhere you want to stream it. But Amazon is also working on a second service that would differ in two significant ways from industry rivals: It would cost half the price, and it would only work on Amazon s Echo hardware. Industry sources say Amazon would like to launch both services in September, but has yet to finalize deals with major music labels and publishers. One sticking point, sources say, is whether Amazon will sell the cheaper service for $4 or $5 a month.',
'Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success: It is not an easy thing to be an independent ride-hailing company these days. For one, it takes billions of dollars and hundreds of employees to spread to new cities, to market the service and to recruit drivers. Legislators and local laws are often not in your favor. And competitors with deep pockets from all over the world are waiting to cheer if you happen to fail. Lyft, the second-biggest ride-hailing company in the United States behind Uber, is grappling with those forces but has found that its options are limited. The company, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent months held talks or made approaches to sell itself to companies including General Motors, Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber and Didi Chuxing, according to a dozen people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. Lyft s discussions were most serious with G.M., which is one of the ride-hailing company s largest investors. Still, G.M. never made a written offer to buy Lyft, said the people, and in the end, Lyft did not find a buyer. Lyft is not in danger of closing down and has a cash cushion of $1.4 billion, some of these people added, so the company will continue as an independent entity. Still, the talks underline how difficult it has become to operate in the ride-hailing market, where people can book rides from drivers through a smartphone app. While ride-hailing companies do not own fleets of cars and instead rely on drivers who have their own vehicles, the business is highly capital-intensive. Venture capitalists and other investors have poured billions of dollars into the companies.',
"Uber Tells Investors It Wouldn t Pay Above $2 Billion for Lyft: As Lyft Inc. was gauging interest from prospective acquirers, executives from Uber Technologies Inc. told investors in the past few weeks that the company wouldn't pay more than $2 billion to purchase its main U.S. ride-hailing competitor, said people familiar with the matter. Uber didn't make a formal offer, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Uber had previously considered purchasing Lyft as far back as 2014, and the two San Francisco companies have discussed the prospect informally, one of the people said. Despite executives floating the $2 billion price tag, Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has said privately that he would not support such a deal because he believes it would face intense regulatory scrutiny, the person said. Regardless, Lyft wouldn't consider $2 billion to be a credible offer, said another person familiar with the matter. Recode reported on Friday that Lyft sought as much as $9 billion but failed to secure serious interest. As fierce rivals, Uber has every incentive to downplay Lyft's value to investors and has done so in the past. Lyft and Uber declined to comment.",
'Hampton Creek, Maker of Just Mayo, Is Said to Be Under Inquiry: Hampton Creek, a prominent start-up that is trying to bring tech industry panache to the world of mayonnaise, ranch dressing and other food products, has come under scrutiny by regulators for its business practices. The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into Hampton Creek, according to a person briefed on the situation who asked not to be named because it had not been announced publicly. The S.E.C. inquiry is a response to a recent report from Bloomberg News that described an organized effort by Hampton Creek to buy large quantities of its Just Mayo product a mayonnaise that uses a plant-based ingredient instead of eggs by sending undercover contractors into stores.Bloomberg s report said the product buyback effort, which took place in 2014, made Just Mayo seem more popular than it was, not long before Hampton Creek raised $90 million from venture capitalists and other private investors. The basic details of the program were confirmed by a former Hampton Creek employee, who asked for anonymity because of confidentiality restrictions with his onetime employer. The inquiry may be only the start of tougher questions facing Hampton Creek. The company is believed to be losing significant amounts of money. It is raising up to $220 million from investors, according to a Delaware filing provided by Equidate, which tracks private company shares. It s not uncommon, of course, for start-ups to bleed red ink in their early days. But Hampton Creek, founded in 2011, faces some basic challenges with the manufacturing costs for its products. According to one former employee, in 2014 the company had negative gross margins of about 20 percent on Just Mayo, meaning that the raw cost to the company for every $1 it got in sales was about $1.20. The issue arises from Hampton Creek s use of premium ingredients in its products without charging shoppers the often eye-popping prices attached to such food products. The vegetable oil used in Just Mayo, for example, does not come from genetically modified organism sources, which adds significant cost, according to the former employee. But on Walmart.com on Friday, a 30-ounce jar of Just Mayo was selling for $3.66 32 cents less than a jar of Hellmann s mayonnaise of the same size.',
'Uber Aims for an Edge in the Race for a Self-Driving Future: On Thursday, Uber said that it would begin testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh in a matter of weeks, allowing people in the city to hail modified versions of Volvo sport utility vehicles to get around the city. Uber also said it had acquired Otto, a 90-person start-up including former Google and Carnegie Mellon engineers that is focused on developing self-driving truck technology to upend the shipping industry. Those moves are the most recent indications of Uber s ambitions for autonomous vehicles that can provide services to both consumers and businesses. And they come after Ford Motor s announcement this week that it would put fleets of self-driving taxis onto American roads in five years. As part of that effort, Ford said it had acquired an Israeli start-up, Saips, that specializes in computer vision, a crucial technology for self-driving cars. Ford also announced investments in three other companies involved in major technologies for driverless vehicles. Suddenly, it seems, both Silicon Valley and Detroit are doubling down on their bets for autonomous vehicles. And in what could emerge as a self-driving-car arms race, the players are investing in, or partnering with, or buying outright the specialty companies most focused on the requisite hardware, software and artificial intelligence capabilities.',
'When Google quietly began working on cars that drive themselves, ber was just a German word. Now, nine years later, Uber the ride-hailing company looks set to get regular people inside autonomous vehicles first a move that s critical for Uber, and dispiriting for the audacious project hatched inside of Google. Uber said on Thursday that, along with Volvo, it will test a fleet of on-demand autonomous cars in Pittsburgh later this month. An Uber driver will still be in the car. But, more importantly, so will a customer. That s something that Google has yet to do. When the search giant first unfurled its self-driving plans, it was the only company tackling the advanced tech. Not anymore: All the major car companies have joined the fray and shown a willingness to cut big checks for the tech behind it. Google is well ahead on the technical challenges of driverless vehicles, according to most in the industry. But those same people, in recent months, have begun asking why, nearly a decade after hiring top roboticists to build its project, Google has not delivered something to market. There are a number of reasons why Google has been a laggard to new rivals in the field. One is its devotion to going fully driverless, a far more difficult feat. That s partially because, unlike the car companies and Uber, the Google self-driving cars don t need an immediate revenue stream. They have search ads to bankroll them. Yet other forces may be holding back Google s cars like internal dynamics at the project, now within the X subsidiary under Google parent Alphabet. Alphabet has kept its revenue strategy for the unit under wraps. Some sources say that is because they have not settled on one yet. They went back and forth all the time, said one person who recently left X. Still, frustration with the inertia of Google s self-driving car looks to be hitting its own ranks. Chris Urmson, the CTO and former director of the car unit, recently departed, along with two early engineers. Earlier this year, several members of the project, including co-founder Anthony Levandowski, decamped to form Otto, an autonomous trucking startup. With its announcement this morning, Uber also said it had acquired Otto.',
"Applied Materials forecast beats on chip, display demand: Applied Materials Inc forecast current-quarter revenue and profit far above analysts' estimates as the company benefits from demand for newer technology to make displays and smartphone memory chips. Shares of the world's largest supplier of tools used to make semiconductors rose 5.7 percent to $29.25 in after-hours trading on Thursday. If the current gains hold, the stock is set to open at a 15-year high on Friday. The rising popularity of mobile devices has fueled demand and investments in 3D NAND memory chips, which can store data without using up power. Applied Materials is considered an bellwether and its results are seen as an indicator for the overall chip industry. The company has also gained from growing demand for displays using organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, where its products help manufacture displays used in televisions, phones and computer screens. Orders in the business surged 153 percent to $803 million in the latest quarter. Applied Materials' net sales rose 13.3 percent to $2.82 billion in the third quarter. The company's net income rose to $505 million, or 46 cents per share, from $329 million, or 27 cents per share, a year earlier.Up to Thursday's close, the company's stock had gained about 48 percent this year.",
'Pinterest Follows Rivals Into Selling Video Ads: Pinterest is finally taking the plunge that many other tech companies already have: It has started selling video advertising. Video ads from brands like Kate Spade and bareMinerals will start appearing in the virtual scrapbook-like Pinterest feed on Wednesday and into the coming weeks, and Pinterest is hopeful that ads from other brands will soon follow. The new ads will show up in a silent, GIF-like format within Pinterest s feed, and will play with sound once clicked. Users will be able to click images, or pins, of featured products next to the videos. That could, for instance, bring them to a brand s website or allow them to buy the product without leaving Pinterest. The move puts the social-bookmarking site in competition with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, as well as large digital publishers, which are all vying for the increasingly large amounts of marketers digital ad dollars. Pinterest allows people to save links to images and videos, known as pins, to aesthetically pleasing virtual bulletin boards, and to follow the boards created by others. It has become a popular destination for consumers looking to buy goods, particularly in areas like home improvement and cooking, and for the brands looking to reach them. Pinterest says 75 percent of the content people consume on its site comes from businesses. Pinterest, which says it has more than 100 million visitors a month, has largely been absent from conversations about videos, even as such content has boomed in popularity on its site. The company said it had seen a 60 percent increase in the number of videos saved by users in the last year. Last year, Etsy was the website with the greatest number of links from Pinterest s Save button. Now, it is YouTube. Candidly, the company just in general has underinvested until now in video as a platform, Jon Kaplan, the head of global sales at Pinterest, said in an interview. We wanted to make sure it was customized and specific to the way people use our platform. What you re going to see going forward is a very big investment in video. ',
'An Expert in Valuation Says Uber Is Only Worth $28 Billion, Not $62.5 Billion: According to Aswath Damodaran, a professor who specializes in equity valuation at NYU\'s Stern School of Business, Uber is running up against the roadblock that has thwarted many upstart businesses: Profit. While Damodaran thinks Uber and riding sharing will continue to expand, albeit at a slower pace, he\'s concerned about whether revenues will follow. China especially worries him given Uber\'s recent sale of its operations in that country to Didi Chuxing, its biggest rival there. The decision to exit "even if it was the right one from the perspective of saving itself from a cash war, will reduce its potential revenues in the future." In the other places where Uber does continue to operate, there are often large discounts for riders and other special promotions. This is proof that the business model is challenged, according to Damodaran. "I believe that a significant portion of their expenses are associating with maintaining revenues rather than growing them," he says. "In effect, it looks like the business model that has brought these companies as far as they have in such a short time period are flawed, because what allowed these companies to grow incredibly fast is getting in the way of converting revenues to profits, since there are no moats to defend." Damodaran says that young companies all face a point in time that he calls the "Bar Mitzvah Moment," when the focus shifts from growth to evidence that the business model can be profitable. In his mind, that moment is right now for ride sharing. "After an initial life, where investors have been easily sated with reports of more ride sharing usage (number of cities served, rides, drivers etc.), these investors are starting to ask the tough questions about how ride sharing companies propose turning these impressive usage statistics into profits."',
"Lenovo's first-quarter profit jumps 64 percent, beating estimates: China's Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's biggest personal computer (PC) maker, said on Thursday its first-quarter net profit rose 64 percent, beating estimates as solid PC sales offset tepid smartphone demand. Beijing-based Lenovo said in a filing that net profit grew to $173 million for the quarter ended June from $105 million in the same period a year earlier. That was more than the $130.1 million average of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters SmartEstimates. First-quarter revenue dropped 6 percent to $10.05 billion from a year earlier, compared with an average of $9.63 billion estimated by analysts. Lenovo consolidated its hold on the slowing PC market during the quarter. PC shipments fell 2 percent year-on-year, compared with a 4 percent decline in the broader industry. Like peer Xiaomi Inc, Lenovo has been focusing on diversifying away from intense competition in low-margin devices in China - still the world's largest handset market but affected by the slowing Chinese economy.According to researcher TrendForce, Lenovo had a 4.5 percent share of the global smartphone market in April-June, leaving it a distant seventh after top player Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's 24 percent and Apple Inc's 15 percent.",
'Ola shuts TaxiForSure unit, lays off up to 1,000 people: Cab-hailing company Ola has shut its TaxiForSure unit and is laying off as many as 1,000 employees, as the SoftBank Group Corp-backed firm tightens its belt to take on US-based rival Uber. According to at least half-a-dozen people with the direct knowledge of the development, about 90% of the staff being laid off from TaxiForSure works in the company s call centres, driver relations and business development units. The employees that are being retrenched are located across a dozen cities and are being given three months salary as compensation, said the people mentioned above. These include current and former employees of the cab hailing company.Ola had acquired smaller rival TaxiForSure for $200 million in early 2015 to strengthen its position against Uber Technologies Inc. After the acquisition, Ola had centralized TaxiForSure s operations to three major cities Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi and eight smaller cities. The company kept around 250 employees each in the three metros and around 30 each in the eight other cities. The layoff and shutdown comes at a time when Ola is locked in a bruising battle with Uber that involved public spats and legal wrangling. It is also dealing with adverse regulatory environment in various states that affect its operations. The company has been trying for a large fundraise for quite some time. Ola has so far raised around $1.2 billion from investors including Japan s SoftBank Group Corp. The taxi-hailing firm was valued around $5 billion at the time of its last fundraising. Although Ola had initially planned to retain TaxiForSure as a separate brand, resource crunch seems to have forced the company to wind down the unit. The people cited above said that drivers on TaxiForSure have been moved to the Ola platform. The company has also been prompting TaxiForSure users to migrate to the Ola app in recent months.',
'Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN: Cisco is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker\'s global workforce, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Cisco, which had more than 70,000 employees as of April 30, declined to comment. Cisco increasingly requires "different skill sets" for the "software-defined future" than it did in the past, as it pushes to capture a higher share of the addressable market and aims to boost its margins, the CRN report said citing a source familiar with the situation. Cisco has been investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers, to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. The company has already offered many early retirement package plans to Cisco\'s employees, according to CRN.',
'Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years: At a news conference on Tuesday at the company s research center in Palo Alto, Calif., Mark Fields, Ford s chief executive, said the company planned to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation in a ride-hailing service by 2021.Beyond that, Mr. Fields s announcement was short on specifics. But he said that the vehicles Ford envisioned would be radically different from those that populate American roads now. That means there s going to be no steering wheel. There s going to be no gas pedal. There s going to be no brake pedal, he said. If someone had told you 10 years ago, or even five years ago, that the C.E.O. of a major automaker American car company is going to be announcing the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles, they would have been called crazy or nuts or both. The company also said on Tuesday that as part of the effort, it planned to expand its Palo Alto center, doubling the number of employees who work there over the next year, from the current 130. Ford also said it had acquired an Israeli start-up, Saips, that specializes in computer vision, a crucial technology for self-driving cars. And the automaker announced investments in three other companies involved in major technologies for driverless vehicles.',
'Univision is buying Gawker Media for $135 million: Univision has won the auction for Gawker Media. The TV network and digital publisher has agreed to pay $135 million for the bankrupt blog network, according to a person familiar with the deal. Univision s offer will encompass all seven of Gawker Media s sites, including Gawker.com Ziff Davis and Univision were the only two bidders for Gawker, which filed for bankruptcy after Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel won a $140 million judgment in a privacy case. Ziff Davis had originally offered $90 million for Gawker Media. The deal won t be official for a bit. For starters, a U.S. bankruptcy court judge needs to sign off on the transaction. When it is final, the judgment funds will be set aside while Gawker appeals its court case; eventually the money will go to the side that wins. Whatever the result of the case, the auction is a disappointing conclusion for Denton, who founded the company in 2002. Last year, as rival media companies like Vice, BuzzFeed and Vox Media (which owns this site) were raising money at increasingly high valuations, Denton was arguing that his company was worth $250 million or more.',
' Shadow Brokers Leak Raises Alarming Question: Was the N.S.A. Hacked The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America s own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed. Most outside experts who examined the posts, by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, said they contained what appeared to be genuine samples of the code though somewhat outdated used in the production of the N.S.A. s custom-built malware.Most of the code was designed to break through network firewalls and get inside the computer systems of competitors like Russia, China and Iran. That, in turn, allows the N.S.A. to place implants in the system, which can lurk unseen for years and be used to monitor network traffic or enable a debilitating computer attack. According to these experts, the coding resembled a series of products developed inside the N.S.A. s highly classified Tailored Access Operations unit, some of which were described in general terms in documents stolen three years ago by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now living in Russia. But the code does not appear to have come from Mr. Snowden s archive, which was mostly composed of PowerPoint files and other documents that described N.S.A. programs. The documents released by Mr. Snowden and his associates contained no actual source code used to break into the networks of foreign powers. Whoever obtained the source code apparently broke into either the top-secret, highly compartmentalized computer servers of the N.S.A. or other servers around the world that the agency would have used to store the files. The code that was published on Monday dates to mid-2013, when, after Mr. Snowden s disclosures, the agency shuttered many of its existing servers and moved code to new ones as a security measure. While still widely considered the most talented group of state-sponsored hackers in the world, the N.S.A. is still recovering from Mr. Snowden s disclosures; it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars reconfiguring and locking down its systems.',
'Xiaomi Phone Shipments Fall 38% in China as Huawei Takes Lead; Apple Falls Behind: Xiaomi Corp., the once-hot Chinese smartphone maker, saw shipments tumble 38 percent in China in the second quarter as Huawei Technologies Co. took over the top spot in the world s largest market. Xiaomi shipped 10.5 million smartphones in the quarter, down from 17.1 million in the same period a year earlier, according to research from International Data Corp. That made the company the fourth-largest competitor in the market behind Huawei, OPPO and Vivo. Xiaomi was once valued at $46 billion, according to CB Insights. The Chinese market has grown increasingly competitive as domestic manufacturers have improved their quality, design and marketing, putting pressure on global leaders Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Apple saw shipments in China drop 32 percent in the second quarter and the iPhone maker fell to fifth in the market, according to IDC. The research firm said that Huawei and OPPO gained ground by concentrating on one or two key attributes in their marketing messages. Huawei emphasized the Leica lens now available on its phones, while OPPO pitched fast-charging technology. Apple s global shipments are set to decline in 2016 as it continues to lose ground in its largest overseas market, Canalys said in a separate report. The iPhones lack features such as waterproofing and wireless charging. Apple needs to catch up with the competition if it wants to compete, Canalys research analyst Jessie Ding wrote.',
'Microsoft s HoloLens Technology Adopted by Israeli Military: If Pokemon Go achieved one thing, it was showing the world that augmented realitytechnologies are ready for the mainstream. Israel s military thinks AR is ready for another use: battlefield training. The Israeli army s C2 Systems Department recently purchased two HoloLens glasses from Microsoft Corp. The commander of the head programming department, Major Rotem Bashi, intends to develop the technology to improve battlefield strategy and train field personnel. And quickly: He intends for HoloLens to be used on active duty within months. At the army base outside Tel Aviv, a handful of developers in Bashi s team created a software program in less than a month that allows commanders to manipulate military terrain models and intelligence data to monitor troop positioning from enemy vantage points. Battlefield maps are superimposed on top of the real terrain, streamed in via satellite, to create a blend that can be interacted with via sight, voice and hand gestures. The unit is now finding ways to allow HoloLens-wearing medics to operate on wounded with simultaneous instruction from trained surgeons, and combat soldiers to fix equipment malfunctions. It s far removed from hurling Pokeballs at Pidgeys and Rattatas in Pokemon Go, but based on similar principles. Besides adapting the HoloLens to military life, Bashi s unit is working on a product that will give headquarters an online report about a combatant s physiological state in the field.',
'LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers: LinkedIn is trying to lock down its exclusive relationship with its users. The professional networking company filed suit against 100 unnamed individuals last week for using bots to harvest user profiles from its website. The lawsuit is a preliminary step to revealing the identities of the scrapers LinkedIn intends to ask the court to reveal the true identities behind the scrapers IP addresses and a way to maintain its exclusive hold on users resumes. But LinkedIn s lawsuit also raises questions about how to police bot use. The company, which was recently snapped up by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, has invoked the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in its suit against the unidentified scrapers, claiming that collecting user profiles from the site amounts to hacking. LinkedIn s case accuses the anonymous scrapers of building a massive botnet and circumventing the restrictions LinkedIn uses to prevent profile collection by undesirable third parties. The lawsuit details several of LinkedIn s automated tools that prevent data harvesting. Dubbed FUSE, Quicksand and Sentinel, these tools monitor the web traffic of LinkedIn users and limit how many other profiles a user can view, and how quickly a user can view those profiles. This tracking is intended to prevent scrapers from signing up for fake LinkedIn profiles and then vacuuming up vast amounts of data. The company also uses a tool called Org Block to block IP addresses it suspects of scraping and uses Member and Guest Request Scoring to track page requests. But paradoxically, LinkedIn doesn t want to prohibit scraping altogether. Search engines like Google use bots to index websites and turn up relevant results and LinkedIn wants to allow this type of scraping to occur. LinkedIn whitelists a number of popular and reputable service providers, search engines, and other platforms so as to permit them to query and index the LinkedIn website, without being subject to all of LinkedIn s security measures, the company explains in its suit. The scrapers targeted in the lawsuit circumvented LinkedIn s bot-blocking tools by sending their requests through one of these whitelisted entities, a third-party cloud service provider.',
"Peter Thiel says journalism will be just fine, since he ll decide what s good journalism: Peter Thiel is a billionaire who decided he didn t like Gawker Media after it outed him as gay. So he funded Hulk Hogan s lawsuit against the company, and they won. Now Gawker is selling itself in a bankruptcy auction. Today, the same day that bids for Gawker are due, Thiel published an op-ed in the New York Timesas a sort of victory lap, but also to muster votes for a bill currently wending its way through Congress, the Intimate Privacy Protection Act. It's more commonly known as the revenge-porn bill, which would make it illegal to transmit private images and messages, but Thiel has co-opted it for his own purposes, referring to it by a lesser-known nickname, the Gawker Bill. But the most interesting part of Thiel s editorial is what he says about the need for a free press: It s telling that despite the fact he felt Gawker had invaded his privacy, Thiel himself never filed a lawsuit he s fighting via proxies. In trying to determine what should and shouldn t qualify as journalism, Thiel is exercising the classic Silicon Valley pretension to attempt to own the definition, to write its own narrative, devoid of context or skepticism. But smart publishers will react to Thiel s call to arms in a similar vein to the closing words of his editorial: He can t do it, if we don t let him.",
'Alibaba passes earnings milestones, silent on SEC probe: China\'s Alibaba Group Holding posted its best revenue growth since before the e-commerce titan\'s listing in late 2014, lifting its shares to their highest level in a year. But Alibaba was silent on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into its accounting practices, which have long been the subject of criticism. In the three months to June 30, Alibaba also made more money from mobile shopping than from PCs for the first time, helping to send its shares up by more than 5 percent to $92.10 in New York, its highest level in more than a year."This is a decoupling of revenue from GMV (gross merchandise volume)," he said, referring to a measure of the total value of goods transacted on Alibaba\'s online shopping platforms. Despite GMV growth remaining low compared to previous years, rising 24 percent to 837 billion yuan, Alibaba is squeezing more money out of its e-commerce business, chiefly from advertising. That translated to quarterly revenues of 32.15 billion yuan ($4.84 billion), a 59 percent leap from the previous year and the highest growth rate since late 2013. While China e-commerce was strong for Alibaba in its first quarter, the company is also investing in other businesses including cloud computing arm Aliyun, driverless vehicles and online shopping in Southeast Asia. It hopes these can become an eventual source of growth as Alibaba faces the prospect of a saturated online retail market in China. Although some are showing promise - Aliyun sales rose 156 percent, though only contributed 4 percent of total revenue - most are still loss-making.',
"Microsoft is buying a company that lets viewers control video game live streams: Today, Microsoft announced its plans to acquire live streaming service Beam, a Seattle-based company that lets users influence and interact with a video game being streamed by another player. Beam launched in January to compete against well-established game streaming services from Twitch and YouTube. It set itself apart by taking a core concept made popular by streamers the notion of letting players control a game from afar and turning into a unique streaming platform. For instance, Beam lets viewers suggest challenges for streamers and even alter in-game aspects like weapon loadout and quest selection. It also lets developers create special button layouts for viewers to interact with games being streamed through Beam. To maintain quality, the company's technology drastically reduces the lag between a player's actions and what the viewers see on the stream, whereas competitors like Twitch have a roughly 10 to 15 second delay. It's unclear how Microsoft plans to incorporate Beam's technology into its own online gaming platform. But the company points to Minecraft, now a Microsoft property, as the type of game well-suited to Beam's technology. Microsoft did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.",
'One year later, Alphabet is a tale of two Googles: Today marks the one year anniversary of the day Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin picked a new name and an audacious corporate structure in an attempt to spawn gigantic tech businesses in industries way beyond web search. So far, the year has been great for Google. Unshackled from the unprofitable moonshots, its balance sheet and steady ads business growth has reassured investors. The business soars: Revenues topped 21 percent growth last quarter and operating margins keep getting fatter. More focus: One senior exec at Google recently explained a key change from the Alphabet reorg: Before, meetings cluttered with discussion of extraneous projects the self-driving cars, medical doodads and internet balloons. Now, Google meetings are spent on Google alone. Porat appeases Wall Street: Not too long ago, investors were making fretful phone calls about Google s abundant spending. Not anymore. Thank Ruth Porat, the former Morgan Stanley CFO who helped orchestrate the Alphabet reshuffle. Implementing a competitive culture in what was becoming a behemoth that s critical, said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. Ruth Porat has been priced into the stock. About that stock: It has climbed nearly 24 percent since August 10th of last year. It s been bumpier for Other Bets, the hodgepodge, ever-evolving group of companies outside of Google that Page and Brin desperately want to behave like lean, world-changing startups. Losses added: Alphabet poured $859 million into these units last quarter, nearly $300 million more than the same quarter last year. New equity: Employees at the non-Google company may soon have to get used to new stock packages ones that aren t tied to that soaring Google.',
"China's JD.com revenue meets expectations as slowdown set to continue: JD.com Inc, China's second biggest e-commerce company, reported revenue for the second quarter of 2016 that was within company forecasts, even as the growth rate continued a steady decline that is expected to continue. The company said on Wednesday revenue for the quarter rose 42 percent to 65.2 billion yuan ($9.83 billion), within JD.com's forecast range of 64.2-66.2 billion yuan. But the company is predicting an even sharper decline in growth for the third quarter, compounding concerns that China's e-commerce sector is saturating. JD.com's revenue from Amazon-like online direct sales rose 40 percent in the quarter, versus a 67 percent jump in sales from services and other businesses.JD.com now expects revenues for the third quarter to be 59-61 billion yuan, a rise of 34-38 percent from the same quarter in 2015. Net losses were 132.1 million yuan ($19.92 million), compared to a loss of 510.4 million yuan in the previous year. The total value of merchandise transactions on JD.com's platforms was 108.7 billion yuan in the quarter, up 47 percent excluding online marketplace Paipai.com, which JD.com shut down. JD.com shares were up around 3 percent at $23.10 in pre-market trading in New York, but well below the $29.53 price at the beginning of the year. ",
'VC Funding Is Drying Up for Media Startups: As venture capitalists exercise more caution and place fewer bets, they re leaving media startups behind. Venture funding to media-tech companies slid for the third consecutive quarter to $91.7 million, the lowest amount since mid-2013, according to data from industry researcher CB Insights. Investment activity followed a similar trend, declining to the fewest number of deals since the second quarter of 2012. While U.S. venture deals were down overall in the first half of the year, the drop in funding to media companies has outpaced declines in other sectors, said Garrett Black, an analyst at researcher PitchBook. Investors worry the businesses are expensive to run compared with software makers and struggle to keep readers attention.The decline in venture funding comes amid a moment of reckoning across the digital media landscape. Web publishers like Mashable Inc. and International Business Times have fired dozens of employees this year. Smaller players are seeking new business models as they struggle to sustain themselves on digital advertising, which is being increasingly dominated by Google and Facebook Inc. Many of them are shifting their business to focus on web video, where advertising rates are higher. Media hasn t traditionally been the top investment area for VCs, but some big wins drew interest to the sector. AOL spent $315 million to acquire the Huffington Post in 2011, and the publication has become a cornerstone of Verizon Communications Inc. s media strategy since it bought AOL. German publisher Axel Springer SE took over Business Insider last year in a $343 million deal, a win for backers including Institutional Venture Partners and Amazon.com Inc. s Jeff Bezos.',
'Bill Maris, the CEO and founder of Google Ventures, is leaving: Bill Maris, the founder and chief of Google Ventures (or GV), is leaving the firm and its parent, Alphabet,Recode has learned. His last day, said sources, is Friday. Maris would be the third high-ranking executive to depart from the Alphabet units outside of the main Google search business in recent months, as the tech giant continues to stumble through the transition into its new corporate structure. Sources say Maris is being replaced by David Krane, a managing partner for the venture arm and one of the earliest corporate communications managers at Google.Maris, an early web entrepreneur, founded Google s venture capital arm in 2009 and quickly built it into a formidable presence in Silicon Valley. In 2015, the firm managed upwards of $2.4 billion in capital. Although GV cut back on investments in Europe and with early stage companies, the firm is still willing to cut checks. For the first six months of this year, it passed Intel Capital as the most active corporate venture arm, according to CB Insights. Under Maris, GV has had some high-profile misses most notably, the disastrous app Secret. But those were outweighed by early bets in gigantic startups like Uber, Nest, Slack and Jet.com, which just went to Walmart for $3 billion.',
'Yelp swings to surprise profit, raises full-year revenue forecast: Consumer review website operator Yelp Inc swung to an unexpected second-quarter profit and raised its full-year revenue forecast as investments in sales and marketing led to more businesses and consumers signing up for its services. The company also gave a better-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter and said it partnered with and made a small investment in Nowait, a mobile platform that allows restaurants to manage their waiting lists. Shares of Yelp, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, jumped more than 13 percent to $35.90 in extended trading on Tuesday. They hit a 52-week high of $32.90 in regular trading. Yelp posted a net profit of $449,000, or 1 cent per share, for quarter ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $1.3 million a year earlier and $15.5 million in the prior quarter. Revenue rose 29.5 percent to $173.4 million.',
'P&G, the biggest advertiser in the world, reminded us why Facebook wants to be TV: Facebook is a giant, mega-successful advertising business. It has 1.7 billion users, and it knows a ton about them, which is why it did $17 billion in ad revenue last year. But despite years of trying to convince advertisers otherwise, Facebook is still not TV the place advertisers go when they want to spend huge sums on brand advertising, meant to create overall awareness of their products. Instead, Facebook is the place advertisers go for direct response ads: Ads that send you somewhere when you click on them, so you can buy or download something immediately. Facebook is better at DR ads than anyone see that second sentence at the top but DR ads are of limited use for some advertisers. We got a reminder of that today, when the Wall Street Journal reported that P&G, the world s biggest advertiser, was going to pull back on the targeted ads it was running on Facebook, because targeted ads weren t helping P&G sell Tide and Pampers. But P&G is increasing its TV budget. P&G isn t cutting back on its overall Facebook spend, and this news isn t going to be a long-term problem for Facebook.',
'Virtual Reality Classrooms Another Way Chinese Kids Gain an Edge: Deep within a building shaped like the Starship Enterprise, a little-known Chinese company is working on the future of education. Vast banks of servers record children at work and play, tracking touchscreen swipes, shrugs and head swivels - amassing a database that will be used to build intimate profiles of millions of kids. This is the Fuzhou hive of NetDragon Websoft Holdings Ltd. a hack-and-slash videogame maker and unlikely candidate to transform learning via headset-mounted virtual reality teachers. It s one of a growing number of companies from International Business Machines Corp. to Lenovo Group Ltd. studying how to use technology like VR to arrest a fickle child s attention. (And perhaps someday to make a mint from that data by showing them ads.) China - where parents have been known to try anything to give their kids an edge and tend to be less obsessive about privacy - may be an ideal testing ground for the VR classroom of the future. As it s envisioned, there ll be no napping in the back row. Lessons change when software predicts a student s mind is wandering by spotting an upward tilt of the head. Dull lectures can be immediately livened up with pop quizzes. Even the instructor s gender can change to suit the audience, such as making the virtual educator male in cultures where teachers are typically men.The notion of adaptive, computer-based teaching has bounced around for more than a decade. Done right, it s got the potential to fundamentally alter learning. Educators who ve relied on their gut and visual cues could be replaced or augmented by digital avatars powered by algorithms, which can in turn be replicated across the planet. Advocates argue that the benefits of using machines to scrutinize children and learning to adapt to their foibles will outweigh questions of privacy because soon there won t be enough human teachers.',
'Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers, but It Strives to Make Ads More Relevant: Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up onFacebook s desktop website, you will now be out of luck: The social network has found a way to block the ad blockers. On Tuesday, Facebook flipped a switch on its desktop website that essentially renders all ad blockers the programs that prevent websites from displaying ads on the page when a user visits the site useless. The change allows the Silicon Valley company to serve ads on its desktop site even to people who have ad-blocking software installed and running.Facebook s move is set to add to a furious debate about the ethics of ad blocking. On one hand, many digital ads are a nuisance they slow loading times of web pages and detract from the online experience. Yet the ads also serve as the business foundation for many digital publishers to provide content to readers. Ad blockers have become a threat to publishers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which are facing declining advertising revenue. About 200 million people worldwide use ad-blocking software on their desktop computers, according to estimates from PageFair, an anti-ad-blocking start-up. An additional 420 million use ad blockers on their smartphones, the company said. Several digital publishers, including Wired, Forbes and The Times, have begun experimenting with anti-ad-blocking techniques, including asking visitors who use ad blockers to whitelist their sites so that ads may still appear.',
'India ride-hailing firm Ola sideswiped as Uber, Didi team up in China: Didi Chuxing\'s acquisition of Uber\'s China business last week reshapes the landscape in Asia\'s growing ride-hailing sector, and leaves India\'s Ola more vulnerable to attack by Uber in its $12 billion home market. Four months ago, Ola executives met with Didi hoping the Chinese firm would invest fresh capital to help it fight Uber Technologies Inc which, with its deeper pockets, has made rapid inroads into India. They were told Didi wanted first to sort out its own challenges in China, said a person with direct knowledge of Ola\'s plans. Didi and Uber have raised and spent billions of dollars in a discount slugfest to win drivers, passengers and market share in China. Didi, now worth around $35 billion, last year invested about $30 million in Ola, which is also backed by Japan\'s SoftBank Group, and the two are allies in an anti-Uber group that also includes U.S.-based Lyft and Southeast Asia-focused Grab. "This (Didi/Uber China) deal changes the dynamics of how they (Didi) will invest in India," said the person, who didn\'t want to be named because the discussions were private. If Didi invests more in Ola, it\'s effectively betting against Uber, its new partner in China, the person said. It\'s not clear whether Didi would provide equity or debt to Ola, which has raised around $1.3 billion in funding and is valued at over $5 billion. SoftBank Capital, Ola\'s key investor, faces its own financial issues and is selling assets to raise cash and reduce debt, which may pose another fundraising challenge for Ola, which was aiming to raise another $1 billion this year.After the Didi deal, Uber is even more focused on India, which it has previously called its No. 2 priority overseas market, doubling down on resources, staffing and technology deployed there, said two people familiar with Uber\'s plans, one of whom is based in the United States.',
'Twitter Seeks to Sublease Part of San Francisco Headquarters: Twitter Inc. is offering about a quarter of the space at its San Francisco headquarters complex for sublease, adding to a growing amount of excess offices available in the city as the technology industry cools. About 78,800 square feet (7,320 square meters) is listed for sublease on the seventh floor of 1355 Market St., a renovated 1930s furniture mart, and 104,850 square feet is available along three floors in an adjacent building at One Tenth St., according to marketing materials from Cresa, a commercial real estate firm.Subleasing is becoming more prevalent in San Francisco as venture-capital investments decline and tech firms slow their hiring from a breakneck pace. While the city s overall office market remains strong, extra space is a warning sign that some companies overestimated their growth rate and are being forced to scale back. An increase in subleasing predated commercial real estate downturns following the 2008 financial crisis and the dot-com bust in the late 1990s.',
'Walmart was the only bidder in $3 billion Jet.com acquisition: When news first broke of Walmart s interest in acquiring Jet.com, the $3 billion price tag was a surprise to many. Why would Walmart pay such a premium for a startup that was unprofitable and just a year old One hypothesis was that Walmart may have been competing against other bidders for Jet possibly Alibaba or even Google. Turns out that was not the case, Jet CEO Marc Lore told Recode in an interview Monday afternoon. This was about trust between Doug and I, Lore said in reference to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, noting that the conversations between the two sides began in the spring. It never occurred to me to go out and get another offer, quite honestly, he added. As part of the deal, Lore will take over as head of Walmart.com in addition to Jet, as Recode first reportedSunday evening. Neil Ashe, Walmart s CEO of global e-commerce, will depart at the end of Walmart s fiscal year. In a conference call with reporters, McMillon outlined why Walmart found Jet so valuable. It was a combination of the speed of the shopping site s growth (a $1 billion annualized sales volume run rate within eight months of launch); the expertise of the exec team led by Lore that is joining Walmart in the deal; and the proprietary pricing and back-end technology that is expected to eventually be used in some capacity on Walmart.com.',
'LendingClub turmoil takes toll as company posts widening losses: LendingClub Corp on Monday reported its largest quarterly loss in a year as it struggles to bring banks back to its online lending platform following the departure of its chief executive and a scandal involving altered loan documents. LendingClub, which matches borrowers and lenders via an online marketplace, reported a second-quarter loss of $81.4 million, or 21 cents per share, compared to a loss of $4.1 million, or 1 cent per share, a year ago. The company also continued its executive shakeup, with the resignation of Chief Financial Officer Carrie Dolan. Her departure is the first high-profile exit since the departure of Renaud Laplanche, the company\'s founder, as chief executive on May 9.The second-quarter earnings report follows a tumultuous period for LendingClub, once considered the standard bearer in a new generation of online lenders but which has been pummeled by revelations of lending improprieties, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, the departure of loan investors and layoffs of 179 employees. "The good thing is (the second quarter) is now behind us," said Scott Sanborn, who took over as president and CEO in June. "We have accomplished quite a bit since the events of May 9." LendingClub\'s shares were down more than 2 percent at about $4.68 in after-hours trading. That puts the company\'s market cap at about $1.8 billion, about one-third its market value of about $5.4 billion when it went public in December 2014 in an offering priced at $15 a share.',
'Airbnb raising a reported $850M at a $30B valuation: Almost a year after its last raise of $1.6 billion, the company is said to be adding $850 million to its coffers, according to information obtained by Equidate. While $850 million is a ton of cash, it is not the largest round the company has raised. Last year, the company raised $1.5 billion in one of the largest VC rounds in history. The additional capital would only move Airbnb from the fifth to the forth most valuable tech unicorn at a potential valuation of $30 billion (tear). Even as a late-stage company, Airbnb has to be increasingly conscious of the capital it takes on. Too much equity dilutes early investors, while too much debt could put investors at risk if valuations were to suddenly tank. Debt as an asset class is paid off before equity. Airbnb has notoriously taken actions to strategically prolong an IPO, bringing on a $1 billion credit faculty last year to support growth without diluting investors. The company previously had an approximate valuation of $27 billion, so while the round is large, it doesn t deviate from prior anti-dilution strategies. With respect to deals that Airbnb reportedly walked away from, the $850 million dollar deal is tame. The Wall Street Journalreported that Airbnb left money on the table, rejecting a deal that would have valued the company at $34 billion.',
'Google keeps finding new and creative ways to piss off Yelp and TripAdvisor: There s no love lost between Yelp and Google. And, more recently, between TripAdvisor and Google, too. Now, Google is giving those companies a new reason to believe that the search giant is intentionally pushing listings from their review sites way down in search rankings. The most recent brouhaha centers on a new search feature that highlights critic reviews of restaurants from sites like Zagat, which Google owns, as well as best of lists from publishers. The end result, as shown below in a tweet from Yelp s CEO, is that Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews don t show up even if you scroll down to the second screen of results on a phone. In this instance, you would have to scroll to the third screen to see Yelp reviews.Both Yelp and TripAdvisor have been complainants in the European Union s case against Google for anticompetitive practices. These companies continue to believe that Google intentionally promotes its own products like local reviews of restaurants and hotels over others, including theirs. Google denies this. Google has historically been a large source of traffic for both review companies, so it s been critical for them to get people to frequent their apps on mobile phones rather than search for local spots through Google. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.',
'Bitfinex exchange customers to get 36 percent haircut, debt token: Crypto-currency exchange Bitfinex, which lost $72 million to hackers last week, told customers on Sunday they would lose just over 36 percent of the assets they had on the platform but would be compensated for these losses with tokens of credit. The Hong Kong-based exchange said losses from the theft would be shared, or "generalized", across all the company\'s clients and assets, widening the group of those affected announced last week. "This is the closest approximation to what would happen in a liquidation context," Bitfinex said on its website early on Sunday. "Upon logging into the platform, customers will see that they have experienced a generalized loss percentage of 36.067 percent." The company said it would also give all affected clients a "BFX" token crediting their losses that could be redeemed by the exchange or for shares in iFinex, the exchange\'s parent company. Bitfinex said it would explain its methodology in a later update and that it was talking to investors about how to fully compensate its customers. Hackers stole 119,756 bitcoin from Bitfinex last week in the second-biggest breach of a crypto-currency exchange ever, in U.S. dollar terms. The hack accounted for about 0.75 percent of all bitcoins in circulation. The exchange is the world\'s largest for trading digital currencies such as bitcoin, litecoin and ether, and is used for its deep liquidity in U.S. dollar/bitcoin trades. It is still not clear how the hackers gained access to the company\'s customer accounts. However, both Bitfinex and outside experts have dismissed suggestions the breach was due to the security of the blockchain, the decentralized ledger that tracks every bitcoin transaction, and which traditional banks are considering adopting to increase the speed and transparency of their transactions.',
'Meet the China whisperers who get the big deals done in Silicon Valley: When Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick wanted advice about whom to hire to run his ride-hailing business in China, he asked Carmen Chang, a longtime Silicon Valley lawyer and investor who had helped a previous generation of tech companies navigate that murky territory. When Uber sold its China business to its rival Didi this week, Chang was a trusted confidante.When Lyft, Uber s smaller rival, needed an entree into China, the company s president turned to another Silicon Valley insider who shuttles between worlds. The introduction from Connie Chan, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, to China s largest ride-hailing company led to a $100 million investment and partnership. Behind the scenes of an unprecedented flood of capital from China into Silicon Valley over the past two years is an elite network of brokers. These brokers do more than deal-making; they play anthropologist and cultural translator -- from coaching startup founders about the culturally appropriate place to sit at a conference room table in China to breaking down how emojis are used in Chinese apps. Their acumen is growing more valuable, entrepreneurs say, as they navigate a cast of hard-to-parse characters with alluring deep pockets and promises of big business opportunities overseas. She is the whisperer between China and Silicon Valley, said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, a web security startup, of Chang. Last year, Chang helped Prince -- whose company had given up on China in 2011 -- clinch a partnership with Baidu, China s search giant. There s very few that really understand both sides. Chang, who was born in Nanjing, China, came to the States to seek a doctorate in Modern Chinese History. She got pulled into tech industry after graduating from Stanford Law School in the early 1990s, when she got a job as an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Silicon Valley firm known for its ties to the clubby venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. One of her early clients was Masayoshi Son, the billionaire Japanese investor who founded the Japanese telcommunications giant Softbank. At the time, she said, senior management at the firm had never been to Asia, and Son wasn t considered important enough to be represented by a general partner. So he got an associate, she says.',
'Snapchat Used to Spook Advertisers. Not Anymore. When Snapchat opened itself up to advertisers more than a year ago, many initially griped that the company needed to lower its ad prices. Some were mystified about how to reach the right audience with the ads, since Snapchat did not provide traditional ad-targeting tools. Most of all, brands wondered how Snapchat could be effective when the ads like Snapchat messages disappeared. In the last 15 months, Snapchat has moved to respond. It introduced new ad formats. It dangled its attractive user base the service now claims 150 million daily users, including nearly half the country s population from ages 18 to 34 to lure advertisers. Most important, Snapchat has persuaded brands like Tiffany & Company, Kraft Foods and Burger King that its ads let them interact playfully with this young audience.Now Snapchat faces the challenge of keeping up its nascent ad business as its early success raises the competitive hackles of rivals. On Tuesday, Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, introduced a near carbon copy of a Snapchat photo and video service known as Stories. A lot is riding on Snapchat s building up its ad business. The company, which Mr. Spiegel helped found in 2011 and is now based in the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles, needs to justify a valuation of about $19 billion that its investors have placed on it. The company also faces sky-high revenue expectations; the investment bank Jefferies recently projected that Snapchat s revenue would grow to $1 billion next year from more than $350 million this year.Mr. Khan s biggest job was to explain why Snapchat s unusual platform was better for advertisers. The task was thorny because Snapchat is a messaging, sharing and broadcast service where most content disappears. Companies had few comparable apps to judge Snapchat against. The potential became clearer after brands started experimenting with Snapchat s geofilters, a tool that adds custom stickers, a type of colorful icon, to the app when people enter a certain geographic area, and lenses, which are whimsical images that transform someone s face in the app.',
'Facebook\'s News Feed to show fewer \'clickbait\' headlines: Facebook\'s News Feed will show fewer "clickbait" headlines over the next few weeks, the company announced Thursday, as it seeks to establish itself as the prime web destination for news and social updates. The company receives thousands of complaints a day about clickbait, headlines that intentionally withhold information or mislead users to get people to click on them, Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management for News Feed, said in an interview. In an effort to eliminate clickbait from the site, Facebook created a system that identifies and classifies such headlines. It can then determine which pages or web domains post large amounts of clickbait and rank them lower in News Feed. Facebook routinely updates its algorithm for News Feed, the place most people see postings on the site, to show users what they are most interested in and encourage them to spend even more time on the site. The system looks for commonly used phrases in clickbait headlines, similar to how filters for email spam work, Facebook said in a blog post. It categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by looking for headlines that intentionally withheld information and those that exaggerated the content of an article. News Feed, a team of about 200 people, uses a similar classification system to determine what it should show each user, Mosseri said.',
'Amazon adds several new devices to its Dash Replenishment auto ordering service: At the beginning of the year, Amazon flipped the switch on Dash Replenishment, a service aimed at bringing the instant reordering of its devoted product buttons directly to connected devices. The idea being that you don t have to, say, order ink for your printer or batteries for your smart lock the devices will do it for you. The retail giant has already announced a slew of different partners for the program, including Brother Printers, the Gmate SMART blood glucose monitor and a GE washing machine, all of which went live in the first round. Today the company announced a number of new additions. The highest profile of the additions is GE, which will be extending its involvement to driers and dishwashers, which will be updated to order fabric softener and dishwasher detergent, respectively, when supplies start to dwindle. Neato joins the list as well, bringing the Wi-Fi-connected robot to the service to order replacement filters and brushes, while Petcube s Kickstarter-supported Bites camera will be able to order pet food. Also on the list are the Behmore Connected coffee brewer, Simplehuman trashcan and SmartThings platform. Even The Hershey Company has been added to the stable with an unnamed device. That should be interesting.',
'LinkedIn Results Beat Expectations Ahead of Microsoft Deal: LinkedIn Corp. reported earnings and revenue that were higher than analysts expected, after the company negotiated a $26.2 billion sale to Microsoft Corp. LinkedIn said second-quarter revenue was $933 million, up 31 percent from a year earlier. The average analyst estimate was $899 million. Earnings, excluding some items, were $1.13 cents per share in the second quarter, compared with analysts projection of 78 cents. This may be LinkedIn s last earnings report as an independent company, before it joins Microsoft in one of the largest technology industry deals on record. ',
'As Chinese hacking abates, FireEye plans layoffs, cuts forecasts; shares plunge: Cyber security firm FireEye Inc said on Thursday it planned to lay off 300 to 400 of its 3,400 workers as it announced quarterly sales below its own forecast, due to a slowdown in demand for its services helping businesses respond to hacking attacks. FireEye\'s shares were down 16.2 percent at $14.02 in extended trading.Chief Executive Kevin Mandia said the company is now responding more frequently to financially driven cyber criminals, who engage in crimes such as ransomware, which are relatively simple to clean up. "The size and scope have changed. The whole remediation was more complex" when the company was responding to large numbers of state-sponsored hacks from China, he said. FireEye cut its full-year revenue forecast to $716 million-$728 million from $780 million-$810 million.Executives blamed much of the trouble on a slowdown in its services business, including its high-profile Mandiant forensics unit that helps organizations respond to cyber attacks. That division\'s revenue rose just 2 percent in the second quarter, compared to a 40 percent increase in the first quarter. Its total number of engagements rose, but average revenue from each one fell dramatically because work performed was less extensive. Mandia said that was due to a shift away from previous years where there were large numbers of state-sponsored espionage hackers from China attacking customers in the United States. FireEye and other cyber security firms said in June that cyber espionage attacks from China appeared to have dropped this year as the Chinese government made good on a pledge with the United States to stop supporting the digital theft of U.S. trade secrets.',
'Zynga plummets 9% in after-hours trading: Social game developer Zynga tumbled 9 percent in after-hours trading following the second quarter 2016 earnings announcement after the bell today. The company reported a net loss of $4.4 million, while still beating analysts expectations in terms of revenue.For the second quarter ended June 30, the San Francisco-based maker of FarmVille and Words with Friends posted revenue of $181.7 million and non-GAAP net earnings came in at $0. ',
'Grand Theft Auto\' publisher Take-Two\'s revenue jumps 13 percent: Videogame publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc reported a 13 percent rise in revenue, helped by strong sales of its "Grand Theft Auto V" and "NBA 2K16" titles. Take-Two, like its rivals, has also benefited from a shift by players downloading digital copies of its videogames which generate higher margins rather than buying physical game discs. Take Two\'s net revenue rose to $311.55 million in the first quarter ended June 30 from $257.30 million a year earlier. Digital downloads accounted for about 55 percent of revenue in the quarter. Net loss narrowed to $38.57 million, or 46 cents per share, from $67.02 million, or 81 cents per share.',
'Activision revenue surges on "Overwatch" launch, "Candy Crush" deal: Activision Blizzard Inc reported a 50.4 percent surge in quarterly revenue on Thursday, propelled by the popularity of the newly-launched "Overwatch" game and the boost from the acquisition of "Candy Crush" maker King Digital. Activision\'s total adjusted revenue, which excludes deferred revenue and related costs, rose to $1.57 billion in the second quarter ended June 30 from $1.04 billion a year earlier.The company\'s shares were up 1.4 percent at $41.40 in extended trading. Activision, best known for its "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" games, released "Overwatch" on May 24 to rave reviews. The multi-player futuristic game now has more than 15 million players and has generated about $500 million in revenue to date, excluding deferrals, the company said. The company\'s net income dropped 40 percent to $127 million, or 17 cents per share, mainly due to costs associated with the near $6 billion acquisition of King Digital in February.',
'Tesla misses Q2 earnings, delivers 14,402 vehicles: Tesla missed its Q2 earnings targets today in a report released after the close of the market. Tesla executives are not wavering on yearly targets, despite a slower than expected quarter. All of this comes amidst a seemingly never-ending wave of Tesla headlines dominating Silicon Valley over the last few weeks. The energy company born out of an automobile company reported non-GAAP Q2 revenue of $1.56 billion up from last year s Q2 revenue of $1.2 billion. The company came close but ultimately missed analyst estimates of $1.6 billion. Tesla closed down 0.62 percent today at $225.79. After the news was released, Tesla shares moved up almost instantly in after-hours trading after the news dropped but have been fluctuating up and down by 2 percent since.Wall Street analysts expected an adjusted net loss of $52 cents a share but found themselves with a worse than expected loss of $1.06 per share. Tesla delivered 14,402 new vehicles consisting of 9,764 Model S and 4,638 Model X in Q2, slightly ahead of last month s estimates. Tesla had originally aimed to deliver 80,000 vehicles by the end of the year. It is growing tougher by the day for the company to hit that goal. On the bright side, the company noted that almost half of Q2 production occurred in the final four weeks of the quarter. Moreover, Tesla had an additional 5,000 cars in transit at the quarter end on their way to be delivered.',
'Why it makes sense for Walmart to buy Jet.com even for $3 billion: Walmart missed out on a Marc Lore company once, when Amazon swooped in to beat it to the purchase of Diapers.com s parent company several years back. The giant retailer may not let it happen again. Walmart is in talks to acquire Jet.com, Lore s new startup that has raised more than $800 million in financing in an attempt to build a new online megastore, according to a person familiar with the talks. It is not clear how far along they are. News of the talks was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which said the tie-up could value Jet at as much as $3 billion. A Walmart spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. A Jet spokesman declined to comment. A $3 billion price tag would be a steep one for Walmart, considering that Jet is largely still unproven and burning more than $20 million a month on advertising alone. A deal would also certainly not be what Lore had in mind when he set out to build a legitimate competitor to Amazon, Walmart and others after his non-compete agreement with the Seattle-based retailer expired two years ago. But it would be a marriage of necessity for both sides, and one that probably makes too much sense not to happen. On the Walmart side, its e-commerce efforts have largely been viewed as a failure in recent years for a retailer of its size and power. Annual revenue for the division is around $14 billion, compared to $99 billion for Amazon, excluding Amazon s AWS cloud computing unit.Five years ago, it would have seemed possible, but unlikely, that Walmart could catch up with Amazon. Today, that notion is laughable.For Lore and Jet, the deal would be something of a shocker. Lore pocketed dozens of millions of dollars when he sold Diapers.com to Amazon so he doesn t exactly need the money. That s one of the reasons his backers believed him when he said his goal was to build a company worth tens of billions. But the hurdles to get there have been significant from the start and perhaps even larger than Lore imagined. Jet only really works long-term as a standalone company if it can convince millions of people to order multiple items at a time to earn discounts; individual product prices aren t typically better than its competitors.',
"Dorsey's Square reports 41.5 percent jump in quarterly revenue: Mobile payments company Square Inc on Wednesday reported a 41.5 percent jump in revenue and diminishing losses as more large merchants make sales using Square's technology, a sign the company has moved beyond serving only pop-up shops and food trucks.Square stock was up more than 14 percent to about $12 in after-hours trading following the second-quarter earnings call. The price at closing bell was $10.44. Square's revenue reached $438.5 million, up 41.5 percent from its earnings of $310.0 million a year earlier. It processed $12.5 billion in payments, up 42 percent from a year ago, mostly due to new and larger retailers using Square, the company said. About 42 percent of total payments is coming from larger retailers, signaling a dramatic transition for Square. The company started seven years ago as a card reader that turns a mobile phone into a payment terminal, and was sold primarily to pop-up stores, coffee shops, food trucks and other small merchants that couldn't afford elaborate payment systems.Square, which went public in November, has expanded to offer an array of services for businesses such as point-of-sale registers, invoice software and loans. Square Capital, the loan program, saw a 123 percent increase over last year, with $189 million in loans made to businesses. Square added five investors to the program, which will provide capital for additional borrowers, said Sarah Friar, Square chief financial officer. About 90 percent of borrowers renew their loans.Friar said Square's familiarity with borrowers - the company lends to merchants it has already done business with - and the low cost of the program distinguishes it from other lenders.Still, the company is not profitable. Its losses narrowed to $27.3 million from $29.6 million during the same period last year.",
'China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech: Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video. All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China. WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols called QR codes to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home. Silicon Valley has long been the world s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter. But China s tech industry particularly its mobile businesses has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.China s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America.Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat. Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.',
"Instagram's Snapchat-like feature allows 24-hour-limit posts: Users of Instagram, a photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc , can now post picture and video slideshows that last 24 hours, a feature similar to the signature function of social media rival Snapchat. Snapchat, which launched in 2011, got its initial boost from millennials, especially teenagers, who value the privacy that the app offers. Text messages disappear right after they are read, and posts expire after 24 hours. As with Snapchat, the new Instagram Stories feature allows its 500 million members to annotate their posts with emojis, doodles and texts, Instagram said in a blog post on Tuesday. The feature is the latest salvo between Facebook, which bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and Snapchat, which rejected Facebook's $3 billion buyout offer just three years ago, as they try to attract more users. Snapchat is popular with younger people who want to shield their posts from the eyes of their parents, who are more likely to be on Facebook, whose 1.7 billion monthly users tend to be older. Snapchat recently surpassed Twitter Inc in daily users and is valued at around $18 billion.",
'Lyft hit a record of 14 million rides last month with run-rate revenue of as much as $500 million: July was a record month for Lyft, which performed 13.9 million rides, according to a letter the company sends its investors on a monthly basis that Recode obtained.That s 1.5 million more rides, or 12 percent more, than the company performed in June 2016 and amounts to 167 million rides on an annual run-rate basis, according to the document. The company also hit more than $2 billion in what it calls net ride value for the first time in its history, on a run-rate basis. Net ride value not to be confused with Lyft s revenue is the amount passengers pay without accounting for tips and tolls. Lyft takes anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of the fare, which means the company s run-rate revenue for the year is between $400 million and $500 million. The leaked document comes at a time when the company is under pressure to sell right after Uber sold its China operations to homegrown competitor Didi. The two companies have essentially agreed to operate a monopoly in China after years of battling for customers and riders through price enticements that made it hard to turn profit. Market dominance is more important than ever as ride-hailing startups look to turn a profit. Uber is likely to seek an IPO next year, and Lyft will have to find a buyer to help it better compete.',
'Tableau Software s Q2 earnings fall short of estimates: Data analytics provider Tableau Software reported second quarter earnings after the bell today. The Seattle-based company posted a loss due to higher than expected expenses for the quarter, while still beating analyst s expectations in terms of revenue. For the three months ended June 30, Tableau posted total revenue of $198.5 million Tableau Software went public in May 2013 at an initial public offering price of $31 per share. At the New York Stock Exchange trading Tuesday, the company s shares closed down 4 cents, or less than one percent, at $56.40.',
'Uber to Sell to Rival Didi Chuxing and Create New Business in China: In a stark signal of how difficult it is for American technology companies to thrive in China, Uber China said it was selling itself to Didi Chuxing, its fiercest rival there. The sale, which would create a new company worth about $35 billion, would end the great ride-hailing battle of China. A person with knowledge of the deal said Uber investors had been pushing for such a transaction. The companies have been fighting relentlessly for market share in mainland China for two years, spending tens of millions of dollars every month to attract riders and drivers. The merger would end that competition and create significant scale, but it would also be a repudiation of Uber s ambitions to take on local Chinese competitors in their huge home market.Still, it is by no means a financial catastrophe for Uber, which for about $2 billion of investment in the Chinese market gets a $7 billion share in a company that is likely to grow. It also saves the cash it may have spent competing in China for other projects.Under the terms of the deal, the new company s estimated worth is a combination of Didi Chuxing s $28 billion valuation and Uber China s $7 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information had not yet been made public. Uber shareholders would receive a 20 percent stake in the new company. Didi Chuxing would also make a $1 billion investment in the company s operations in the rest of the world, called Uber Global, which was lastvalued at $62.5 billion, according to the two people with knowledge of the sale. Bloomberg first reported news of the deal.',
'Didi Schools Uber on Doing Business in Cut-Throat Chinese Market: The deal is the culmination of more than a year of take-no-prisoners war between the world s two largest ride-sharing companies, a series of clashes played out in the media and on the dusty streets of hundreds of cities. That battle, waged through massive subsidies on rides, wound up costing Uber $2 billion, the people said. Alarmed, its investors clamored for a ceasefire.In the end, Didi proved too resourceful -- and too well-connected -- for the ride-sharing giant to dethrone. Uber threw in the towel just days after China banned the practice of charging less than the cost of a ride, depriving the U.S. company of a tried-and-true engagement tactic. In a blogpost obtained by Bloomberg before an official announcement, Kalanick portrayed the deal as a merger that strengthens both parties; others, including Grab CEO Anthony Tan, saw it as a humbled Uber taking its ball elsewhere.But Didi proved more creative, and local connections came through. The conflict took an unusual turn as third parties began to get drawn into the mix. In August, Uber complained it had been blocked from WeChat, the popular messaging service run by Didi-backer Tencent. Then Didi recruited allies, forging a four-way alliance with ride-sharing services that compete with Uber, including Lyft Inc. in the U.S., Grab and India s Ola. Didi gained confidence as it entered the new year. From President Jean Liu on down, its executives were determined to deal a knockout blow. Didi began raising more money and its emboldened executives openly declared victory. We will be the last one standing, Stephen Zhu, vice president of strategy, said in what proved to be a prescient April address.Recent funding saw Uber s valuation swell to $68 billion and the company said it had access to more than $11 billion on its balance sheet. Didi, said to be valued at close to $28 billion, had more than $10 billion at its disposal. In the end, Didi proved too large an opponent, with backers including some of China s largest government institutions and even Apple Inc. The four-year-old company now handles more than 11 million rides a day and serves about 300 million users across some 400 cities, offering taxis, private cars, ride sharing and test driving.',
'Didi s acquisition of Uber China throws the global anti-Uber alliance in doubt: Didi Chuxing, China s homegrown ride-hailing startup, was the glue that held together the global anti-Uber alliance that included Lyft, Grab and Ola. But now that Didi has acquired Uber s China operations, that partnership has been thrown into doubt. In addition to a $1 billion investment Didi is making into Uber, the deal also brings Uber CEO Travis Kalanick onto Didi Chuxing s board and Didi Chairman Cheng Wei onto Uber s board. Both Kalanick and Wei are non-voting members of the board. That means, as of last night, Didi Chuxing is more invested in Uber s success than it is in the alliance. Didi, so far, had invested about $100 million in Lyft, $350 million in Grab and $30 million in Ola, altogether about $480 million, less than half of what it just invested in Uber.',
'More news on this: Uber s surrender in China puts more pressure on big tech companies to thrive in India',
'Delphi, Singapore launch test of self-driving taxis: Delphi Automotive Plc will launch a small test fleet of automated taxis in Singapore next year, aiming to ferry passengers around a city district in one of the first real-world tests of automated rides on demand, the company said on Monday. The project, run in partnership with the Singapore Land Transport Authority, will road test a concept that many companies investing in automated driving believe offers the fastest path to making such technology commercially viable. A cab ride in a dense urban area can cost $3 to 4 a mile, Delphi vice president of engineering Glen DeVos said in an interview. We think we can get to 90 cents a mile with an automated vehicle. That drops the price of transporting goods and people, and allows for the costs of automated driving systems to be spread over hours of operation and multiple users. Initially, the cars will have drivers ready to take over if the piloting systems fail, DeVos said. But by 2019 or 2020, we ll have removed drivers from the car, Glen DeVos, Delphi s vice president of engineering said in an interview.',
'Microsoft Sells $19.75 Billion of Bonds in Its Biggest Ever Sale: Microsoft Corp. raised $19.75 billion in the third-largest U.S. corporate bond sale of the year to help finance its planned purchase of LinkedIn Corp. Investors put in more than $50 billion of orders for the deal in the software maker s biggest ever sale. The strong demand helped Microsoft to borrow at lower rates than it paid for the $13 billion of bonds it raised in October. It also saved about $40 million in annual interest payments compared with what it was offering to pay initially, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors have been clamoring for U.S. corporate debt in recent months. Yields are turning negative on a growing number of bonds globally as central banks in Japan and Europe ramp up stimulus packages, spurring money managers to seek higher returns in the U.S.S&P Global Ratings assigned the bonds the top AAA grade in a note reviewing the sale on Monday. Moody s Investors Service also gave the bonds its top grade. The longest portion of the debt is a 40-year bond that yields 1.8 percentage points above Treasuries. On Thursday, Apple Inc. sold $7 billion of bonds. Investors opened their wallets for the iPhone maker, allowing the company to lower yields on all portions of the offering, which was funding shareholder buybacks. Like Apple, Microsoft s debt issuance is tied to avoiding an increase in its tax bill. Companies with cash holdings from overseas profits have to pay a 35 percent tax to repatriate those funds to the U.S. Rather than use that cash to fund its acquisition and pay the hefty taxes that result, it is far cheaper for large multinationals like Microsoft to borrow the funds.',
"A quiet news weekend, but lots of big news from Friday, which I've recapped below.",
'Amazon s Profits Grow More Than 800 Percent, Lifted by Cloud Services: For the second quarter, which ended June 30, Amazon reported net income of $857 million, or $1.78 a share, up from $92 million, or 19 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue jumped 31 percent to $30.4 billion from $23.19 billion a year ago. Amazon s shares rose more than 2 percent in after-hours trading after the release of its results. For most of its life, Amazon sacrificed profits if it could build another few warehouses to ship orders to customers more quickly or find some other investment to fuel its growth. Now, it cannot avoid showing big profits thanks to the lucrative cloud computing business in which it has improbably become a leader. On Thursday, Amazon reported net income of $857 million in its most recent quarter, the third quarter in a row in which it has shown a record profit. Its net income for those three months was also more than nine times the amount for the same period last year. A big part of what has made Amazon s story as a company so captivating to investors is the single-minded focus of Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company s founder and chief executive, on making big long-term investments. Unlike Google and Facebook, which have highly profitable advertising businesses, Amazon s retail business has operated on thin profit margins that quickly vanish when the company begins spending heavily, pushing it into the red. What is most striking about its recent habit of showing profits is that Amazon has not suddenly become stingy about making investments. In a conference call, Amazon s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said that the company would open 18 new fulfillment centers the warehouses from which it processes customer orders in the third quarter of this year, three times the number it opened in the same period last year. The retail business that Amazon is best known for is growing at a torrid pace even though it is now more than two decades old. The company s North American retail revenue jumped 28 percent as it continued to benefit from a shift in consumer spending to online from offline stores. The company s spending on new warehouses and delivery services has played an important role in helping it gobble up a bigger portion of the money people spend on consumer goods. They are defying the laws of gravity, said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. It shows their level of market share gains is increasing. ',
'Google Silences Doubters With Blockbuster Quarter: It s good to be Google. Sometimes it s just plain great. Revenue regularly increases at a clip rarely achieved by firms of its size. The same goes for profits. Seven of its products have over a billion users, a scale unimaginable in the predigital era. A reorganization last year into a holding company called Alphabet, accompanied by some related high-level personnel moves, was unexpected but generally applauded. Investors and analysts see little in the short term to disrupt this happy state of affairs, which has pushed Alphabet s value to more than $500 billion. Those sentiments were confirmed in its second-quarter earnings report, released Thursday after the market closed. It was even better than the rosy forecasts. Revenue rose to $21.5 billion, about $750 million more than analysts were predicting and a 21 percent jump from a year earlier.Celebration ensued. Alphabet s shares, which drifted sideways during regular trading, immediately rose 4 percent after hours.',
'Oracle s $9.3 Billion Deal for NetSuite Will Bolster Its Cloud Offerings: When Evan M. Goldberg founded NetSuite in 1998, he did so with backing from his former boss, Lawrence J. Ellison, who started the software giant Oracle. On Thursday, their relationship came full circle as Oracle agreed to acquire NetSuite for $9.3 billion to beef up its cloud offerings.The NetSuite deal is Oracle s largest acquisition since it bought PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion in 2004, according to data from Standard & Poor s Global Market Intelligence. That deal, a hostile takeover fought out over 18 months, extended Oracle s customer base and product offerings. It made Oracle bigger, but it did not change its business model. About 5,000 PeopleSoft employees, close to half the company, were laid off in the following months. The NetSuite purchase, on the other hand, is at the heart of Oracle s fight to remake itself for the modern world of cloud computing, or providing accessing to vast computational resources over the internet. This transition has shaken up the software business for the last several years. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have created markets worth billions, and older companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle have struggled to change the way they make and sell their products.The deal also illustrates that, for all the reach and novelty of tech, Silicon Valley remains a very small place with long personal histories. Mr. Goldberg got the idea for NetSuite after conversations with Mr. Ellison about where else the internet might go. Down the hall was another rising star at Oracle, named Marc Benioff. Mr. Benioff started a company called Salesforce.com within weeks of NetSuite s start, also with backing from Mr. Ellison. Today, Salesforce is regarded as the leading company selling only cloud software, with a market capitalization of $55.7 billion. The relationship between Oracle and Salesforce is testy, however. In 2011, Mr. Benioff was kicked out of a big Oracle conference after he lampooned Oracle s cloud efforts. And now the NetSuite technology will help Oracle compete more directly with Salesforce for customers.',
'Flipkart valuation shrinks again; firm reveals job cuts: Global asset manager T. Rowe Price Group Inc. has reduced the value of its stake in Flipkart Ltd by a fifth, its second cut in four months, reflecting continued investor concerns over the valuations of technology start-ups. The move came ahead of a statement by Flipkart on Friday that it was cutting 300 to 600 additional jobs, after already shrinking its workforce to 30,000 from 33,000 at the start of the year to reduce costs. US-based T. Rowe Price lowered the value of its holding in Flipkart to $96.29 per share, a 20% erosion, according to a filing the investment manager made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the quarter ended June. That values Flipkart at $10.3 billion, according to T. Rowe Price. The firm had earlier cut the value of its stake in Flipkart by 15% in April.On Friday, a Flipkart spokeswoman said the company had cut 300 to 600 jobs.The Economic Times reported on Friday that Flipkart was offering employees who had failed to meet expectations the choice to either resign or be sent off with severance pay, adding that the move was expected to impact 700-1,000 staff.',
"Facebook trounces Wall Street estimates with sharp ad sales growth: Facebook Inc provided more evidence on Wednesday that it can turn eyeballs into profit as the maker of the world's most popular app and social website trounced Wall Street's estimates, sending its shares to an all-time high. The leading social media company's mobile app and push into video attracted new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to spend more. It now has more than 1.7 billion monthly users, well ahead of any rivals. Its shares were up 5.4 percent in after-hours trading at $130.01, after hitting their highest since the company went public in 2012. Mobile advertising revenue accounted for 84 percent of the company's total advertising revenue, compared with 76 percent a year earlier. Total advertising revenue surged 63 percent to $6.24 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $5.80 billion.Meanwhile, Facebook still has several untapped areas for revenue opportunities, including its WhatsApp and Messenger apps, both of which have more than 1 billion users. But Wehner said the company does not plan to monetize them any time soon, and that it is instead focused on building interactions between businesses and users on the apps. Facebook also owns picture-sharing app Instagram, which recently announced it has more than 500 million users. Facebook has yet to say how much money Instagram makes, but research firm eMarketer predicts it will make $1.5 billion in revenue this year.Total revenue rose 59.2 percent to $6.44 billion, ahead of analysts' average estimate of $6.02 billion.",
"GoPro revenue plunges 47 percent, but beats estimates: GoPro's quarterly revenue plunged 47.4 percent, but beat analysts' estimates, which have been sharply lowered on shrinking demand for the company's body-mounted point-of-view cameras. The company's shares were up 2.4 percent in volatile trading after the bell on Wednesday. GoPro's revenue fell to $220.8 million in the second quarter ended June 30 from $419.9 million a year earlier.The company, whose cameras are worn by surfers, skydivers and other action junkies, said second-quarter units shipments rose 8 percent to 759,000 compared with the first quarter. Its average selling price increased 11 percent sequentially and 14 percent on a year-over-year basis. GoPro, however, maintained its full-year revenue guidance of $1.35 billion to $1.5 billion. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $1.34 billion. GoPro posted a loss of $91.77 million, or 66 cents per share, for the second quarter.",
'Groupon reports better-than-expected revenue, still not profitable: Deal site Groupon saw its shares rising today in after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected second quarter earnings report.Groupon revenue in the first half of 2016 reached $1.49 billion.Groupon beat Wall Street revenue expectations with second quarter revenue of $756 million. And it posted a better-than-expected net loss of $6.8 million on a non-GAAP basis, or $0.01 loss per share. In a phone interview, Groupon CEO Rich Williams said that the reasons the company did not make profits in the last quarter are essentially two: Groupon is still investing in marketing and other efforts to attract new customers, and they face other costs associated with company restructuring.In the first half of 2016, Groupon revenue looked better than it did over the same period last year. But the company is not looking quite as strong as it did in the first half of 2015 in terms of profitability.',
'Apple sells more iPhones than expected, shares jump after hours despite revenue drop: Apple Inc (AAPL.O) sold more iPhones than Wall Street expected in the third quarter and estimated its revenue in the current period would top many analysts\' targets, soothing fears that demand for the company\'s most important product had hit a wall. Its shares rose 7 percent in after-hours trading. The world\'s most valuable publicly traded company said it sold 40.4 million iPhones in the third quarter, down 15 percent from the year-ago quarter but slightly more than the average analyst forecast of 40.02 million, according to research firm FactSet StreetAccount. IPhone sales dropped for the second straight quarter, pushing down Apple\'s total revenue 14.6 percent in the fiscal third quarter, ended June 25. Demand for Apple\'s phones has waned in China, partly because of economic uncertainty there, and has also slowed in more mature markets as people tend to hold on to their phones for longer. The sales slump has stoked concerns about whether the tech leader can continue to deliver profits at the level Wall Street has come to expect. "China was a major letdown," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "Samsung and Huawei are much more competitive now than a year ago and the Chinese economy is not doing well at all." Apple\'s services business, which includes the App Store, Apple Pay, iCloud and other services, generated nearly $6 billion in revenue, up 18.9 percent from the previous year. As iPhone sales level off, Apple is attempting to use such services to wring more revenue out of its existing base of users. The business emerged as Apple s second largest after the iPhone for the first time in the second quarter, eclipsing gadgets such as the iPad and the Mac. That shift bodes well for Apple because gross margins on services are better than the average for the rest of the company, Maestri said.',
'Twitter still has revenue problems, and its stock is down big: Twitter reported Q2 earnings on Tuesday and investors aren t happy. The key issue is likely Twitter s Q3 guidance. The company says it is targeting $590 million to $610 million in revenue next quarter. Early analyst estimates pegged that number at $678 million, according to Yahoo Finance. So that s a big discrepancy.The stock was immediately down more than 10 percent on the news and seems to be hovering there.So here s Twitter s dilemma: CEO Jack Dorsey has effectively been in charge of Twitter for the past year, and it s clear that the company s growth problem is still a problem. On top of that, Twitter has now missed revenue estimates two quarters in a row, and significantly cut its Q3 guidance. So there s a clear revenue problem to go along with the growth problem. Not good. To state the obvious, this kind of production (or lack thereof) doesn t help Dorsey s case for running two companies (remember, he also runs Square). It also puts pressure on the board to consider broader options for the company, namely selling. Twitter is in the very beginning stages of trying to transition its business to look more like TV, but it doesn t have a lot of runway left.',
'$1 Billion for Dollar Shave Club: Why Every Company Should Worry: Unilever is paying $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club, a five-year-old start-up that sells razors and other personal products for men. Every other company should be afraid, very afraid. The deal anecdotally shows that no company is safe from the creative destruction brought by technological change. The very nature of a company is fundamentally changing, becoming smaller and leaner with far fewer employees. Dollar Shave Club was a phenom in the men s grooming industry. The online business was founded in 2011 by Mark Levine and Michael Dubin to combat the high cost of razors. The idea was rather simple. Instead of paying $10 or $20 a month at a store for disposable razors, a Dollar Shave Club subscriber could go online and set up a regular order to be shipped to his home monthly at a fraction of the retail cost. The experiment was a brave one. Until that time, Gillette dominated the razor business and was in an arms race with itself to add yet more blades and other features to its razors. Gillette was so dominant in advertising and shelf space that Procter & Gamble paid $57 billion for the company in 2005. Everything changed in 2012, when Mr. Dubin s comedic free ad posted on YouTube. Within 24 hours, the new business had more than 12,000 orders, more than it could handle. The ad went on to get over 20 million views and rocket Dollar Shave Club to over $240 million in revenue. The wealth will be spread among a few. Dollar Shave Club has over three million subscribers but only about 190 employees. Its razors were made in South Korea by Dorco. Distribution was initially handled in-house but eventually was contracted to a third-party company in Kentucky. What remained was a terrific design, marketing and customer service shop; and a business that was easily expandable to meet demand and that had a good niche with men who do not like to shop. These super-successful companies with few employees should worry an America struggling with inequality. That is the way things roll these days. It used to be that if you wanted to sell razors, you needed a factory, a distribution center, a sales force, a research and development team and a marketing budget. Keeping all of these functions under one roof lowered transaction costs and made operations more efficient. In part this was because of communication structures having telephone and mail together was a necessity. But the internet, mass transportation and globalization destroy everything. If you do not believe this change is about brand, experience and disruption, know that you can buy razors directly from Dorco, presumably the same brands sold by Dollar Shave Club.',
"Flipkart-owned Myntra acquires Jabong for $70 mn in all-cash deal: Flipkart-owned Myntra today said it has acquired Jabong from Global Fashion Group for USD 70 million. Myntra, which itself was acquired by Flipkart in 2014 in an estimated Rs 2,000 crore deal, will have access to a combined base of 15 million monthly active users.Jabong has been in the market for a sell-off and was in discussion with companies including Future Group, Snapdeal and Aditya Birla-owned Abof among others. Jabong was founded in 2012. In September 2014, its investor, Rocket Internet merged Jabong with four other online fashion retailers in Latin America, Russia, the Middle East, South-east Asia and Australia to create Global Fashion Group (GFG). Swedish investment firm Kinnevik also owns a large stake in Jabong's parent Global Fashion Group. While Jabong has managed to reduce losses by reducing discounts, both Kinnevik and Rocket Internet seem unwilling to infuse fresh capital and are believed to be keen to exit.",
'',
'Amazon Expands Drone Testing in Britain: Amazon has partnered with the British government to significantly expand drone testing, a move that could allow the devices to deliver packages to British homes far earlier than in the United States. Under the partnership, Britain s aviation regulator will let Amazon test several aspects of drone technology such as piloting the machines beyond the line of sight of its operators that the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States has not permitted. The tests, which are an important sign of confidence in Britain after its historic vote last month to leave the European Union, are to begin immediately.The move puts pressure on the F.A.A., which had recently rebuffed requests by Amazon, Google and other drone makers to advance their delivery plans. The tech behemoths and other drone makers have aggressively lobbied the F.A.A. to authorize the devices to significantly reduce costs to transport goods by airplane, freight and trucks. Amazon said it hoped success with the drone trials in Britain would encourage more hesitant regulators in the United States and elsewhere to loosen restrictions. The trials will help identify what operating rules and safety regulations will be needed to help move the drone industry forward, the company said in a statement. Amazon will work with British regulators to test drones that fly beyond the line of sight of operators in rural and suburban areas. It will also test whether a single operator can safely command multiple drones at once, as well as technology that lets the machines automatically detect and avoid other planes, buildings and people.',
'Analyst Downgrades Apple and Says It Has \'Peaked\': With Apple Inc\'s earnings report just a day away, Wall Street analysts are more at oddsthan ever, and one of them in particular anticipates tough times for the tech giant. "Our opinion [is] that Apple has peaked under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook," Colin Gillis of BGC Financial L.P. said in a note this week. "Our view that that there is risk that the upgrade rate for the next iPhone may slow even more than the upgrade rate cycle of 6s, which has been materially lower than the upgrade rate of the iPhone 6 as per the company." However, others disagree and say that while things haven\'t been great as of late, things will get better next year. "Amid pervasive investor fear and negativity, we see results/guidance as not great but good enough to start swinging the tide from near-term fear to cautious optimism about the future," Timothy Arcuri of Cowen and Company LLC said in a note. "Given our installed base work, we see a "super-cycle" in \'17 and iPhone 7 could even sell a little better than bearish expectations." Even Gillis acknowledges that shares could see a move higher after earnings due to the low expectations. After that bounce, though, his pessimism continues. "[W]hen we ask ourselves \'Do we see Apple gaining or losing its next $100 billion of value,\' the answer is losing."',
'Sprint says to be cash-flow positive next year, shares soar: Sprint Corp (S.N) reported better-than-expected first-quarter revenue as big discounts attracted more postpaid subscribers, and the No. 4 U.S. wireless carrier said it expected to be cash flow positive next fiscal year after breaking even this year. The company\'s shares surged more than 28 percent to $5.93 on Monday - their biggest intraday percentage gain ever - after it also said it had enough money to fund its business this year. Some analysts and investors had raised questions about Sprint\'s financial position after majority owner SoftBank Corp (9984.T) agreed earlier this month to buy UK chipmaker ARM Holdings for $32 billion. Sprint had negative cash flow of $3.17 billion in the financial year ended March 31. "We expect that we will have adequate sources to provide all the capital necessary to fund the business and repay the debt maturities due in FY 16," Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati said on a conference call with analysts.Sprint, in which Japan\'s SoftBank holds a more than 80 percent stake, said its net operating revenue fell marginally to $8.01 billion. Up to Friday\'s close, Sprint\'s shares had risen 27.6 percent since the start of the year.',
'Investors realize Nintendo didn t develop Pok mon Go and shares plummet: Nintendo s shares plunged after the company said late Friday that the worldwide success of Pok mon Go will not significantly impact its financial results. Nothing Nintendo disclosed about the ownership of the game was new information, but markets were shocked anyway. The stock sank 18 percent to 23,220 yen at the close in Tokyo, the maximum one-day move allowed by the exchange, noted Bloomberg. After the drop, Nintendo s stock remained flat. In morning trading today, the Kyoto-based company s shares were down $2.36, or 8.14 percent, at $26.64.On Friday, Nintendo put out a statement pointing out that it owns only 32 percent of the voting power of The Pok mon Company, an affiliated company that holds the ownership rights to Pok mon. Nintendo also owns 13 percent of Niantic, the San Francisco-based mobile developer spun out of Google last year who developed and distributed the game. Because of this accounting scheme, the income reflected on the company s consolidated business results is limited, Nintendo wrote in a notice. Also, Nintendo said that Pok mon Go Plus, its peripheral device for use with the application, is scheduled for release and it s already reflected in the financial forecast. Following Pok mon Go s release in the U.S. at the beginning of July, Nintendo s market valuation soared to more than $40 billion, passing Sony. ',
'Verizon to Pay $4.8 Billion for Yahoo s Core Business: the internet is an unforgiving place for yesterday s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an independent company. The board of the Silicon Valley company agreed to sell Yahoo s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon for $4.8 billion, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak about the deal before the planned announcement on Monday morning. After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents.That s a pittance compared with Yahoo s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Founded in 1994, Yahoo was one of the last independently operated pioneers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking companies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom. But Yahoo, despite constant management turmoil, kept growing. Started as a directory of websites, the company was soon doing much more, offering searches, email, shopping and news. Those services, which were free to consumers, were supported by advertising displayed on its various pages. For a long time, the model worked. It seemed like every company in America and across much of the world wanted to reach people using the new medium, and ad revenue poured in to Yahoo.In the end, the company was done in by Google and Facebook, two younger behemoths that figured out that survival was a continuous process of reinvention and staying ahead of the next big thing. Yahoo, which flirted with buying both companies in their infancy, watched its fortunes sink as users moved on to apps and social networks. Verizon, one of the nation s biggest telecommunications companies, plans to combine Yahoo s operations with AOL, a longtime Yahoo competitor acquired by Verizon last year. The idea is to use Yahoo s vast array of content and its advertising technology to offer more robust services to Verizon customers and advertisers. ',
'Google Races to Catch Up in Cloud Computing: When it comes to cloud computing, Google is in a very unfamiliar position: seriously behind. Google is chasing Amazon and Microsoft for control of the next generation of business technology, in enormous cloud-computing data centers. Cloud systems are cheap and flexible, and companies are quickly shifting their technologies for that environment. According to analysts at Gartner, the global cloud-computing business will be worth $67 billion by 2020, compared with $23 billion at the end of this year.For Google, a loss in cloud computing would be a rare misstep for a company that revolutionized media with its advertising business, and then made the world s leading smartphone operating system.But it will be an uphill climb. Amazon Web Services, which began its cloud product a decade ago, remains the leader. The company took in $2.6 billion, 9 percent of Amazon s sales, in the first quarter of 2016. Profits from the service made up 56 percent of Amazon s operating income. Those numbers may well be higher when Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Microsoft styled itself a cloud company, too, and the company said last week that revenue from Azure, its cloud business, which was founded in 2010, rose 100 percent over the last year. Cloud technology also figures in crucial businesses like Office 365. In contrast, Google Cloud Platform does not even figure in the earnings reports of Alphabet, Google s parent company. That has to sting, since the company owns perhaps the largest network of computers on the planet, spending close to $10 billion a year to handle services like search, Gmail and YouTube.the company said it has used artificial intelligence to cut the power use in its data centers 15 percent, a huge decrease considering how efficient these data factories were already. Power is probably the largest single cost for all three of the cloud companies. Google is almost certain to use its savings to reduce prices, much the way it won in search advertising by figuring out its competitors costs, then undercutting them. That ability to find energy efficiency may be a powerful tool to sell to others over Google Compute.',
'Apple Watch Sales Fall 55% in Second Quarter, IDC Report Says: Apple Watch sales fell 55 percent in the second quarter of 2016, dragging the global market for such devices lower, as potential customers hold off for an update coming later this year, according to a report from market intelligence firm IDC. Apple Inc. sold 1.6 million watches in the second quarter of this year, down from 3.6 million units a year earlier, IDC said. Global smartwatch sales fell 32 percent to 3.5 million units. While Apple held on to its position as the industry leader, with 47 percent of the market, it was the only company in the top five to see a decline. Samsung Electronics Co. saw its market share more than double to 16 percent. Consumers have held off on smartwatch purchases since early 2016 in anticipation of a hardware refresh, and improvements in WatchOS are not expected until later this year, effectively stalling existing Apple Watch sales," IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani wrote in the report. Apple still maintains a significant lead in the market and unfortunately a decline for Apple leads to a decline in the entire market. ',
"Nintendo shares plunge, company says Pokemon GO's earnings impact limited: Shares of Nintendo Co (7974.T) tumbled as much as 18 percent early on Monday after the company said smash-hit mobile game Pokemon GO would have only a limited impact on its earnings. Nintendo said after the market closed on Friday that it had already factored in anticipated revenues from its Pokemon GO Plus device - an accessory worn on the wrist to alert players of nearby monsters to catch - and that it had no plans to revise its annual earnings forecasts for now. Nintendo said its affiliate Pokemon Co receives licensing and fees from the game's developer, Niantic Inc, and that profits at Nintendo from those revenues would be limited. The company, which owns 32 percent of Pokemon Co, is due to report first-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares and even with Monday's decline, the shares are still up some 60 percent compared with levels prior to the game's July 6 launch in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.",
'Startup Deal Activity Keeps Falling Worldwide: According to a new report from KPMG International and CB Insights, global deal activity for venture capital-backed startups continued a decline in the second quarter after hitting record levels one year ago. In fact, at the current rate, deal activity will just barely top 2013 s numbers. "Many of the high-profile tech [initial public offerings] from 2015 continue to trade well below their initial offering price, putting pressure on private company valuations," said Brian Hughes of KPMG. "This, combined with economic concerns in China and Europe, has continued to put a damper on VC investment." "It\'s a challenging time for VC investors," he concluded.The reason funding moved higher while deal activity dropped is that some larger startups such as those of Snapchat Inc., Didi Chuxing, and Uber Technologies Inc. all saw huge rounds, accounting for much of the funding. In fact, in North America, Uber and Snapchat accounted for more than $4.5 billion of the $17.1 billion in total investment.And while there might have been more billion dollar companies minted in the second quarter than in the first, there were yet again more "down events" companies raising new money or being acquired at a lower valuation than there were unicorns created. According to the report, seven startups reached the unicorn club in the past four months, but CB Insights downround tracker shows that 17 failed to live up to expectations and experienced down events over that time. Unicorn creation saw its most recent peak in the third quarter of last year, when 25 were birthed.',
'Roger Ailes created another big problem for Fox News the average age of its audience is 68: Roger Ailes, the closest thing in modern U.S. politics to a kingmaker, today stepped down as head of Fox News, the network he founded 20 years ago and turned into a potent political force. James Murdoch and his brother Lachlan, both named by father Rupert to run parent company 21st Century Fox last year, pushed Ailes out on the heels of a sexual harassment suit that led to more allegations of sexual misconduct from female anchors. The brothers saw the situation as a way to remove a longstanding obstacle to their power within the company. A lot of the news reports most of the key details were first broken by New York Magazine s Gabriel Sherman centered on how the 76-year-old, a lifelong Republican, clashed with the two brothers politically, personally and as an executive. Ailes is known as a venal operator, specializing in deals with questionable reciprocity. His style was completely at odds with James, a data-driven technocrat, and Lachlan, the earnest Murdoch member. Mostly true. A lesser-known but perhaps more important reason had to do with more practical issues namely, the business of Fox News itself, according to sources. The average age of Fox News viewers in primetime, the hours that draw the highest ad rates and so are the ones that matter, is 68 a group that advertisers don t pay to reach. In the world of cable news, marketers really only pay for viewers in the 25-54 age range. That means a good chunk of Fox News audience is worth little to nothing. Fox News still mints money it accounts for as much as 24 percent of the parent company s yearly profit, or more than $1.5 billion but a lot of that comes from licensing fees paid by distributors to carry the network, which are only negotiated every few years. Fox News still leads in total viewership and in primetime, but it can t capitalize on a lot of that audience since advertisers don t pay for a lot of these viewers. That weighed on the future value of the network, as James saw it, according to one person familiar with the matter, and as much as Ailes s style and politics were issues for both brothers, the more pressing concern was managing for the future of the network, this source said.',
'Reddit is still in turmoil: Its been one year since Reddit revolted When the company cracked down on revenge porn and subreddits containing offensive content last summer, the backlash was swift and ultimately led to the ouster of interim CEO Ellen Pao. Although Pao was seen as the driving force behind efforts to make Reddit respectable enough to appeal to advertisers, the company continued its clean-up after her departure, making diverse hires and keeping up with the anti-harassment policy instituted during Pao s tenure. But Reddit, led by CEO Steve Huffman, seems to be struggling with its reform. Over the past six months, over a dozen senior Reddit employees most of them women and people of color have left the company. Reddit s efforts to expand its media empire have also faltered. Reddit let go of at least two key members of its team earlier this week, several sources with knowledge of Reddit confirmed to TechCrunch. Among those who lost their jobs are Reddit s vice president of marketing, Celestine Maddy and Reddit s editorial director, Vickie Chang. Also this week, Reddit HR generalist Nicole-Jasmin Clark left the company, according to our sources and confirmed by her LinkedIn, as well as a handful of people from the marketing team. The layoffs follow departures from the network s video team last month, and the slow trickle of employees exiting the company over the past several months. Back in May, Reddit lost its head of community, Kristine Fasnacht, after being in the role for just nine months. In short, female and POC employees have been quietly leaving the company by way of layoffs and resignations from many departments, including engineering, marketing, operations and product. Reddit s associate creative director Stephen Greenwood also left the company in June. sources say Reddit s internal turmoil can be traced back to the company s ongoing struggle to leave its antagonistic culture behind. Several employees fended off uncomfortable comments from users and management alike, sources claimed. Management is terrible, a complete reflection of what the site is like, one source said. Another source, a former Reddit employee who asked to remain anonymous described a management team with good intentions but poor execution.One individual speculated that the reemergence of the company s drinking culture was to blame for the uncomfortable environment. Under Pao s reign, Reddit tried to eradicate the bro-like amount of alcohol consumption at the office, but that went right out the window following Pao s departure in July 2015.',
'Visa and PayPal have finally settled a long-standing feud: Two months ago, Visa s CEO issued a thinly veiled threat to PayPal: Stop driving business away from us or risk increased competition like you ve never seen. He got his wish. The two payment companies just announced a wide-ranging partnership that includes a promise from PayPal to stop steering Visa cardholders away from using their Visa cards for PayPal transactions. The new accord will also enable PayPal s mobile app to work as a payment option in brick-and-mortar stores whose equipment accepts tap-and-pay Visa payments. The partnership appears to bring to a close tension between one of the world s biggest credit companies and the biggest alternative online payment option in the U.S. PayPal has been viewed warily by the credit card companies that don t appreciate PayPal pushing their customers to pay with a bank account hookup known as ACH rather than a payment card. PayPal historically makes more money on a transaction when a user funds his or her PayPal wallet with a direct bank account hookup, since that method carries lower transaction fees than payment cards do. The agreement affords PayPal certain economic incentives, including Visa incentives for increased volume, and greater long-term Visa fee certainty, according to the press release. Translation: Visa is paying PayPal for increasing the amount of PayPal transactions that flow through Visa pipes. It appears PayPal is also getting a promise that Visa will not raise the fees it charges PayPal when a PayPal customer uses a Visa card to make a PayPal purchase. But it still appears likely that the deal will eat into PayPal s profits as more Visa customers choose to pay with cards through PayPal instead of bank accounts, according to Craig Maurer, an analyst with Autonomous Research. Yes, PayPal will get some form of incentives from Visa, but we believe the off-set will be minimal while this drag will be material, he wrote in research note to clients.',
'Dollar Shave Club hit the jackpot when Unilever agreed to buy the online men\'s razor merchant for $1 billion. Other e-commerce startups such as Birchbox and Stitch Fix can\'t necessarily expect their own suitor to sweep in with such sweet deals. That\'s because the key to Dollar Shave Club\'s appeal is not so much its online prowess but the fact that it built a powerful brand in four years. Dollar Shave Club upended the industry\'s traditional business model by offering a subscription service that sells blades for as little as $3 a month (including shipping and handling). The day Dollar Shave Club started selling subscriptions in March 2012, the company released a YouTube video starring founder Michael Dubin. He tells viewers the product is f***ing great, "so gentle a toddler could use it." The website crashed, but the blades sold out in six hours. The video has been viewed about 23 million times. The company reached $150 million-plus in sales in 2015, Unilever said in a press release announcing the deal. That despite the fact that the blades lack many of Gillette\'s high-tech enhancements. Few other e-commerce startups can claim to have built a brand so quickly. Unilever and P&G are masters at traditional marketing, mostly offline, but they struggle with the direct-to-consumer brand-building at which upstarts like Dollar Shave Club excel.',
"Intel's slowing data center growth overshadows strong profit: Intel on Wednesday reported slower revenue growth at its data center business, which makes semiconductors used in high-end servers, overshadowing a better-than-expected quarterly profit. Shares of the world's largest chipmaker fell 3 percent in after-hours trading. Hurt by weak demand from enterprises, revenue at the highly-profitable unit rose 5 percent to $4 billion, but lagged the previous quarter's 9 percent increase and remained below Intel's annual target of low double-digit growth.Net revenue rose 2.6 percent to $13.53 billion, narrowly missing the average analyst estimate of $13.54 billion.Intel reported a better-than-expected profit as its cost-cutting begin to pay off. In April it announced plans to slash 12,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its global workforce, of which it said about half was already complete. Intel's forecast for $14.9 billion in current-quarter revenue topped the average analyst expectation of $14.63 billion. Net income fell to $1.33 billion, or 27 cents per share, in the second quarter, from $2.71 billion, or 55 cents per share, a year earlier",
'Uber Investors Said to Push for Didi Truce in Costly China Fight: Uber Technologies Inc. investors have a message for management: It s time to wrap up the costly fight in China. Several institutional investors are pushing the ride-hailing company to ink a partnership agreement with China s market leader Didi Chuxing, according to people familiar with the matter, stemming the billions of dollars Uber is spending to expand in the region.Uber and Didi are bleeding cash in China as they fight for dominance in the world s most populous country. Uber has said that it is spending at least $1 billion a year to expand its business in the country. Both are giving out incentives for drivers and free rides to compete for market share.Benchmark s Bill Gurley -- an Uber investor and board member -- spoke briefly with Didi President Jean Liu at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, a few months ago, according to a person familiar with the matter. Didi is in the lead on its home turf, with 14 million drivers signed up in 400 Chinese cities. Uber has set a target of operating in 100 cities this year. Uber set up a separate corporate entity to insulate its Chinese business, which has gathered local Chinese investors. Still, the parent company has also invested its own money, keeping the units financially intertwined. Among private technology companies, the rivals are giants. Uber, which was last valued at nearly $68 billion, says it has access to more than $11 billion in cash and equity. Didi, which was last valued at $28 billion, says it has more than $10 billion at its disposal in cash and equity.',
'Strong demand from China buoys Qualcomm forecast: Qualcomm Inc forecast current-quarter profit largely above market estimates as it sees strong demand for its mobile chips in China and expects to sign more licensing deals. Shares of the company, which also posted a better-than-expected third-quarter profit, rose about 7 percent in extended trading on Wednesday.The company, whose chips are used in Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd smartphones, is focusing on its flagship mobile processors to regain the market share. Qualcomm expects to launch Snapdragon 821, an advanced and a faster version of Snapdragon 820, which powers Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones."I think it is pretty straightforward...Samsung is back as their customer and...more people in China are ready to pay to license their technology...so it looks like the company is well positioned for the coming quarters," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.Revenue rose to $6.04 billion quarter ended June 26 from $5.83 billion a year earlier. Net Income attributable to Qualcomm rose to $1.44 billion, or 97 cents per share, from $1.18 billion, or 73 cents per share.',
"EBay beats revenue estimate, bumps up forecasts: Online retailer eBay Inc reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and raised its sales forecast for the year as efforts to revamp its online marketplace start to pay off. EBay shares were up 8 percent after the bell on Wednesday after the company's board also authorized an additional $2.5 billion stock buyback program. The company, which spun off PayPal last July, has tackled slowing growth by focusing on small business sellers, while offering a bigger selection of products. Gross merchandise volume, or the total value of all goods sold on its sites, was up 4 percent at $20.9 billion in the second quarter ended June 30, helped by strength in its U.S. business. The number of active buyers rose 4 percent to 164 million. The company's revenue also got a boost from robust sales at Stubhub, which won a 6.5 year revenue-sharing deal to resell tickets for the New York Yankees last month.The company's net income rose to $435 million, or 38 cents per share, in the latest quarter from $83 million, or 7 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 5.7 percent to $2.23 billion, ahead of analysts' average estimate of $2.17 billion. Up to Wednesday's close, shares of the San Jose, California-based company had fallen 5.6 percent in the past 12 months.",
'Microsoft Earnings Are Up, Cushioned by Its Cloud Business: On Tuesday, in its quarterly earnings results, Microsoft offered strong signs that its cloud business was growing quickly. Revenue from Azure, a business Microsoft started to compete in cloud computing with Amazon, the market leader, rose more than 100 percent in the quarter. Revenue from Office 365, a subscription version of the old Office software, rose 54 percent from commercial customers and 19 percent from consumers.Microsoft s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has made cloud computing a priority for the company since becoming chief executive two years ago. Many believed it was a move that Microsoft had long needed to make but was held back by the reluctance of its previous boss, Steven A. Ballmer. There is risk in this transition. The profit margins from renting software in the cloud are not as high as selling a license to customers, and Microsoft investors have always counted on the company to generate exceptional profits. But the cloud business model tends to be more stable a trade-off for slimmer margins. After Microsoft s misadventures in the smartphone market, it is a necessary trade-off. Last week, the company said it would fail to meet a goal of getting its Windows 10 operating system running on one billion devices before June 2018, largely because of its retrenchment in the mobile phone business.Now the company has laid off most of the thousands of people who joined Microsoft through the deal, written off the value of nearly all of the acquisition and whittled back the number of smartphones it sells. On Tuesday, Microsoft said that its phone revenue had declined 71 percent from a year ago. For years, people have put off purchases of new machines or avoided them entirely in favor of smartphones and tablets. Last week, IDC, the technology research firm, said worldwide PC shipments fell 4.5 percent in the most recent quarter compared with a year earlier.For the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft reported net income of $3.12 billion, or 39 cents a share, compared with a loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents a share, during the same period a year earlier. Revenue fell to $20.61 billion, from $22.18 billion a year ago. The decline was partly the result of a $2 billion deferral of revenue related to Windows 10, its latest operating system. Accounting rules require Microsoft to recognize revenue from the software to be recognized in pieces over time. Without the deferral, Microsoft s revenue rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $22.64 billion. The company s shares jumped about 4 percent in after-hours trading following the release of its results.',
'Google has found a business model for its most advanced artificial intelligence: Two years ago, Google spent over half a billion dollars for the tiny artificial intelligence startup DeepMind. Since then, the unit has walloped Atari video games and beaten an impossible board game. Impressive stuff, that. But those AI demonstrations have yet to spell actual revenue. Until now although the efforts are helping Google save money on its most expensive part. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis told Bloomberg that his unit recently began applying its advanced AI to Google s data centers, finding ways to reduce the company s sizable energy bill. Google started using machine learning for its data centers two years ago, searching for ways to reduce costs for one of the company s top expenses. A month ago, it aimed the more specialized AI tools from DeepMind at the problem of cooling these server farms. That cut the energy needed for cooling by 40 percent, the company said. It didn t offer a dollar figure for that, but it s safe to assume that it means hundreds of millions in savings over the long haul.DeepMind technically sits outside of Google in Alphabet. (I ve heard people describe it as in the Alphaverse, whatever that means.) But a rep said that Google was not paying DeepMind for its cost-cutting research here.',
'Facebook Pilots Offline Video for India in Duel With YouTube: Facebook Inc. is piloting a feature in India allowing users to save videos to watch offline, chasing a similar program from Google s YouTube, as the companies attempt to crack a market ridden with poor internet connectivity. The move followed feedback from users in the country citing poor video experiences because of limited mobile coverage, Facebook said in a statement. We re testing an option for people to download videos to Facebook while they re online on good internet connections, to view the video at anytime, online or offline, without using extra mobile data, the company said. YouTube introduced offline video in 2014 to cater to Indians crazy about watching Bollywood song sequences, cricket snippets and comedy sketches. Despite the cost of downloads, an estimated 40 percent of data consumption on phone networks is video, said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of the New Delhi-based Medianama.com, which monitors news on the digital industry.Facebook, which has 142 million users in India, said the new feature helps users get through the lag between downloading and playing a video by saving it for later, similar to the YouTube feature. Only original videos posted on personal Facebook accounts and on the social network s pages can be downloaded. The program is being tested on a small percentage of Indian users, the company said without providing details on broader rollout.',
'Netflix Disappoints Wall Street as Subscriber Growth Slows: Netflix isn t looking so invincible anymore. On Monday, the company disappointed Wall Street with the news that subscriber growth for its streaming video service had slowed significantly during the second quarter. Also disconcerting was that Netflix added far fewer subscribers over all during the period than expected, which the company blamed on news media coverage of its plans for price increases. Netflix added just 1.7 million new streaming members in the three months that ended June 30, about half the 3.3 million net additions from the same period the previous year. That anemic growth for both United States and international subscribers came in well below its forecast of 2.5 million new members. The development sent Netflix shares down as much as 16 percent in after-hours trading on Monday, representing the second earnings report in a row that has sparked a double-digit plunge in the company s stock price. Mr. Hastings finds himself in a starkly different position from just six months ago, when he stood onstage at the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas and declared that Netflix would conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its world service map. At the time, the company s share had been soaring, surging 135 percent in 2015 as the top performer on the Standard & Poor s 500-stock index. So far this year, Netflix s share price has declined about 14 percent. Still, some analysts pointed to the company s financials as proof that it would continue to deliver on its plans in the long term. Net income for the quarter was $41 million, up 58 percent from $26 million during the same period last year. Total revenue was $2.1 billion, up 27 percent from $1.6 billion in the same period last year.',
'Yahoo Revenue Falls 15 Percent and Profit Drops 64 Percent: As Yahoo accepted the final bids for its core business on Monday, the internet company revealed just how badly that business was deteriorating. Yahoo said that its revenue in the second quarter fell 15 percent, after excluding accounting adjustments, and its operating profit fell 64 percent. Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013. But investors were not focused on the quarterly numbers or Yahoo s vast overpayment for Tumblr. They were far more interested in whether Yahoo s web, email, news and other businesses will finally be sold and at what price.Yahoo has been conducting a prolonged auction for those assets since February, and final bids were due on Monday. Yahoo s board is expected to evaluate the offers over the next week or two and decide whether to proceed with a transaction that would end Yahoo s 20-year run as an independent, publicly traded company.Analysts expect the final bids to come in at $3.5 billion to $6 billion, including Yahoo s land and patents.The write-off of most of the value of the Tumblr blogging network is emblematic of the failure of Ms. Mayer s strategy to expand Yahoo by luring the mobile young users who drive the business of its chief rivals, Google and Facebook.In the second quarter, Yahoo s revenue was $1.31 billion, up from $1.24 billion in the same quarter a year ago. But the most recent quarter s revenue rose only because of a change in how Yahoo accounts for revenue from its search partnership with Microsoft. Excluding those changes, revenue fell 15 percent, and both search ads and display ads posted significant drops. The company reported a net loss of $440 million, or 46 cents a share, for the quarter, compared with a loss $22 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Excluding the Tumblr write-off and other adjustments, the company s operating profit fell 64 percent. Shares of Yahoo were down slightly in after-hours trading Monday evening.',
'IBM Rises After Sales Beat Estimates on Software Unit Gains: IBM second-quarter revenue beat analysts estimates, boosted by the unit that includes its Watson artificial intelligence platform, in an early indication that the company s transition to cloud-based software and services is beginning to pay off. Sales were $20.2 billion, compared with the average analyst estimate of $20.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue in cognitive solutions, which includes Watson, increased 3.5 percent to $4.7 billion. This is the first time since IBM reorganized its segments that the cognitive solutions portion has registered growth, after declining the previous five quarters in a row. Adjusted earnings, excluding some items, was $2.95 a share, beating the $2.89 average estimate of 19 analysts. The shares rose 3.2 percent in late trading to $165. They are up 16 percent this year through the end of Monday, compared with a 6 percent gain on the Standard & Poor s 500 Index.',
'What is ARM and why is SoftBank spending $32 billion on it SoftBank s $32 billion deal to buy chip designer ARM had many people scratching their heads Monday. It s not that ARM isn t important in tech. Indeed, its processor designs are used by nearly every chipmaker and, by extension, find a place inside nearly every piece of tech from cellphones to hard drives to networking gear. Rather, it is the fact that the chipmaker is so far removed from SoftBank s other businesses. The Japanese conglomerate has a wide range of tech holdings, including a controlling interest in Sprint, its own mobile carrier business in Japan and investments in Alibaba, OlaCabs and Snapdeal. SoftBank would have been one of the least likely I thought to buy ARM, said longtime chip analyst Kevin Krewell of Tirias Research. They are not in the semiconductor business in any significant way. Krewell says he suspects that SoftBank looked hard at buying other companies in the chip business and decided that ARM was the strongest play, especially for the very long term.It s worth taking a second to understand how ARM s business works and what it does. ARM doesn t make any products. Not only does it not manufacture chips, it doesn t even design the ones that are eventually sold. Rather, it designs the core engines that get built into others chips chips from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia as well as processors like Apple s A9 and Samsung s Exynos. For its efforts, ARM gets a small license fee from every chip that uses its design. Because it is in so many products, that small license fee adds up to a pretty healthy business. Its 2015 revenue was nearly one billion British pounds. And its sphere of influence is growing, both in terms of the number of chips using its design as well as the kinds of products. Last year nearly 15 billion chips using its designs were sold, up from about six billion in 2010. Cars, servers and internet-of-things devices are all seen as big expansion areas for ARM chips.',
'SoftBank is bidding to buy ARM for $32 billion because everything s a computer now: apan s SoftBank is buying U.K.-based chip design firm ARM Holdings for about $32 billion, according to the FT. Why Everything is a computer now, and ARM has been one of the winners of the mobile revolution. ARM designs chips but doesn t actually make them for a huge variety of devices. It dominates the market for smartphones Apple is a big client, as is Samsung and its chips shows up in other consumer gadgets, as well as more-industrial-like devices and internet of things sensors. The number of chips containing ARM processors reached almost 15 billion in 2015, up from about 6 billion in 2010.The move is a big one for SoftBank CEO Masa Son after his would-be successor, former Google executive Nikesh Arora, stepped away from the company last month. (Talks presumably started while Arora was still there.) One key question is whether other firms will let SoftBank purchase ARM or if there will be a bidding war. Apple, arguably ARM s most important client, and Intel, which lost the mobile chip war to ARM, are both potential buyers.',
'ATMs Spit Out Cash Without Cards as Smartphone Apps Take Over: Forgot your bank card at home No worries. Many ATMs will soon dispense cash with help from a smartphone and banking app. A growing number of banks are letting consumers arrange withdrawals via their mobile app and pick up the cash at a nearby automated teller machine. Customers authenticate the transaction by scanning a QR code with their phone, entering a one-time security code or tapping their device on the machine. The idea is to help customers who have forgotten their cards or worry about thieves stealing their card data via ATMs. While so-called cardless cash access is only available at about 2,000 of the half a million or so U.S. ATMs in use today, it s expanding rapidly and will be at as many as 95,000 machines by year end, according to payments researcher Crone Consulting LLC. JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to roll out the feature later this year. Bank of America Corp.said it will extend the technology to 5,000 ATMs by year end. And Wells Fargo & Co. is letting some users of mobile wallets like Apple Pay authenticate through their phone, and expects more than 40 percent of its ATMs to be enabled for this technology by year end. In possibly the largest deployment to date, Payment Alliance International, the nation s largest closely held provider of ATM processing and maintenance services, plans to announce Friday that it will start rolling out the technology in August or September, and plans to have cardless cash access at 25,000 machines in stores and gas stations by the end of 2017.The technology has cut transaction times at ATMs to about 10 seconds from 45 seconds, he said, adding that more than 8 percent of the bank s mobile customers use the service. Smartphone-based ATM transactions have also helped combat skimming, where criminals insert a device in an ATM that steals customers credentials and lets them make withdrawals later. Last year, the number of ATMs compromised by criminals in the U.S. jumped 546 percent, according to FICO Card Alert Service. Upgrading an ATM with software for such smartphone-based withdrawals cost about $800, Ormseth said.',
'Artificial Intelligence Swarms Silicon Valley on Wings and Wheels: For more than a decade, Silicon Valley s technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a Like button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligenceand robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world. The shift was evident in a Lowe s home improvement store here this month, when a prototype inventory checker developed by Bossa Nova Robotics silently glided through the aisles using computer vision to automatically perform a task that humans have done manually for centuries. The robot, which was skilled enough to autonomously move out of the way of shoppers and avoid unexpected obstacles in the aisles, alerted people to its presence with soft birdsong chirps. Gliding down the middle of an aisle at a leisurely pace, it can recognize bar codes on shelves, and it uses a laser to detect which items are out of stock.',
'Success of Pokemon GO adds impetus for change at Nintendo: The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO and the surge in Nintendo Co\'s (7974.T) market value by $17 billion in just over a week has been seized upon by one of its most vocal investors to press for a change of strategy at the company. Until Pokemon GO, a mobile game, was launched just over a week ago, Nintendo had taken every opportunity to say its main focus was still gaming consoles, and games for smartphones were just a means to lure more people to them. But the success of Pokemon GO - unforseen even by its creators - has shown the potential for augmented reality and for Nintendo to capitalize on a line-up of popular characters ranging from Zelda to Super Mario. Seth Fischer, founder and chief investment officer at Oasis Management, is one of Asia\'s best known hedge fund managers and has long been a small but loud shareholder. Encouraged by the success of mobile games like "Candy Crush", he has campaigned for years for the Japanese console maker to develop and sell games for platforms run by Apple and Google. "I hope they will now understand the power of smartphones," Fischer told Reuters. "And as a result, I hope this means there is a whole change in strategy." "My next focus with Nintendo is for them to focus on monetizing the rest of their 4,000 patents for mobile gaming, multi-player gaming, et cetera. I think they could be making 30 to 60 billion yen ($290 million to $570 million) annually from licensing."',
'Line Rises in Initial Public Offering, Cheering Skittish Tech Industry: The Line Corporation, the owner of a Japanese instant messaging app with a colorful cast of cartoon characters, cheered the technology industry on Thursday when its shares jumped 30 percent in their American trading debut. The strong showing offers hope for tech firms and their financial backers that Wall Street investors are warming up to closely held technology start-ups. But experts say Line is an unusual case of an established company with operating heft and a proven way to gin up sales something that many new tech companies lack. Line itself still faces considerable hurdles, such as slowing user growth and an untested plan to use advertising to help make it profitable. Line s American depositary shares, priced at $32.84 each on Monday, jumped to $42.70 in early trading in New York on Thursday. The stock is expected to begin trading in Japan on Friday. Line s debut coincided with another new high for the equity markets in the United States. The Standard & Poor s 500-stock index has surged 8 percent since June 27, after Britain s decision to leave the European Union roiled stocks worldwide, as investors anticipated additional stimulus from central banks.',
'Snapchat Geofilter Campaigns May Get a Boost From Yext: Snapchat Inc. may start to see more brands paying up for location-based advertising campaigns on its photo-sharing mobile app, thanks to the efforts of another startup, Yext Inc. Advertisers can already pay the social-media service to have branded geofilters -- a type of graphical overlay people can use to decorate photos or videos they re sharing -- to show up in the app in specific locations. To run these campaigns, companies have had to manually provide Snapchat with the exact geographical details of where they want the filters to appear and the dimensions of each space. Yext, whose software helps businesses manage digital location data, has been working with Snapchat to make that process easier. The New York-based startup on Thursday is unveiling a new feature that lets clients give Snapchat all that information with a few taps.Last year, Snapchat started offering geofilters to brands as an advertising platform. In the U.S., a national geofilter campaign reaches 40 percent to 60 percent of daily users, according to Snapchat s website. The company also unveiled a cheaper option for smaller businesses and individuals this year: on-demand geofilters. The starting price for one of these geofilters is $5 for up to 20,000 square feet of coverage. Companies including McDonald s Corp., Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yum! Brands subsidiary KFC have already launched location-based ad campaigns on Snapchat. The fried chicken seller offered special KFC-themed geofilters at more than 900 locations in the U.K., resulting in a more than 23 percent lift in visitation within a week of a user seeing the filter in a friend s Snap, according to a June presentation by KPCB partner Mary Meeker.',
'Pokemon GO gets ads - could be next big marketing tool for retailers: Pokemon GO, a mobile game that has rocketed to the top of Apple Inc and Android app stores in record time, looks set to challenge young internet companies which specialize in increasing foot traffic for small businesses and may end up playing a role in major brands\' marketing, according to industry experts. The augmented reality game from Japan\'s Nintendo Co Ltd, where players walk around real-life neighborhoods to hunt down virtual cartoon characters on their smartphone screens, has more than 65 million users in the United States just seven days after launch. That is more users than Twitter Inc, and the game is already helping local restaurants, coffee shops and small retailers to attract new customers. L\'inizio Pizza Bar in Long Island City in New York claims its sales jumped 75 percent over the weekend by activating a "lure module" feature that attracts virtual Pokemon characters to the store, thereby tempting in nearby players. The store\'s manager spent $10 to have a dozen Pokemon characters placed in the location, according to a report in the New York Post. That sort of instant effect is a potential threat for Groupon Inc, LivingSocial Inc, Foursquare and other relatively new companies which have revolutionized online marketing for small businesses in the last few years.',
'Zendesk s Automatic Answers taps machine learning, AI to generate bot-style email responses: Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we re seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today,Zendesk is taking the wraps off Automatic Answers , a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk s in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to as its name implies determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it s getting it right). Automatic Answers will work first in email because, as Zendesk s VP of product Sam Boonin tells me, Even in a world of customer services embedded in every communication channel from social to web to phone, email still represents the majority of interactions that are coming in. ',
'No more Tesla buyback guarantee as company cuts price of Model X: Tesla Motors Inc has ended a program that guaranteed the resale value of its cars, and lowered the starting price of its Model X crossover, the high-profile electric vehicle maker said on Wednesday. The discontinuation of the buyback program, as of July 1, allows Tesla to free up cash that had been set aside to buy back Model S cars after three years at a value of at least 50 percent of the base purchase price. The changes come after Tesla warned earlier this month it will miss its vehicle delivery target for a second consecutive quarter.It faces other challenges, including a regulatory investigation of its Autopilot technology following a May 7 fatal crash and more scrutiny of its financials after a proposed merger with SolarCity Corp. Within the next 12 months, Tesla has disclosed it could pay a maximum of $192.4 million to cover resale value guarantees on 4,209 vehicles. That amounts to a maximum liability of $45,711 per car, although Tesla could offset payouts by reselling repurchased vehicles. Tesla valued the total liability created by the resale value guarantee at $1.58 billion as of March 31, according to its latest quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, up over 20 percent since the end of 2015. The program, begun in 2013, was intended to help Tesla control its secondary market and reassure buyers purchasing vehicles using its novel technology that resale values wouldn\'t drop substantially. A Tesla spokesperson said the program was discontinued to "keep interest rates as low as possible and offer a compelling lease and loan program to customers." In effect, Tesla is now doing what most established auto makers do: allow market forces to set trade-in values.',
"EU-U.S. commercial data transfer pact enters into force: A new commercial data pact between the European Union and the United States entered into force on Tuesday, ending months of uncertainty over cross-border data flows, and companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft can sign up from Aug. 1. The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield will give businesses moving personal data across the Atlantic - from human resources information to people's browsing histories to hotel bookings - an easy way to do so without falling foul of tough EU data transferral rules. The previous such framework, Safe Harbour, was struck down by the EU's top court in October on the grounds that it allowed U.S. agents too much access to Europeans' data. Revelations three years ago from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden of mass U.S. surveillance practices caused political outrage in Europe and stoked mistrust of big U.S. tech companies. In the months that followed the EU ruling companies have had to rely on other more cumbersome mechanisms for legally transferring data to the United States. The Privacy Shield will underpin over $250 billion dollars of transatlantic trade in digital services annually. Google and Microsoft said they would sign up to the Privacy Shield and would work with European data protection authorities in case of inquiries. A person familiar with social network Facebook's thinking said the company had not yet decided whether to sign up.",
'Google just scored a bunch of new property to make its crazy dream campus come true: Google couldn t score LinkedIn s business. But it s getting LinkedIn s real estate. On Tuesday, the two companies announced a large, surprising property swap encompassing over three million square feet of existing and future real estate, including LinkedIn s corporate headquarters. The companies wouldn t share financial terms, but they said neither side paid a premium for the properties. From Google, LinkedIn is picking up seven buildings, a plan it said will consolidate its staff around its Sunnyvale and Mountain View Calif., offices. The company said the deal is unrelated to its recent Microsoft acquisition. In return, Google is getting LinkedIn s Mountain View headquarters office and far more critical for the internet giant four different surrounding properties that enable Google to follow through on its ambitious plan for a new, green, crazy-futurist campus. But here s the kernel: Google proposed the aforementioned crazy-futurist campus in early 2015. It was a big deal; the genius architect behind it got a magazine cover. Then LinkedIn spoiled the fun: Mountain View s city council voted last May to cede the property to LinkedIn, blocking Google s grand vision. But now the runway for Google is clear.',
'Amazon Says Prime Day Sales Up 30 Percent for Merchants: Amazon.com Inc. said Prime Day sales from third-party merchants surged 30 percent compared with a year earlier, fueled largely by international demand. While U.S. sales appeared to start slowly on Tuesday, hampered by technical glitches, the world s largest e-commerce company built momentum on the summertime promotion it created last year to entice shoppers to subscribe to its $99-a-year Amazon Prime membership. Led by strong growth internationally, we are seeing more than 30 percent increase over last year in the number of items sold by small businesses and sellers on Prime Day, Amazon said in an e-mail, reflecting sales as of 3 p.m. New York time. We are expecting a record day for small businesses and sellers on Amazon with many more deals to come today. Amazon also used Prime Day to push shoppers beyond physical goods by offering discounts on housecleaning through Amazon Home Services, restaurant delivery in several cities and on-demand video rentals for movies such as Kung Fu Panda 3 and Deadpool. Hot-selling items on Tuesday included pressure cookers and iRobot Roomba vacuums, according to the company.The event highlights the benefits of Prime membership, such as free two-day shipping on many items, which converts the occasional Amazon shopper into a devotee. Prime subscribers spend about $1,200 annually on the website, compared with $500 for non-subscribers, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners in Chicago. Amazon had 63 million Prime subscribers as of June 30, an increase of 43 percent from a year earlier, according to the research firm.',
"The non-gamer s guide to playing Pokemon Go: Pokemon Go is a full-blown phenomenon, with millions of downloads and excitement only growing after players got through their first weekend of being real-life Pokemon trainers. The game is heavy on fun but light on explanations -- particularly if you're so excited to start playing that you blitz through the opening tutorial. So maybe you've downloaded it, fired it up and then gotten, well, completely lost. If you're completely mystified by how this game actually works, here are some basics to get you out there and catching Pokemon in no time.Once you download the app, you'll be asked to sign in. You can sign in using an existing Google account. Or, if you're not so keen to connect your Pokemon identity to your Google identity, then you can also sign up with the Pokemon Trainer Club, which is an account with the Pokemon Co. From there, you design your character and pick your first Pokemon. Then you can get going! And you will have to actually get going. The whole selling point of the game is to walk around the real world to find the cute little critters. This not only encourages you to explore your own city, but also -- gasp! -- gets you outside and around other people. In fact, this is not really a game you can play while stationary. Sometimes Pokemon will come to you, but more often than not you have to go to them.",
'Twitter Falls After Analysts Downgrade Stock on Slow Growth View: Twitter Inc. slipped after analysts at two firms downgraded the stock, citing a lack of confidence in the company s direction and ability to capitalize on new products. "What is Twitter Quite frankly, we don t believe that question has been answered," said James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. in a note. "Barring any changes, Twitter was, is and will continue as a niche product." He downgraded the stock to the equivalent of hold from buy. Robert Peck, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey also lowered his rating on the stock to the equivalent of hold from buy. User growth and engagement for Twitter continue to be challenged, and we believe that increasing monetization can only go so far with limited new product introductions increasing competition (Snapchat!) and a challenging advertising background, Peck said in a note.The stock fell 2.6 percent to $17.61 at 10:16 a.m. in New York. The shares have declined about 50 percent over the past year, valuing the company at about $12.4 billion. Many analysts see the company as an inevitable takeover target some day, though not anytime soon. It s surely an upside risk to our new rating, but at this time we expect Twitter will have to navigate as a standalone company, Cakmak said.',
'The SEC is investigating whether Tesla should have told its investors about a fatal crash: The Securities Exchange Commission is opening an investigation into Tesla to determine whether the company should have told shareholders earlier about a fatal crash related to its autonomous driving tech, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Joshua Brown was killed on May 7 when his Tesla, operating in Autopilot mode, drove into a tractor-trailer that that was crossing the highway. Autopilot is a semi-autonomous driving technology that s a much more sophisticated version of cruise control. Weeks later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the accident to determine whether the technology worked as expected. This SEC probe, on the other hand, is not about the technology; it s about whether, under securities law, Tesla should have told its investors about the accident and when. A Tesla spokesperson said the company had not received any communication from the SEC as yet.) The results of the SEC probe will set a precedent for the auto industry as more automakers roll out their own versions of Autopilot. The 2017 Mercedes Benz E class will be equipped with semi-autonomous technology called Drive Pilot; Volvo s XC90 already has semi-autonomous technology called Pilot Assist; and General Motor s Super Cruise technology is expected to become available in the 2017 Cadillac CT6. Automakers typically don t disclose to investors every single accident in which their vehicles are involved. If, however, the SEC determines that Tesla should have disclosed this accident to its investors, that may all change.',
'Bezos Beats Buffett as Amazon Market Value Tops Berkshire: Amazon.com Inc., Jeff Bezos s online retailer, moved past Warren Buffett s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to become one of the world s five largest companies by market value on Monday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Amazon rose as high as $356.5 billion in the first two hours of trading. The company surpassed Berkshire on the day before Prime Day, an annual promotion.',
'What is Pok mon Go and why is everybody talking about it : This new Pok mon game is bringing augmented reality mainstream.It s a new mobile game, free on both iOS and Android, that lets you create an avatar that can catch, train, trade and battle Pok mon characters inside the game. That sounds familiar. Isn t that the premise of virtually every other Pok mon game Yes, kinda. What makes this game unique is that it uses your phone s location services and camera so that you can catch Pok mon in real life. That is, when you walk around the streets of whatever city or town you live in, your avatar moves inside the game. So finding new Pok mon and checkpoints for the game actually requires you to get off the couch and walk down the block. How does this work The game uses Google Maps technology to place your avatar on a virtual world that mirrors your real life surroundings. When you find a Pok mon, the game uses augmented reality (AR) to make it look like whatever Pok mon you ve stumbled across is indeed standing right there in front of you. Who created Pok mon Go Nintendo and the other creators of Pok mon teamed up with Niantic Labs to create the game. The former company was born inside Google; its founder, John Hanke, was a key leader of its Geo products (Google Maps, Earth). After moving to leave Google in 2010, Hanke was lured to stay with funding for Niantic, a skunkworks project to build mobile AR tools using Google Maps technology. Niantic s first effort, Ingress an augmented-reality, massively multiplayer, location-based online game cultivated a small but very dedicated following. Niantic spun out of Google in the fall, yet the search giant stayed involved, participating in a $30 million investment for developing Pok mon Go.',
"Nintendo shares surge on Pokemon mobile game hopes: Shares of Japan's Nintendo Co soared more than 20 percent in early Tokyo trading on Monday, extending last week's gains, on hopes that the popularity of its new Pokemon GO smartphone game will boost its results. Pokemon GO was launched in the United States last week and shot to the No. 1 free app in Apple Inc's U.S. iTunes store. It was also launched in Australia and New Zealand, and is expected to be rolled out in Japan soon. Nintendo shares were up 23.5 percent at 20,085 yen ($199.32) each after earlier rising as high as 20,190 yen, their highest since November.",
'Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos Is Barred From Running Lab for 2 Years: Federal regulators have barred Elizabeth Holmes, chief executive of Theranos, from owning or operating a medical laboratory for at least two years, raising new questions about the future of the embattled blood-testing start-up and its founder, once a Silicon Valley phenomenon. In a letter sent to Theranos that was made public on Friday, regulators said they were revoking the certification of its flagship laboratory in Newark, Calif., effective Sept. 5. They also said the laboratory would be prohibited from taking Medicare and Medicaid payments. The government scrutiny stemmed from questions about the effectiveness of Theranos s technology and the way the company operated its labs. The company faces a fine of $10,000 for every day it is out of compliance with regulations, effective July 12. Such stern sanctions are virtually unheard-of in my 40 years experience in the industry, said David Nichols, president of the Nichols Management Group, a consultant to and operator of clinical laboratories. I don t see a path forward for the company. What Theranos and Ms. Holmes will do next is not clear. The company said in its statement that it would continue to operate a laboratory it owns in Arizona, at least for now. But if the license of the California lab is indeed revoked, then Ms. Holmes and Theranos could not own or operate any laboratory, and the Arizona facility would also have to be shut, according to both Theranos and a spokesman for the regulator.',
"Japan's Line sets top price for up to $1.3 billion IPO: Line Corp set the price for its initial public offering at the top of its marketing range, raising up to $1.3 billion, a regulatory filing showed on Monday, reflecting robust appetite for the Japanese messaging app firm. The company set the IPO price at 3,300 yen per share, compared with its book-building range of 2,900-3,300 yen. It had initially set the range at 2,700-3,200 yen but bumped it up last week. Including an over-allotment arrangement, Line will sell up to 132.8 billion yen ($1.3 billion) of shares. Line, owned by South Korea's Naver Corp, plans to list in New York on July 14 and in Tokyo the following day.",
'Uber Is Said to Close $1.15 Billion High-Yield Leveraged Loan: Uber Technologies Inc. closed a $1.15 billion high-yield leveraged loan, a person familiar with the matter said, bringing the total equity and debt raised by the ride-hailing mobile app to more than $15 billion. Bloomberg reported last month that Uber was seeking to raise $1 billion to $2 billion in debt. Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. facilitated the deal. Creditors will receive about a 5 percent yield on the loan, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the terms aren t public.',
'Amazon s Audible Goes Long on Short-Form Audio: Amazon hopes to persuade people to pay for something they have traditionally enjoyed free: short-form audio. Audible, Amazon s audiobook and spoken-word subsidiary, on Thursday announced Channels, a subscription service that will offer a new library of audio, including original programs, articles read aloud and more. At $4.95 a month, it presents a lower-priced entry point to the service and significantly expands on Audible s core audiobook offering, while giving listeners more incentive to stick with the company. Channels will be free under Audible s traditional $14.95 monthly membership, which provides access to hundreds of thousands of programs and audiobooks.Roughly two out of five Audible customers listen to podcasts, he said. But those customers are not always satisfied with what they find. When you talk to those customers and you ask them about podcasting, they describe something that equally enthralls them and frustrates them, he said. In that frustration, Audible sees an opportunity. Similar programs, in the form of podcasts a label Audible resists as too narrow have traditionally been free, supported by advertising, sponsorships, user donations or support from media and radio organizations. That a subsidiary of a company as aggressive as Amazon would invest in such a service suggests that it anticipates a willingness among the public to pay for short-form audio.',
"India's $4 Smartphone Seems Too Good to Be True: A little-known Indian company called Ringing Bells Pvt is set to start shipping the Freedom 251. The prototype touts a quad-core processor, a 4-inch screen and front and back cameras - at the astonishingly low price of 251 rupees (less than $4). While global brands Samsung Electronics Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. sell devices for less than $100, the $4 smartphone is the one stirring up the internet-hungry, app-crazy hordes in a country where Apple Inc. has been unable to make a dent. With iPhones costing upwards of $700, Apple commands a mere 2 percent market share in a country where the World Bank puts the per capita income at $5,630. Brands can't make money even on $50 smartphones, so profiting from a $4 device is a ludicrous idea, say experts like Tarun Pathak, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Technology Market Research. While Micromax sells millions of cheap devices every month in smaller cities - it profits by taking advantage of economies of scale. Ringing Bells managing director Mohit Goel isn't counting on a profit from device sales, conceding that the company will lose hundreds of rupees on each unit, and is instead planning to recoup money through advertising and marketing deals. Goel has said the company is importing kits from Taiwan and assembling the phones in a factory in Haridwar near Delhi.Even at $4, the smartphone could still be out of reach for most because of scarcity. When Goel first announced Freedom 251 in February, the company said over 70 million jostled to register, crashing its website. Last week he said Ringing Bells will soon start shipping 200,000 smartphones to buyers picked by lottery. Other details were not available and e-mails, phone calls and text messages to Goel and his representatives in the past days went unanswered. Selling such a cheap device has attracted scrutiny along with the publicity. The prototype Freedom 251 presented to the media turned out to be produced by another manufacturer with its logos covered. Thwarted buyers protested outside the company s headquarters, setting off inquiries by the police and tax officials. Pankaj Mahindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association, with members including Apple and Samsung, said We are concerned and keeping a close watch. ",
'Another Tesla crash is under investigation to see if Autopilot is at fault: U.S. transportation regulators are opening a new probe of a Tesla car crash, one week afterannouncing an investigation into a fatal crash of a Tesla operating in the company s semi-autonomous driving mode. The new investigation involves a non-fatal crash on July 1 in Pennsylvania. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will try to determine if the Tesla s Autopilot functions were active at the time. The additional investigation will likely intensify scrutiny around the safety and design of Tesla s Autopilot product, which provides some self-driving features as a software update. ',
"Zomato's Results: For the year ending March 2016, Zomato posted revenues of Rs 87.5 crore for the India region, up from Rs 46 crore revenues in 2015. India accounted for 47.3% of Zomato's overall revenues that stood at 184.97 crore for FY16. The net loss for the India region however shot up to Rs 247 crore for the fiscal, up more than three times from Rs 62.3 crore loss in 2015. This is nearly half of Zomato's overall net loss of Rs 574.5 crore in FY16.In the US market that accounts for nearly 50% of its listings, the Gurugram-based company posted a net loss of Rs 327.5 crore on revenues of Rs 6.73 crore for the fiscal. This is a massive increase from Rs 33 crore on revenues of Rs 5.1 crore in 2015. Zomato had forayed into United States last year with the $52 million UrbanSpoon acquisition that was eventually folded into the company.In terms of segments, Online advertising still dominates Zomato's revenues, accounting for 91.4% of the company's overall revenues. The segment's revenues grew by 76.1% to Rs 169.1 crore for FY16, from Rs 96 crore in FY15. Revenues from online ordering was at Rs 7.5 crore for the fiscal, accounting for nearly 4% of the company's revenues. Goyal had recently said that 20% of its India revenues came from the ordering business in April this year. Subscription revenues grew to Rs 8.4 crore from Rs 0.64 crore in 2015. This includes revenues from its business app from restaurants and its Whitelabel platform among others.",
'Apple Drops to Fifth in China s Mobile Market as Locals Rise: Apple Inc. dropped to fifth place in Chinese smartphone shipments, losing ground in its biggest overseas market in a fresh blow for the technology giant. IPhones made up 10.8 percent of devices sold in May, down from 12 percent a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. By comparison, Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies Co. increased its lead with 17.3 percent. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has publicly touted the importance of China, where the company is combating a slowing domestic economy and local vendors with increasingly popular devices. The launch of the cheaper iPhone SE was meant to boost Apple s popularity in developing markets and Cook met with China s vice premier Liu Yandong in May. Instead, it has suffered commercial, legal and regulatory setbacks in recent months leading to lawsuits and key products getting shut down. Local brands Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi are now the top four smartphone makers in China with a combined market share of 53 percent, according to Counterpoint research director Neil Shah. Oppo almost doubled its market share to 11 percent. Apple s sales in Greater China, which also includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, fell 26 percent during the March quarter compared to a year earlier, amid a slowing market.',
'Samsung Set to Boost Spending as S7 Revives Smartphone Fortunes: After ending a two-year smartphone slide with the Galaxy S7, Samsung Electronics Co. could be about to hike capital spending to sustain a revival across the company. At least $5 billion more of investment is headed to the display and semiconductor businesses, according to a survey of analyst estimates, to help Samsung ride out bumps in the phone market. Such a move reflects new optimism about the company after the success of the Galaxy S7, with the shares rallying 17 percent this year. Samsung s smartphone business has finally had a soft landing after a bumpy ride, said Chung Chang Won, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Seoul. Samsung will probably boost spending on memory and displays, which are poised for a sudden rise as the next growth drivers. But with growth in the global smartphone market evaporating, it needs to build up its other major businesses as competitors bring out new products in an attempt to spark growth.',
'Tesla Falls After Paring Delivery Forecast Amid Factory Strains: Tesla Motors Inc. fell after the electric-car maker missed second-quarter forecast for global deliveries and lowered its full-year outlook, citing an extreme increase in output in the period s final month. The shares slid 3.3 percent to $209.40 at 9:35 a.m. New York time. They declined 9.8 percent this year through Friday. Deliveries of 14,370 vehicles trailed a projection of about 17,000, after an extreme production ramp came too late in the quarter to get the cars to their buyers, Tesla said Sunday. About half of the quarter s output in the final four weeks.The carmaker has had trouble getting its vehicles to customers fast enough to meet its targets even after increasing production. Tesla said 5,150 cars were still on trucks and ships making their way to clients who ordered them, and will be delivered in the first part of this quarter. Tesla is increasing output at its Fremont, California, factory with an eye toward making 500,000 cars a year by 2018 -- an ambitious timeline that also depends on the carmaker s battery factory east of Reno, Nevada, coming online with battery-cell production. Tesla missed its deliveries forecast for the second time in a row this year. In the first quarter, the company blamed the shortfall on hubris in adding in too much new technology that led to part shortages for the Model X.',
'BookMyShow secures $81.5 mn from Stripes Group, others: Movie ticketing platform BookMyShow has raised Rs 550 crore ($81.5 million) from existing and new investors in one of the largest funding rounds for an Indian consumer Internet firm in recent months. BookMyShow s Mumbai-based parent Bigtree Entertainment Pvt Ltd. said on Tuesday it raised the Series C funding round from investors led by New York-based investment firm Stripes Group. Existing investors Network 18, Accel Partners and SAIF Partners also took part in this round. This round takes the total amount the company has raised to $128 million (Rs 863 crore), making it one of the most heavily funded firms in the media and entertainment sector. The company last raised $25 million (Rs 150 crore) from SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Network18 in 2014.The latest funding round values the Indian company at $445 million (Rs 3,000 crore), The Economic Times reported citing company sources.The latest funding round values the Indian company at $445 million (Rs 3,000 crore), The Economic Times reported citing company sources.',
'Five days of Etsy payment processing outages have merchants flipping: Those hoping to snag some handmade July 4th cookies and home-made vegan sunblockmight have woken up to an empty stomach and sunburn after a serious payment processing outage on e-commerce site Etsy. Over the last five days, a large number of Etsy transactions have been disrupted by third party payment processing outages. As of 6pm PST July 5th, over 4,000 messages of frustration have been posted in the company s Bugs Community Forum. After the Direct Checkout outage, many merchants were left with their hands in their laps explaining delays to buyers. The outage is especially tough for sellers who have to face angry customers. It s all too easy for an unhappy buyer to blame the seller in a negative review for an outage out of their control.',
'How AWS came to be: There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago,Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion run rate. What you may not know is that the roots for the idea of AWS go back to the 2000 timeframe when Amazon was a far different company than it is today simply an e-commerce company struggling with scale problems. Those issues forced the company to build some solid internal systems to deal with the hyper growth it was experiencing and that laid the foundation for what would become AWS. Speaking recently at an event in Washington, DC, AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who has been there from the beginning, explained how these core systems developed out of need over a three-year period beginning in 2000, and, before they knew it, without any real planning, they had the makings of a business that would become AWS. It began way back in the 2000 timeframe when the company wanted to launch an e-commerce service called Merchant.com to help third-party merchants like Target or Marks & Spencer build online shopping sites on top of Amazon s e-commerce engine. It turned out to be a lot harder than they thought to build an external development platform, because, like many startups, when it launched in 1994, it didn t really plan well for future requirements. Instead of an organized development environment, they had unknowingly created a jumbled mess. That made it a huge challenge to separate the various services to make a centralized development platform that would be useful for third parties.At that point, the company took its first step toward building the AWS business by untangling that mess into a set of well-documented APIs. While it drove the smoother development of Merchant.com, it also served the internal developer audience well, too, and it set the stage for a much more organized and disciplined way of developing tools internally going forward.',
'Salesforce Pushed Microsoft to Up LinkedIn Bid Before Deal: Salesforce.com Inc. battled Microsoft Corp. for LinkedIn Corp. deep into the negotiating process, forcing the world s largest software maker to boost its offer to buy the professional-networking service just days before the $26 billion deal was announced. Three other companies were involved in the discussions, which lasted almost four months, according to a regulatory filing Friday. One of those was Facebook Inc., which passed on an acquisition, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Microsoft increased its offer to $196 a share June 11, from $182 a share earlier, after the other main bidder offered "approximately $200" a share for the company, the filing said. The board ultimately decided the Microsoft offer was stronger in part because it was an all-cash deal, while the other bidder was offering to pay with its stock and cash, the filing said.There were other companies that expressed interest in acquiring LinkedIn, or were involved in the process. Those were referred to as Parties B, C and D in the filing. Recode reported Friday that Party B was Google, the internet search business of Alphabet Inc., and Party D was Facebook, operator of the largest social network.',
"Tesla crash raises concerns about autonomous vehicle regulation: The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S in Autopilot mode has turned up pressure on auto industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology is deployed safely. The first such known accident, which occurred in Florida in May, has highlighted tensions surrounding efforts to turn over responsibility for braking, steering and driving judgments to machines. It may delay the U.S. government's plan to outline guidelines for self-driving cars this month. The cause of the Model S crash is still under investigation by federal and Florida state authorities, which are looking into whether the driver was distracted before his 2015 Model S went under a truck trailer. Shares of Tesla and Mobileye NV, the maker of the camera vision system used in the Model S, rose on Friday as analysts said the accident was likely a short-term setback. The stocks fell in after-hours trading on Thursday after an investigation of the crash was made known.",
'Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable: Don t think companies haven t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service, Mr. Robbins said. Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you re hearing messages like, If you d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately. The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support.Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple s customer support service, AppleCare, and theAmazon Prime subscription service.',
'Zenefits halves its previous valuation to $2B to head off investor lawsuits: Zenefits is executing a change in its current ownership structure that will increase the overall ownership of the company for late-stage investors; it s a move that revalues the company s Series C round at $2 billion and looks to placate investor concerns over the company s regulatory investigations. As part of accepting the new ownership changes, the investors participating will sign a release of claims against the company. It s another move that new CEO David Sacks is doing in what s been a massive cleanup effort of the company following report after report of the company skirting insurance regulation. Since all those regulatory issues came to light, the company has laid off more than 350 employees and parted ways with its former CEO Parker Conrad. The biggest issue stemmed from a program called The Macro that would aid in circumventing state licensing requirements.All this is basically a way to reset expectations for investors, as well as try to retain employees following the changes in the company s ownership structure. Shareholders were kept in the dark in relation to the existence and use of The Macro, which required a reset of the relationship. Zenefits grew like a rocket ship, reaching a $4.5 billion valuation in just about two years after the company started. That, at the time, labeled the company as one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups ever but, obviously, there was a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes to pad that growth.',
'Apple is in exploratory talks to acquire Tidal, the streaming music service run by Jay-Z, the Wall Street Journal reports. Recode has confirmed that the companies are discussing a deal. The fact that Tidal, which has been shopping itself for some time, is now talking to a buyer with incredibly deep pockets and a streaming service is not a surprise. One thing seems certain: This is a different situation from when Tim Cook, Eddy Cue and companypaid $3 billion for Beats two years ago. Then, it was acquiring several executives, including Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, plus the Beats Music team and a hardware business that was selling lots of expensive headphones. Tidal, on the other hand, has much less to offer: Tidal has about four million paying subscribers, according to the WSJ. (For context, Apple Music has 15 million.) Those can t automatically be moved over to Apple Music, but Apple should be able to persuade many of them to come over. It has whatever Jay-Z brings to the table for consumer marketing and artist relationships. Perhaps most importantly, a deal would take Tidal off the market as a competitor for artist exclusives, which have created much of its buzz. This presumably means Apple wouldn t have to worry about not being able to stream the new Beyonc album, for example. (Though Tidal s artist and label deals will likely expire upon acquisition, as is typical.) Apple also probably doesn t have much competition for this deal, so it would be in a strong position. Samsung, the most logical buyer, walked away from its earlier talks with Tidal, according to a source close to the deal. Spotify can t afford it. Google, which also owns a streaming service, could possibly also be interested for similar reasons as Apple. All this is worth something, but not a ton.',
'Oracle ordered to pay HP $3 billion in Itanium case: A California jury ordered Oracle to pay Hewlett-Packard $3 billion in damages in a case over HP\'s Itanium servers, an Oracle spokeswoman said on Thursday. Oracle said it would appeal the verdict. The Itaniuum processor is made by Intel. Oracle decided to stop developing software for use with HP\'s Itanium-based servers in 2011, saying that Intel made it clear that the chip was nearing the end of its life and was shifting its focus to its x86 microprocessor. But HP said it had an agreement with Oracle that support for Itanium would continue, without which the equipment using the chip would become obsolete."HP is gratified by the jury\'s verdict, which affirms what HP has always known and the evidence overwhelmingly showed," John Schultz, executive vice president and general counsel of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in an e-mailed statement, saying that Oracle\'s decision to stop the software development "was a clear breach of contract."',
'Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family: For years, Facebook has courted publishers of all sizes, asking them to depend more and more on the social media giant to expand their audiences. Now, Facebook has a new message for publishers: Tamp down your expectations. Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to make a series of changes to its news feed algorithm so that it will more favorably promote content posted by the friends and family of users. The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook. The move underscores the never-ending algorithm-tweaking that Facebook undertakes to maintain interest in its news feed, the company s marquee feature that is seen by more than 1.65 billion users every month. It is also a reminder that while Facebook is vastly important to the long-term growth of news media companies, from older outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to upstarts like BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox Media, publishers rank lower on Facebook s list of priorities.',
"Landing with a bump Germany's Rocket falls back to earth: When German e-commerce investor Rocket Internet launched Jumia in 2012 as a would-be African Amazon, it was optimistic that a rapidly expanding middle class would quickly shift from street markets to shopping online. Four years on, falling sales for sites like Jumia and slower growth from Nigeria to Russia and Brazil is casting doubt on Rocket Internet's ambition to become the world's biggest Internet company outside the United States and China. Jumia made a loss of 17 million euros ($18.8 million) in the first three months of 2016 on sales that fell more than a third. The devaluation of Nigeria's naira last week is a new blow for Jumia, which now operates in more than 20 countries in Africa. Revenue growth has also slowed at most of Rocket Internet's other 11 leading start-ups, ranging from furniture e-commerce and food delivery in Europe to online fashion in markets from India to Latin America and the Middle East. That is the consequence of Rocket's shift to rein in spending on marketing and logistics as it seeks to stem losses which it said peaked at 1 billion euros in 2015. As a result, shareholders have cast doubt on the valuation Rocket has put on its portfolio and questioned the strategy of sending business school graduates to set up 150 start-ups in more than 110 countries in just a few years. Exclusive interviews with shareholders reveal growing scepticism about Rocket's sprawling empire as emerging markets sour and technology stocks cool. Its share price has fallen 39 percent this year.",
'Google Capital Makes First Public Company Investment in Care.com. Shares in Care.com Inc soared 18 percent in extended trading, after the home care provider announced a $46.35 million investment from Google Capital, the growth equity arm of Alphabet Inc. Google Capital s investment makes it the largest shareholder in Care.com, and Laela Sturdy, a partner at the fund, will join the company s board, Care.com said Wednesday in a statement. The company provides child, adult, senior, pet and home-care services and had a market capitalization of $276 million as of Wednesday. Google Capital was founded in 2013 and has invested in numerous private companies. It pairs its companies with advisers spread across Alphabet, and in the last six months has tapped 300 different people to give advice to its companies, Sturdy said. This deal marks its first investment in a public company.Care.com said it used a portion of the Google Capital investment to repurchase 3.7 million shares of its common stock from Matrix Partners at a price of $8.25 per share, a 5 percent discount to the 30-day volume-weighted average price. It also issued a new series of convertible preferred stock to Google Capital at an initial conversion price of $10.50 per share. Dividends on the stock will accrue at 5.5 percent annually, the company said. Matrix had been an investor since 2006 and wanted to make some divestments, so it was a good time to do a buyback, said Sheila Marcelo, Care.com chairwoman and chief executive officer. It helps us reduce pressure on our stock, she said.',
'It s official: Kleiner just pulled off a $1.4 billion fundraise: So much for losing its mojo. Despite twists and turns in recent years that have sometimes rivaled those of a telenovela, and even with its most famous member, John Doerr, no longer a general partner, Kleiner Perkins has raised two new funds totaling $1.4 billion, show newly processed SEC filings. The firm s digital growth fund its third has secured $1 billion in commitments. The capital will be managed by Mary Meeker, Ted Schlein, Mood Rowghani and Noah Knauf, who very recently joined Kleiner from Warburg Pincus. Kleiner s newest (17th!) early-stage fund, meanwhile, has closed with $400 million in commitments. As you ve read here recently, Kleiner s early-stage team now features five general partners: Schlein, Mike Abbott, Eric Feng, Beth Seidenberg and Wen Hsieh.',
'Lyft Tells Investors to Expect No Growth in Rides for June: Lyft Inc. may be hitting a wall in its war with its richer competitor. Lyft told investors in a recent memo obtained by Bloomberg that it expects the number of rides it handles to be flat or down in June, compared with May. That follows a record month for rides in May. Lyft expects to beat its target for second-quarter ride volume by 35 percent, Lyft told its investors. "This implies June will be flat to slightly down from the record May level given we face traditional seasonality headwinds in June as most college students leave their campuses for the summer," the note said. "Additionally, June represents the first full month without Austin, after pausing operations in the city in May." (Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, Texas, after the city passed legislation that would require them to conduct fingerprinted background checks on their drivers.) One Lyft investor told Bloomberg that, given the company s heavy losses, if Lyft could sell itself for $5.5 billion -- the value of the company at its latest valuation -- that would be an acceptable price. Qatalyst could also help the startup sell a stake, rather than the whole business. The company also said in the memo that it reached a nearly $1.9 billion annual revenue run rate based on its performance in May. In November, it touted a $1 billion run rate. Revenue run rates apply monthly figures to a 12-month period. Investors use them to gauge the potential for growing businesses.While Lyft expects to lose hundreds of millions this year, Uber has lost money on a much larger scale. In three quarters last year Uber lost $1.7 billion. The company has committed to spending billions in China and India, and Uber has continued to subsidize rides against its global competitors like Didi Chuxing and Ola. Like Lyft, as a private company, Uber s financials are private.',
'Airbnb s new funding round makes it the second-most valuable startup in the United States: Last year, Airbnb raised $1.5 billion at a $25.5 billion valuation. Earlier this month, the companyraised $1 billion in debt financing. And now, sources close to the company tell Recode, Airbnb is currently raising an undisclosed amount of cash at a $30 billion valuation. Such a deal would make Airbnb the second-most valuable startup in the United States, trailing only the $62.5 billion Uber. The New York Times first reporteddetails of Airbnb s latest round. With all the new money, Airbnb plans to grow its global operation. Bloomberg has previously reported that the company plans to add booking features later this year for things beyond short-term home rentals (think museums, restaurants, etc.). In the meantime, Airbnb is being kept busy on the legal front. Earlier this week the company filed suit against the city of San Francisco for imposing stiff penalties on home rental registration rules that Airbnb helped write. The company is also locked in a battle with the New York government, where state legislatorsrecently passed a bill that would further restrict the company s listings.',
'Amazon Expands Items on Dash Buttons as Order Rate Doubles: Amazon.com Inc. has added more than 50 new brands to its Dash Button service for instantly reordering everyday items, citing a doubling in the frequency of orders over the last three months. After introducing the WiFi-connected plastic tabsthat can be mounted to the fridge, washing machine or kitchen cupboard in 2015, the online retailing giant has steadily increased the number of brands available for replenishment to more than 150, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. Amazon also expanded its product categories to include toys, such as Play-Doh and NERF darts and added new items like Campbell s Soup and Cascade dishwashing soap. Members of Amazon Prime, which offers free two-day delivery on many items, are placing orders at a pace of more than twice a minute, Amazon said, up from once a minute three months ago. Total orders increased more than 70 percent in the last three months.',
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'Lyft Is Said to Hire Qatalyst as Uber s Rival Explores Deals: Lyft Inc., the second-largest U.S. ride-hailing startup, is working with Qatalyst Partners LP to explore deal options, said a person familiar with the matter. Qatalyst, an investment bank founded by Wall Street veteran Frank Quattrone, has orchestrated high-profile sales of technology companies. Lyft and Qatalyst declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal, which earlier reported the hiring, said Quattrone has contacted large automakers about buying a stake in Lyft. In January, Lyft said General Motors invested $500 million into the San Francisco company. Lyft, which was last valued at $5.5 billion, has been overshadowed by Uber. While Lyft only operates in the U.S., it has teamed up with China s Didi Chuxing and other global ride-hailing companies to form an alliance to take on Uber.',
'JD.com Loses Luster as Hedge Funds Backpedal Amid Slowing Growth:JD.com Inc., the Chinese online retailer that a year ago was a favorite among hedge fund managers including Tiger Management LLC s Julian Robertson, is quickly losing its allure. The U.S.-traded stock has plunged 37 percent this year, wiping out almost $17 billion in market value. The number of shares borrowed for short selling touched a record on June 15 after more than doubling in less than a month. Hedge funds including Tiger and Lone Pine Capital have been bailing out. The turnaround comes as China s slowing economy and intensifying e-commerce competition crimp the company s expansion. With sales growth flagging, investors are increasingly questioning when, or even if, the 12-year-old company will ever become profitable.After revenue more than quadrupled over the past three years, the shortcomings of the country s second-largest e-commerce company are now being laid bare by China s slowing consumption. JD.com s self-owned inventory and logistics have helped it grab market share by offering authentic products and speedy shipping. That model, similar to Amazon.com Inc. s, also has driven up costs and led to operating losses as the company builds warehouses and employs more than 59,000 delivery staff, more than the total number of employees of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., its larger Chinese competitor.The stock slump has deepened since May 9, when JD.com said first-quarter revenue growth fell to 47 percent, from 57 percent the previous period. Its loss widened to 10 cents per share, from 8 cents a year earlier. The company warned that revenue may increase as little as 40 percent in the second quarter.',
'Amazon Unveils Online Education Service for Teachers: Just ahead of the back-to-school season, Amazon plans to make a major foray into the education technology market for primary and secondary schools, a territory that Apple, Google and Microsoft have heavily staked out. Monday morning, Amazon said that it would introduce an online marketplace with tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials for teachers in late August or early September. Called Amazon Inspire, the education site has features that may seem familiar to frequent Amazon shoppers. Search bar at the top of the page Check. User reviews Check. Star ratings for each product Check. By starting out with a free resources service for teachers, Amazon is establishing a foothold that could expand into a one-stop shopping marketplace not just for paid learning materials, but for schools wider academic and institutional software needs, said Tory Patterson, co-founder of Owl Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in ed tech start-ups. Amazon is joining other tech industry giants in a push to expand the use of technology in the public schools. Last year, primary and secondary schools in the United States spent $4.9 billion on tablet, laptop and desktop computers, according to a report by Linn Huang, a research director at the International Data Corporation, a market research firm known as IDC. Schools bought 10.8 million Apple, Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows devices in 2015, he said. Because its devices tend to cost more, Apple accounted for the largest slice of school computer sales, amounting to $2.2 billion, Mr. Huang said. By volume, however, Chromebooks the inexpensive laptops that run on Google s Chrome operating system have taken schools by storm, accounting for more than five million devices bought last year, he said. Even so, ed tech industry analysts said the growing market for digital educational materials, which Amazon is entering, is likely to prove much more valuable over time than the school computer market.',
'Brexit Pounds Some Technology Companies: Online marketplace operator EBay sank as much as 8.2 percent on Friday, outpacing declines by the wider U.S. equity market as analysts singled it out for its large exposure to the U.K. and Germany. Chipmaker ARM, based in Cambridge, U.K., gained as much as 6.8 percent on calculations that a weaker British pound will make its repatriated earnings more valuable. The pound sank more than 8 percent against the U.S. currency Friday, to its lowest level in 30 years. The U.S. dollar rose 2 percent against a basket of foreign currencies tracked by Bloomberg. A strong dollar hurts mainly when proceeds from goods and services sold in foreign currencies are exchanged into dollars. That can also make it more expensive to buy U.S. tech products. EBay has the most significant exposure among U.S. internet companies to the U.K. and Europe, according a report by Needham & Co. The disruption caused by Britain s exit from the EU and currency fluctuations could slow cross-border transactions on online marketplaces. "EBay gets 31 percent of revenue from U.K. and Germany, more than Google or Amazon," said Needham analyst Kerry Rice. "This really impacts cross-border trade more than anything. It could shift spending behavior if currency fluctuations make a purchase cost-prohibitive." ARM investors were quick to turn to its own calculations on the impact of currency moves and bet on an increase in profit. The company, which licenses chip technology and designs, gets more than a third of its sales from the U.S., 19 percent from China and another 25 percent from Taiwan and South Korea. Singapore and Switzerland supply it with more revenue than its home market at around 3 percent each, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. According to a company presentation from April, more than 95 percent of ARM s sales are in dollars. A 10 percent move in the value of the pound against the dollar moves earnings per share by 15 percent, it said. That suggests the recent drop in the British currency could boost profit by about 10 percent for the rest of this year.',
'China Tightens Internet Rules for Baidu and Other Search Engines: Chinese authorities will require Baidu Inc. and other search engines to report banned content and verify advertisers qualifications in its latest attempt at Internet regulation. Under rules to take effect Aug. 1, search engines operating in the country will be prohibited from providing banned information in various formats including links, summaries, cached pages, associative words, related searches and relevant recommendations, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement. They will also be required to report websites and applications that contain prohibited content when spotted, the regulator said. Baidu, China s biggest search engine, has been criticized recently for misleading users with search results. The Cyberspace Administration launched aninvestigation earlier this year after the death of Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old computer science major, who sought out a controversial treatment advertised among search results. Baidu said it would restrict the number of sponsored posts to 30 percent of a results page and establish a 1 billion yuan ($151 million) fund to fight fraud after the death of the student.',
'Line, the biggest tech IPO of the year, struggles to show its growth plan can work: In delaying its IPO by two years, Japanese messaging app company Line Corp bought time to correct weak financial reporting controls, work on its business plan, bolster staffing - and left billions of dollars on the table as its valuation shriveled. Line\'s initial public offering in the next three weeks is set to raise about $1 billion, which given a global drought of such deals could make it the biggest tech listing this year, but skeptical fund managers point to tepid growth in Line\'s home market and doubts about its prospects for regional expansion. They also question whether its advertising revenue strategy will work. Fund managers who have watched Line\'s growth slow in a crowded global messaging app market assess the plan with caution. "I\'m not interested," said Yasuo Sakuma, portfolio manager at Bayview Asset Management, which manages 270 billion yen ($2.64 billion). "Its growth outlook is very poor." "Among the four countries that it\'s focusing on, only Indonesia has big room for growth in use," he added. "Even there, the business outlook is not that easy." Growth in Line\'s monthly active users has tailed off after tripling across the world over the past three years. Last year, user numbers rose just 13 million to 218 million at the end of March, the IPO filing showed. The company isn\'t providing much visibility about the future either - it says in its filing that limited operating history makes it "difficult" to forecast future results. "I went to the company\'s meeting with investors... but nothing moved me," said a fund manager at a major Japanese asset management firm who declined to be named because of company rules against discussing individual shares. "It\'s not clear how it can make money out of its advertisement business." Line\'s likely valuation is far less than the $10 billion-$20 billion that was expected by investors when South Korean parent Naver Corp previously talked of a Line listing in 2013-2014, although Line may not have had much choice but to wait.',
'Twilio, a Cloud-Based Business, Soars After Its IPO: Shares of Twilio, a maker of software that helps companies like Uber and Nordstrom communicate with their customers, soared 92 percent on Thursday, their first day of trading after becoming the largest technology initial public offering of stock so far this year. Twilio began trading in a market that has not been receptive to tech initial offerings. Only three technology companies have made their debuts so far in 2016.The company said on Wednesday that it had raised $150 million, pricing 10 million shares at $15 each, above the range it marketed to investors. The I.P.O. price yielded a market valuation of $1.2 billion, slightly higher than the $1.1 billion valuation Twilio received in a private funding round a year ago. Twilio, based in San Francisco, has been hailed as a trailblazer compared with the almost 170 unicorns companies with valuations above $1 billion that have chosen to stay private for now. Twilio was a test of investor receptivity to the software company s finances, which show 88 percent revenue growth over last year but consistent net losses. As markets became more uncertain, investors preferred that companies going public turn a profit. Twilio had $167 million in revenue last year from about 25,000 active customer accounts. WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Facebook, represented 17 percent of that revenue.',
"InMobi, fined $1m for tracking users, had fine reduced based on 'company's financial condition': Mobile advertising network InMobi has been fined $950,000 by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for tracking the locations of millions of consumers, including children, without their knowledge or consent. InMobi was subject to a $4-million civil penalty, but it was reduced to $950,000 based on the company's financial condition. In addition, the company will be required to delete all information it collected from children, and will be prohibited from further violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).",
'BlackBerry Rises on Profit Forecast After More Software Gains: BlackBerry Ltd. rose as much as 4.6 percent after forecasting better-than-expected profit and insisting there was a way to make its ever-shrinking phone business profitable again. Fiscal first-quarter earnings per share, excluding some items, broke even, compared with analysts average estimate of a loss of 7 cents. Revenue in the quarter was $424 million, including software and services revenue of $166 million that was 21 percent higher than the same period last year ($137 million). Analysts had estimated total revenue of $471 million. BlackBerry changed its reporting structure to include revenue from both smartphone sales and licensing deals. The new unit -- mobility solutions -- accounted for 36 percent of revenue. The company sold 500,000 devices in the quarter, compared with 600,000 in the previous quarter. Shares gained 2.4 percent to $6.90 at 9:57 a.m., after reaching as high as $7.05 in New York in Thursday.',
'Uber switches out surge for price transparency: No more pop-ups asking you to agree to those murky 2.1x (or some other x amount) surge fares on the Uber app. Soon Uber will just tell you the price of your ride up front. Uber pricing will still fluctuate with demand, but now you ll know the dollar amount you ll be paying for the ride, instead; no math and no surprises, says Uber. The new costs are calculated similarly to the old x surge pricing so you might still end up paying a ridiculous sum in certain places or times of day where demand for a ride home is going to be high. The price is based on expected time, distance, traffic, the number of riders requesting rides at that time and the number of drivers available nearby, but at least now you ll know exactly how much of a punch the ride will make to your bank account. Uber will also allow either the driver or rider to update the app if you change your destination in the middle of the ride and says you ll get a notification in the app with the change in price. The rideshare company also told me you won t have to worry if your Uber driver goes way off the map and tries to charge you more or if the route is suddenly busy and they need to change course. The price you agreed on will still be the price you pay. So no more lightning bolts and pop-up screens asking you to agree to 3x surge or whatever it is after you stumble out of the bar or head all the way across town. Just like with hotels and airfare, the prices change all the time, but you ll know what the price is before you book. According to Uber, hundreds of thousands of riders have already received the pricing transparency rollout including those in Miami, San Diego, Seattle, New Jersey, New York and some of the bigger cities in India like Mumbai and Hyderabad. Uber plans to roll out the changes to pricing in the app globally in the next few months.',
'Clash of Clans May Spur Tencent s Marvel-Like Aspirations: Tencent is spending $8.6 billion to gain control of Supercell Oy -- the Finnish maker of mobile games including Hay Day, Clash Royale and Boom Beach -- from SoftBank Group Corp. To see how that portfolio may fit into Tencent s emerging entertainment empire, look at how the Chinese company leveraged World of Warcraft and League of Legends into global powerhouses.League of Legend s 67 million monthly users helped Tencent earn $9 billion in game revenue last year, and the Tencent-backed movie Warcraft is setting box-office records in China since this month s release. Acquiring Supercell reinforces Tencent s entertainment aspirations against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc., and comes after Tencent bought the rights to 300-plus Japanese anime franchises in a push to become a worldwide multimedia brand like Marvel, DC and Disney. Tencent has taken on a strategy to convert good IPs into movies and anime, said Mark Tanner, founder of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based research and marketing agency. It s creating a world of superhero characters for entertainment. Supercell occupied the top spot on researcher App Annie s rankings of publishers fortwo years running. Clash of Clans was named an essential app by Apple Inc. and was promoted during the 2015 Super Bowl in a commercial featuring Academy Award-nominee Liam Neeson. Yet the game hasn t been among the 10 top-grossing apps in China and Japan s iOS Store since 2015, which is where Tencent s clout can help.The company s QQ and WeChat instant messaging apps have more than a billion users combined, and it could use those apps to promote Supercell games, Tanner said. That distribution system helped Tencent s mobile-game revenue increase 16 percent to 8.2 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in the quarter ending March 31, compared with the previous three months. China s mobile gaming market expected to reach 68.8 billion yuan by 2018. We do see there s an opportunity for IPs of games and movies and video to cross and splice with each other, in the right way, Martin Lau, Tencent s president, said during a conference call Tuesday.',
"Okta hires Goldman Sachs to lead IPO or sale: Okta Inc, a U.S. cloud identity management company valued at $1.2 billion in its latest private fundraising round, has hired Goldman Sachs Group to lead an initial public offering or outright sale, people familiar with the matter said. Okta's exploration of both an IPO and a sale underscores the dilemma faced by several technology companies this year, as frothy stock market valuations of many of their peers begin to come down, prompting potential buyers to enter the fray. Okta could file for an IPO as early as the second half of this year, the people said this week. However, the San Francisco-based company has also held talks with technology peers about being acquired, and could pursue a sale if it believes it can fetch a significantly higher valuation than in an IPO, the people added.Okta helps companies organize passwords and authenticate the identity of employees who log into work applications made by other software firms. Its customers include satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp and hospitality company MGM Resorts International. Okta has raised a total of roughly $230 million to date with investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures, Janus Capital Group and Altimeter Capital.",
'Twilio prices its IPO at $15 per share, above its previous target: Twilio today said it would price its initial public offering at $15 per share, which would value the company at around $1.23 billion. That would value Twilio above its previous $1 billion valuation from its last financing round. With the pricing, the company expects to raise around $150 million, with an option for another 1.5 million shares to be purchased. It s also a higher price than the $12-$14 per share price that the company previously targeted. Twilio s IPO will be an important one given the drought of tech IPOs this year. Anxiety has gripped many startups that have hit unicorn status given the complete lack of tech IPOs for 2016 (Twilio will only be the third of the year). The hope, for many startups, is that Twilio will re-open the tech IPO window with a strong showing after trading begins tomorrow. If that happens, it might convince investors that many startups that have hit frothy valuations have come back in line with reality, and these companies could be good investment targets if they choose to go public. Twilio is not profitable, with the company reporting a net loss of $35.5 million on $166.9 million in revenue last year. But it s showing strong revenue growth, with the company bringing in $88.8 million in revenue from 2014. In total, Twilio has raised more than $200 million in venture financing, with Bessemer Venture Partners owning the largest chunk of the company at 28.5 percent per its last IPO filing. Twilio is expected to start trading tomorrow, and we ll see whether or not the appetite for tech IPOs will be coming back with its performance.',
'Tesla offers $2.8 billion for SolarCity in \'no brainer\' deal for Musk: Tesla s stock drove off a cliff after the SolarCity bid was announced, and Elon Musk and his family could stand to gain $700 million in Tesla shares from SolarCity deal: Elon Musk on Tuesday sought to build a clean energy powerhouse as his electric car maker, Tesla Motors , made an offer to buy his solar installation firm SolarCity Corp in a stock deal worth as much as $2.8 billion. Tesla shares plunged more than 13 percent to $189.99 in extended trading - amounting to a loss in value of about $4.3 billion, or more than the value of the offer for the other company. Shares of SolarCity rose about 18 percent to $25.02. Musk, who is the chairman of SolarCity, CEO of Tesla and the largest shareholder of both companies, described the deal as a "no brainer" in a call with reporters. Tesla investors punished the company\'s shares, however. Musk, who owns 19 percent of Tesla and 22 percent of SolarCity, said he would recuse himself from voting on the deal. He could not say how soon shareholders could vote on the deal, as due diligence needs to take place first. SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, Musk\'s first cousin, said he supported the deal but would also recuse himself from voting. Rive\'s brother, Peter, is also a founder of the company and its chief technology officer.',
'SoftBank President Nikesh Arora Plans to Step Down: A former Google executive and Silicon Valley star was on course to be the next chief executive of SoftBank of Japan, one of the world s most prominent technology conglomerates. Now he is leaving, in an abrupt shakeout that shows cracks in SoftBank s global ambitions. When the executive, Nikesh Arora, was poached two years ago from a coveted role as Google s head of business operations, the hire was widely considered a coup for SoftBank. Its billionaire founder and chief executive, Masayoshi Son, crowned Mr. Arora heir apparent. Mr. Arora was vaunted for his deal-making prowess and seen as an international executive who would help transform SoftBank with a flurry of investments. One of Mr. Son s most cherished ambitions was to turn SoftBank, a Japanese business with some notable overseas names like the American carrier Sprint, into a truly global enterprise. The honeymoon did not last.Investors have criticized Mr. Arora recently for his record of managing SoftBank s overseas deals. Investments in start-ups like DramaFever and Housing.com, these shareholders have said, appear to have soured as the companies have faltered. And the carefully orchestrated succession plan or what appeared to be has collapsed. Mr. Son decided he was not ready to give up the reins soon. Mr. Son, 58, said in a statement that he still wanted to work on a few more crazy ideas at SoftBank. Mr. Son cited differences over when Mr. Arora would take over as chief executive as the reason he had agreed to step down. Mr. Arora, who was born in India, holds the titles of president and chief operating officer. This will require me to be C.E.O. for at least another five to 10 years this is not a time frame for me to keep Nikesh waiting for the top job, Mr. Son said. Mr. Arora, 48, also presented the parting as amicable. Masa and I are still in love with each other, he posted on Twitter. I will support everyone I invested in, and they know that. ',
'VR is the future of porn, and it s a creepy future indeed: This got real weird, real fast. And not just because I was demoing the technology in the middle of the E3 floor, surrounded by fellow show-goers. It s just well, even after all the explainers in the world, it s hard to sufficiently brace your mind for all that virtual reality porn entails. It occupied a small space, tucked in the rear of the LA Convention Center, but Naughty America may just have had the one booth capable of rivaling Nintendo s for sheer show buzz. We must have walked by the thing a dozen times during our three days on the floor, and there was always a small army of show-goers lined up to take it for a spin. Much like, say, your standard first-person shooter, the technology is built around a POV (point-of-view) shot, putting the viewer in the place of the camera. The effect is already a bit jolting (and, at times nausea-inducing) in standard VR, but all of that really goes next level when you look down and you ve swapped your bits and bobs with someone else s. The company s demo cycles through a few short clips, in which the scenery, scenarios and co-stars change, but, well, the view pretty much stays the same. It s hard to say how much of the initial shock is due to the newness of the technology and how much is firmly entrenched in the uncanny valley, though the company told me that many attendees enjoyed the demo, strange setting and all.Once you get past the somewhat off-putting nature of swapping nether regions with a professional, VR porn does offer an interesting way forward for an industry that, like many others, has been hard hit by the prevalence of free online content.',
'Apple May Soon Open Retail Stores in India: After months of delays, Apple is likely to open its first retail stores in India, a fast-growing market for smartphones where the American technology giant has little presence. New rules issued by the Indian government on Monday exempt foreign-owned companies that want to open stores selling a single brand of products from requirements that 30 percent of the content of those products come from India. The exemption, which lasts three years, can be extended to eight years in the case of companies selling cutting edge items, such as Apple s iPhones and Macs. Apple, which makes virtually all of its devices in China, lobbied for months for the loosening, and Timothy D. Cook, the company s chief executive, discussed it with government officials during his first visit to India last month.An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the issue on Monday. The company has not yet received any formal response from the Indian government on its application to open stores. By themselves, new stores will have little impact on Apple s small market share in India, beyond serving as a marketing tool. Although Indians will buy an estimated 139 million smartphones this year, Android models that cost less than $120 dominate the market, according to the Gartner research firm.Apple says its sales in India grew 56 percent during its last fiscal quarter, but its cheapest phones typically run $400 or more. Its total annual sales in India were around two million units last year, according to Gartner.',
'Chinese Curb Cyberattacks on U.S. Interests, Report Finds: Nine months after President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China agreed to a broad crackdown on cyberespionage aimed at curbing the theft of intellectual property, the first detailed study of Chinese hacking has found a sharp drop-off in almost daily raids on Silicon Valley firms, military contractors and other commercial targets. But the study, conducted by the iSight intelligence unit of FireEye, a company that manages large network breaches, also concluded that the drop-off began a year before Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi announced their accord in the White House Rose Garden. In a conclusion that is largely echoed by American intelligence officials, the study said the change is part of Mr. Xi s broad effort to bring the Chinese military, which is considered one of the main sponsors of the attacks, further under his control. As a result, the same political forces that may be alleviating the theft of data from American companies are also responsible for Mr. Xi s stunningly swift crackdown on the Chinese media, bloggers and others who could challenge the Communist Party.',
'Wal-Mart to Buy 5% Stake in JD.com as Part of Chinese Deal: Wal-Mart Stores will acquire a 5 percent stake in Asian e-commerce giant JD.com Inc. in a deal that will reshape the U.S. retail chain s operations in China. As part of the agreement, JD.com will take ownership of Wal-Mart s Yihaodian online marketplace, the companies said in a statement Monday. The Chinese branch of Sam s Club also will open a store on JD.com, and the two companies will link up their supply chains. The partnership gives Wal-Mart a fresh start in China after it struggled to adapt to a slowing local economy and a rise in online shopping. Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon has said that the company needs to succeed in China, where it estimates that 25 percent of global retail growth will come from in the next five years.A 5 percent stake in JD.com would be worth about $1.5 billion at its current stock price. Wal-Mart will receive about 145 million newly issued Class A shares of JD.com in the transaction. That deal will increase the retailer s earnings per share by 16 to 19 cents in the second quarter, according to the statement.',
'Apple to lose weighting in Russell index, shares could fall: After dropping more than $200 billion in market capitalization in one year, Apple shares could fall further as they are set to lose their weighting and be reclassified in the annual reconstitution of the widely followed Russell indexes. When all is said and done, about $1.3 billion more will be sold in Apple Inc shares at the market close on Friday, when the reconstitution of the Russell indexes takes effect, according to an analysis by Credit Suisse. Because Apple has been aggressively buying back and retiring its stock, outstanding shares have dropped to less than 5.5 billion from 5.8 billion in late June 2015, when the Russell indexes were last recalibrated, according to Reuters data. Apple\'s weighting in the Russell 1000 will roughly fall to 2.52 percent from 2.77 percent, Credit Suisse said. The decline is due to the combination of fewer shares outstanding and Apple\'s smaller part of the index\'s capitalization. The performance of a market-weighted index is more influenced by larger companies, like Apple. Adding to the selling pressure, Apple will be classified as both a value and a growth company at Russell. After the close on Friday, 92 percent of Apple will be considered "growth" and 8 percent "value" according to index provider FTSE Russell, splitting it between two Russell subindexes. The move matters because value managers that peg their investments to the Russell indexes will be buying Apple while growth managers will be selling. Because there are more assets benchmarked to growth than to value, there will be net selling of Apple, said Meera Krishnan, U.S. index strategist at Credit Suisse in New York. She estimated there will be over $850 million of selling in Apple out of the growth component of the Russell 1000 and about $400 million of buying from the value side.',
'Phone Tracking, Nude Selfie IOUs See Chinese Bare All for Credit: Talkative people pay back loans. The very talkative default. Too taciturn is no good either. Also, don t take out a loan at 4 a.m. Those are lessons from online lenders in China that are tracking people s behavior -- via apps on their mobile phones -- and taking it into account when deciding what their credit ratings should be. Chinese consumers don t mind handing over personal details that would spark outrage in the West, in exchange for lower interest rates. WeLab Ltd., a Hong Kong-based online lender that makes loans in China, looks at what apps people have downloaded, where they go using the phone s GPS tracker, their social networks and their school records. It offers discounted interest rates for each extra piece of personal information that helps profile customers for credit ratings. In Hong Kong, for example, giving WeLab access to a Facebook account gets a 5 percent discount on the cost of a loan, and access to LinkedIn gets you 10 percent off, on loans with interest rates that otherwise reach as high as 20 percent. "Chinese people have no issue handing over their personal data, giving you their credit card number, giving you their bank account," said GGV Capital s Shanghai-based managing partner Jenny Lee, whose Silicon Valley venture capital firm has invested in data-hungry tech giants such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. "Look at the whole internet finance sector, people are giving you their bank statement so you can do profiling." Some are perhaps over-sharing. University students desperate for cash have been sending nude photos of themselves as collateral to several online lending platforms, according to the official People s Daily. Typically they get loans of 15,000 yuan ($2,280) -- more if they re doctoral students or enrolled at a famous university, the report said, and at least one loan had a weekly interest rate of 30 percent. Delinquent borrowers face the threat of their naked selfies being sent to family if they don t pay.',
'Apple says iPhones still available for sale in China: Apple said its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were still available for sale in China after Beijing\'s intellectual property regulators barred their sales saying the designs had infringed a patent held by a Chinese company. "We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court," Apple said in a statement on Friday. The notice, dated May 19, banning sales of certain iPhone models in Beijing was posted on a Chinese government website. The Chinese market is vital to Apple, driving more of its sales than any other region outside the United States. But the tech giant has faced greater scrutiny there in recent months, with its online book and film services blocked by Chinese regulators earlier this year. Apple historically had enjoyed favorable treatment in China, but Beijing s crackdown on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is a reminder that the tech giant is not immune to the scrutiny that other U.S. tech firms have long faced in the country, said analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners.',
'Uber Rival s $28 Billion Valuation Shows Size of China s Ride-Sharing Market: The Chinese car-hailing app Didi Chuxing said on Thursday that it had brought in $7.3 billion in its latest round of fund-raising, which included Apple, Alibaba, and SoftBank as investors. The new funds give the company a total of $10.5 billion in disposable funds, and put its valuation at $28 billion, according to a person familiar with the fund-raising. That Didi s valuation is now almost half that of the $62.5 billion valuation of its main rival in China, Uber, shows how much potential investors see in China. Yet the size of the cash infusions also underscores the market s difficulties. In part because of China s widespread blocking of foreign websites, the competition between Uber and Didi marks the first time in recent history a major foreign tech company has vied so intensely with a local Chinese business. In other markets the contest over ride-sharing has focused on regulation and technology, but in China it has been much more about cash, with the two companies spending billions. The most recent round has also pulled in Apple, pitting America s biggest tech company against America s best-known start-up, Uber, in a tricky Chinese market. Both see China as critical to growth. The fund-raising comes as executives from Didi and Uber have signaled that they are focusing on profitability in China. Since then both companies have been locked in a spending war. Though it has primarily taken the form of subsidies, both companies have also tried to develop technology specific to China, and have actively wooed both local and national government officials. Didi has focused on technology that better predicts car arrival times, given China s unruly traffic, while Uber has developed a commute function that links drivers with riders based on where they live and work.',
'Why back-up cameras haven t stopped drivers from backing into stuff: With or without eyes in the back of their heads, drivers keep hitting things. Despite the growing prevalence of back-up cameras, federal data shows that this technology hasn\'t significantly cut down on cars backing into people and causing them harm. That research on so-called "back-over incidents" comes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration moves to make back-up cameras standard and presses automakers to add a bevy of new technologies -- from automatic braking to lane collision warnings -- to even entry-level cars to reduce accidents on the road.As car companies and even regulators increasingly lean on technology to make roads safer, the tepid success of the back-up camera is a red flag. Sure, drivers can see more of what\'s behind them -- the cameras reduce blind zones while in reverse by 90 percent, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety -- but they keep hitting things.Even with back-up cameras, drivers still don t look around their vehicles enough when in reverse and sometimes get distracted by any number of things as their cars roll backward. Back-up cameras also often beam images to display screens in the front of the car, and drivers can become too reliant on them. Instead of looking backward and through their rearview window or checking mirrors, their eyes are glued to a screen.',
'LG Electronics sells mosquito-repelling TV in India: The Indian arm of South Korea\'s LG Electronics Inc has begun selling a TV with a feature that it says repels mosquitoes, which can spread diseases such as malaria, Zika and dengue. The TV\'s "Mosquito Away Technology" uses ultrasonic waves that are inaudible to humans but cause mosquitoes to fly away, according to the company. It was released in the country on Thursday, LG said. The same technology, which was certified as effective by an independent laboratory near Chennai, India, has been used by LG in air conditioners and washing machines, the company said. The technology, which also functions when the TV is switched off, is available in two models, priced at 26,500 rupees and 47,500 rupees ($394 and $706). The TV is targeted at lower-income consumers living in conditions that would make them vulnerable to mosquitoes. It will go on sale next month in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Kim Sang-yeol, an LG Electronics official, said there are no plans for now to market it elsewhere.',
"Oracle's cloud strength boosts quarterly revenue: Business software maker Oracle Corp reported a higher-than-expected quarterly revenue as sales in its cloud business surged due to more customers. Shares of the Redwood City, California-based company rose as much as 3.8 percent to $40.10 in extended trading on Thursday. Like its rivals such as SAP SE, IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp, Oracle has focused on moving its business toward the cloud-computing model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Total revenue from the company's cloud-computing software and platform service rose 49.1 percent to $859 million in the fourth quarter ended May 31. It contributed 8 percent of Oracle's total revenue during thequarter. The company's total revenue fell 1 percent to $10.59 billion, beating analysts' average estimate of $10.47 billion. Oracle's net income rose to $2.81 billion, or 66 cents per share, in the quarter ended May 31, from $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, it earned 81 cents per share, meeting average analysts' estimate. Up to Thursday's close, Oracle's stock had risen 5.8 percent this year.",
"Salesforce also made a bid for LinkedIn, CEO Benioff confirms: Salesforce was also a serious bidder for LinkedIn, the business networking site that sold to Microsoft for $26 billion this week, said CEO Marc Benioff. While he would not give details of the effort, sources said Salesforce was primarily interested in LinkedIn's recruiting business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue. Sources said LinkedIn was already deep into negotiations with Microsoft when Salesforce made its approach, which would have required both debt and stock financing. Microsoft was able to buy LinkedIn in cash and also promised to let it operate independently. Interestingly, sources confirmed numerous reports that Microsoft had tried to buy Salesforce earlier this year, and both price and the way it would be operated within the company were among the issues that resulted in it not happening. Indeed. Salesforce recently bought Demandware for $2.8 billion.",
'InMobi Technologies to discontinue use of mascot function on Miip platform: InMobi on Thursday said it has shuttered the animated-discovery commerce part of Miip for now, a product it launched amid much fanfare in July last year. Instead, the firm will look to help e-commerce companies reach inactive customers using more traditional ad formats, using the underlying technology it built for the platform. In July, InMobi launched a beta version of Miip, which took the form of an animated monkey, that tracked users browsing habits across various mobile apps and showed ads in the forms of bubbles and animations instead of traditional display ads. It allowed consumers to interact with the mascot and tell it what they liked, and how they felt about the products and ads they saw. The promise of such a technology was that first, it enabled personalised discovery of products, and second, the completion of purchases within the ad itself as InMobi had tied up with payments providers like Stripe, AliPay and Paytm. This hasn t worked out. The larger vision behind Miip is to enable consumers to buy products and complete transactions through ads. The mascot was conceptualized simply as a face to the Miip platform. Over the course of testing, users responded better to an advertiser s brand as against the Miip branding on an ad unit, said Arun Pattabhiraman, vice president and global head of marketing, InMobi',
'Good VR is great and bad VR is abysmal: VR is a powerful medium, but difficult to work with because the developer is put in the position of creating a sense of self and presence, more is required of them, and while successes are almost impossible to describe properly, failures are conspicuous and easily dissected. It s easiest to illustrate with actual examples. Easily the most interesting VR experience I ve had at E3 (of a dozen or so) was an Oculus demo called The Climb, by a team at Crytek. Using the Touch controllers (a new innovation; previously a gamepad was used), you manipulate a pair of disembodied hands, gripping ridges and cracks to make your way up a cliff face. Like many VR games, it sounds rather boring. In fact, it s genius, but only within VR and like so many other games, the only way to find that out is to play it. Nevertheless, It s excellent for several reasons, and these act as sort of guidelines for content that fits VR s strengths and avoid its weaknesses. Alas, I was disappointed by Final Fantasy XV: The VR Experience, despite being hyped for the game itself. Here, I found, was the worst possible outcome: a game that should and could be interesting, but does almost nothing right. Unlike The Climb, it sounds like a blast on paper. You and the other main characters from the game are in a battle with a Behemoth, one of the game s most well-known monsters. You re Prompto, the one who has a gun, supporting your buddies as they fight hand to hand. What it amounts to, however, and I m heartily sorry to say it, is a disjointed and boring five minutes that may leave you less excited for the game than when you donned the headset.',
'What are leveraged loans and why does Uber want one Uber, fresh off $3.5 billion from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, is in talks to closeanother $1-2 billion in the form of leveraged loans. Over the last 24 hours, the term leveraged loans has been thrown around a lot, but few in the startup world have seen this term before.The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would like to settle on a 4-4.5 percent interest rate. This appears ambitious but let s assume that it is accurate. While not completely applicable, Apple issued $12 billion in bonds at a 3.22 percent blended interest rate excluding floating rate debt. Yes, 4.5 percent is greater than 3.22 percent but junk bond references by the Wall Street Journal and Recode should be taken lightly. Junk bonds can generate upwards of 7 percent interest. Plenty of well-known publicly traded companies have issued bonds at rates higher than 4.5 percent and survived to fight another day. Yes, both leveraged loans and junk bonds have higher-than-normal interest rates. Unlike junk bonds, a 4-4.5 percent interest rate for Uber shouldn t invoke images of the subprime mortgage crisis.',
'SpaceX s latest rocket landing ended in a rapid unscheduled disassembly : Elon Musk\'s SpaceX failed to complete what would have been its fifth landing of a reusable booster rocket Wednesday, a down note on what appeared to be an otherwise successful mission to deliver two Boeing-built communication satellites to high orbit above the Earth. "Falcon 9 was lost in this attempt," the company said in its webcast. As the satellites headed on their way Wednesday, the booster rocket began its descent toward the ocean for a landing on a special floating platform. Video footage of the attempt seemed to show the booster touching down, then flames, before the picture froze.As with previous attempts, SpaceX had said landing the reusable booster rocket would be made more difficult by the fact that it would be falling from higher up. And, the company said, the rocket would have less fuel than normal to control its descent. SpaceX founder Elon Musk later tweeted that it appeared the the thrust in one of three landing engines was insufficient, causing the rocket to come in far too fast. In what he said may have been SpaceX\'s "hardest impact" ever, the booster ultimately suffered an RUD, or "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Upgrades to compensate for the problem could come by year\'s end, said Musk.',
'Uber Sets Sights on Leveraged Loans for Even More Money: Uber has raised more than $14 billion using all sorts of creative funding sources. Now it may add something new to the list: the leveraged loan market. The ride-hailing start-up is looking to issue as much as $2 billion in securities to investors, said a person briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are managing the process, said the person, adding that the deal has not begun yet and may still fall apart.By tapping leveraged loans, Uber is adding to its trove of billions made up of many types of securities, which the company has been spending as it expands worldwide. Uber has raised equity from traditional venture capital sources, strategic corporate investors and private equity. This month, the company said that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia s Public Investment Fund. Uber has also raised billions in convertible debt, which can be exchanged for equity at a future date. Uber has redefined private fund-raising, drawing hundreds of millions in new cash or debt at a rapid pace of once every few months. The company needs financing as it now operates in at least 69 countries and is fighting an expensive battle in China against a rival, Didi Chuxing, which is also raising money to expand. Leveraged loans are rarely used among start-ups. A leveraged loan is a security issued to a company that has a lot of debt on its books already, and thus is perceived by investors as being a higher risk. The loans are typically used for leveraged buyouts and are seldom seen in Silicon Valley. Uber has been able to tap less traditional funding sources because investors think its size and scale make it a safer bet than other Silicon Valley companies. Uber s valuation of $62.5 billion making it the highest valued venture-backed start-up in the world would not change with this new investment. Leveraged loans also allow Uber to raise money without diluting the holdings of its many equity investors some of which have been through more than a dozen rounds of financing.',
'Twitter has invested in music streaming service SoundCloud: Two years ago Twitter thought about buying SoundCloud, but ended up walking away from the music service. Now Twitter has bought a piece of SoundCloud instead. Twitter has invested around $70 million in the music service, as part of a round that should end up in the $100 million-range, according to sources familiar with the deal. The round is expected to value SoundCloud at about $700 million the same value that investors placed on the company in 2014, when it raised $60 million; since then it has also raised a debt round. It s unclear whether the Twitter investment is part of a strategic partnership, but that would make sense: Twitter might view via an integration with SoundCloud as a way to increase growth and engagement, and SoundCloud may look at Twitter as a way to promote its newly launched subscription service, which is crucial to the company s plans. And both companies could use some help. Twitter has been punished by Wall Street for its inability to add users at a rapid clip; SoundCloud s flat valuation indicates that investors are also worried about its own growth prospects.',
'Alibaba Tries to Shore Up Investors Confidence: The Alibaba Group of China has disappointed investors since its record-breaking American stock listing nearly two years ago, as volatile financial results and regulatory run-ins have driven the price of its shares down almost to where they began. Now the e-commerce giant is trying to reassure. For the first time, Alibaba on Tuesday offered investors financial guidance for the coming year, saying that it expected revenue growth to accelerate from last year s pace. At a meeting at its Hangzhou headquarters, Alibaba cited strength in its core business, despite China s slowing economic growth, as well as benefits from new ventures that have raised eyebrows among some investors The forecast comes as Alibaba seeks to demonstrate that its strategy, which has long focused on growth, is good for business. In China, Alibaba operates online sales platforms that connect consumers with mom-and-pop stores, as well as with global brands like Burberry and Zara. It has been showing sales growth on its platforms using a measure called gross merchandise volume, a yardstick for transactions across its platforms. Alibaba said on Tuesday that it would de-emphasize that figure, saying it would no longer report it quarterly. It will continue to report an annual figure, and offered a target for 2020.',
"India's Space Program Takes On Elon Musk: India s space agency will launch a record 22 satellites on a single rocket as it tries to ease a global backlog and demonstrate the ability to compete with commercial spaceflight companies run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.Satellites from the U.S., India, Canada and Germany will enter orbit after a scheduled June 20 liftoff from the Sriharikota barrier island along the southeast coast, the agency s chairman, A.S. Kiran Kumar, said in an interview in Bengaluru.The 22 machines being launched next week include an Earth observation satellite to capture light invisible to the naked eye. It is the biggest single launch by India, trailing Russia s 33 in 2014 and NASA s 29 the year before. India last month successfully launched a scale model of a reusable spacecraft, a project that in time could pit the nation against Bezos and Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The country also injected a probe into Mars atmosphere in 2014 for just $74 million, about 11 percent of the cost of the U.S. s Maven probe.",
'Microsoft, Reasserting Its Muscle, Buys LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion: Microsoft has made its most ambitious move in years to reassert itself in a technology market it once dominated. The software giant said Monday morning that it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion cash deal. The acquisition, by far the largest in Microsoft s history, unites two companies in different businesses: one a big maker of software tools, the other the largest business-oriented social networking site, with more than 400 million members globally. The deal is Microsoft s biggest bet yet that the traditional software business is shifting quickly to cloud computing, a model in which customers rent software and other services delivered over the internet. While LinkedIn does not have the household name of Facebook, a much larger and more lucrative social network, it is the most widely used site for people to advertise their professional skills and work history.Though they operate in different businesses, Microsoft and LinkedIn make most of their money by catering to professionals. Executives involved in the deal said that the common thread prompted the acquisition. They know the interconnections of the business world, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm. That could really benefit Microsoft from a sales standpoint. ',
'How generous is Microsoft s takeover bid It puts LinkedIn s enterprise value at 79 times the social network s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, for the 12 months that ended on March 31. On the basis of that multiple, the transaction is more expensive than any big internet deal paid with cash, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Microsoft is paying $220 for each of LinkedIn s monthly active users. By comparison, when Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion two years ago, it spent $40 for every user. For LinkedIn, the attractions of the deal are obvious: Its shares fell nearly 42 percent from the beginning of the year through last week, as investors expressed disappointment over a weak earnings forecast for 2016. Finding a buyer with deep pockets dulls the pain of being a publicly traded company.',
'One Unspoken Reason Behind the LinkedIn Sale: Let me explain why. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn s chief executive, wrote a lengthy memorandum to his employees Monday morning, ticking off a list of reasons behind the surprise decision to sell the company to Microsoft for $26.2 billion: Most important, he said, was the heft that Microsoft gives LinkedIn to control our own destiny. But there may have been another reason that he left unspoken. That would be the company s struggling stock price and its reliance some might say overreliance on stock-based compensation.On one grim day in early February, LinkedIn s stock price plummeted more than 40 percent after it forecast weaker-than-expected growth for the year. The share price had hovered at $225 at the beginning of 2016; a month later it briefly got close to $100. The rapid devaluation has posed more than just a problem for investors. LinkedIn s employees are paid largely in stock, and therein lies the rub: Around the company s new 26-story skyscraper that opened in downtown San Francisco in March, as well as the corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., there have been persistent whispers about whether LinkedIn could retain its top talent as the marketplace clobbered their incomes.Mr. Weiner who took over as LinkedIn s chief in 2009, succeeding Reid Hoffman, the founder has done a tremendous job in the past years building the company s business, which is primarily about helping people connect to one another for employment and conduct business-oriented social networking. But despite all the headlines about growth and profits, LinkedIn has been a money-losing operation for the last two years. You wouldn t know that if you only glanced at LinkedIn s news releases. That s because LinkedIn steers investors to focus on what s known as its adjusted Ebitda, or non-GAAP earnings. The company purposely strips out the cost of stock-based compensation, which has the effect of turning losses into gains. LinkedIn paid out $510 million in stock-based compensation last year; over the last two years, that stock-based compensation represented a whopping 96 percent of operating income, or 16 percent of revenue, according to Mr. Mahaney. Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook paid out about 15 percent of operating income, or well under 10 percent of revenue.',
'Baidu Reduces Revenue Forecast on Ad Restrictions: Baidu, China s biggest internet search engine, cut its revenue forecast for the second quarter, saying regulatory restrictions cut advertising from drug companies and other health-care groups. Shares declined as much as 8.9 percent in extended trading after the announcement. The company said it projects sales of 18.1 billion yuan ($2.81 billion) to 18.2 billion yuan compared with its previous forecast of 20.1 billion to 20.6 billion yuan. The new regulations on online marketing by health-care companies have caused a reduction or delay in advertising from a significant portion of medical customers, Baidu said in a statement Monday. The company said the lower revenue also is a result of the cut in the number of sponsored links, which Baidu announced last month. While these actions will have a negative impact in the short term, Baidu said it expects users to become accustomed to the changes and health-care advertising will eventually recover. Last month, Baidu announced that it will restrict the number of sponsored posts to 30 percent of a results page, and establish a 1 billion yuan fund to fight fraud after the death of Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old computer science student who sought out a controversial treatment advertised among search results.',
"Does the LinkedIn sale put Twitter in play Yes, it does: LinkedIn just gave Twitter investors something they haven t felt in a long time: Hope. News that LinkedIn sold to Microsoft on Monday for more than $26 billion has pushed Twitter stock up more than 8 percent in early-morning trading. The reason If Microsoft is willing to break the bank for LinkedIn, maybe there s a savior out there for Twitter, too! There have long been talks that a big tech company like Google or Facebook or even Microsoft might swoop in for Twitter. Now that feels almost inevitable, especially given that Twitter s stock is down nearly 60 percent from where it was a year ago when then-CEO Dick Costolo announced he was stepping down. Simply put, that means the LinkedIn acquisition has done more to boost Twitter s value than CEO Jack Dorsey has. Of course, the stock move is typical investor arbitrage, but if Twitter s shares stay up, it's a clear signal investors would rather see it in someone else s hands. Who might save Twitter It could still be Google, or perhaps a bigger media player like Comcast*. We talk all the time with smart people close to Twitter, and the growing feeling is that Twitter s best option is to finally sell to someone with deep pockets. With LinkedIn now off the market, those deep pockets may come take a closer look.",
'Apple Starts to Woo Its App Developers: When Apple s App Store opened in 2008, there were well under a thousand apps, and the relationship was obviously beneficial for both sides. But now, when there are more than 1.5 million apps fighting for attention in the App Store, the benefits for developers, particularly smaller ones, have become much less apparent. Is Apple coasting on its relationship and lead with developers I think the answer is yes, said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. Their app store is considered an unappealing experience by many people. Their rules are arbitrary, and they take a big slice of money from sales. For a long time, Apple didn t have to care. But now it faces flat sales of its flagship iPhones, a lack of excitement about newer products like its smart watch and Apple TV, growing competition from Google s Android platform and the rise of new challengers like Amazon s Echo device, which responds to a user s voice commands at home with the kind of magic that used to be an Apple hallmark. As the company prepares to hold its annual developer conference in San Francisco next week, there are signs that it wants to improve its relationship with app makers. Among the announcements expected at the gathering: Apple plans to finally give developers access to its Siri voice assistant so they can incorporate it into their apps.Apple s charm offensive began in earnest in December, after it put Philip W. Schiller, its senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in charge of the App Store. Under Mr. Schiller, the company accelerated the app approval process, cutting typical review times from two weeks to a day or two. On Wednesday, Apple announced that it would soon begin allowing app makers to buy ads that would appear at the top of search results in the App Store, like the ads already on Google s Play Store and website. Apple also said that it would cut its usual 30 percent commission on all subscriptions to 15 percent after an app subscriber had been active for at least a year.',
'What happens when your search engine is first to know you have cancer:This week researchers demonstrated that by analyzing a person s Web searches they could in some cases predict an upcoming diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The team of researchers aren t pancreatic cancers experts, but computer scientists at Microsoft. Unlike traditional medical professionals, they have the advantage of access to a trove of data that Microsoft collects through its search engine, Bing. The Microsoft researchers identified Web users who had recently searched for queries indicating they have pancreatic cancer, such as I was told I have pancreatic cancer, what to expect, and then looked back months earlier to examine patterns in the symptoms that the users searched for. This included phrases such as dark or tarry stool, abdominal swelling, dark urine and yellowing skin. From this analysis they realized trends in the queries of users who were soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, identifying 5 to 15 percent of cases with low false-positive rates. The research was published in the Journal of Oncology Practice.',
'Alibaba Bears Pounce as SEC Probe, SoftBank Sale Squeeze Shares:Traders have never been more bearish on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company facing a regulatory probe and the loss of a key investor. The total number of outstanding shares borrowed for short selling peaked at more than 124 million last week. That s the most since its 2014 initial public offering and is up from about 60 million in December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit. Prominent short sellers including Jim Chanos and John Hempton have been red-flagging Alibaba for months, suggesting that its growth figures might be too good to be true. Bearish bets spiked in the past two weeks after the company disclosed a regulatoryprobe of its Chinese delivery unit and SoftBank Group Corp. disclosed plans to sell a $10 billion stake. Alibaba, which claimed more than 75 percent of the e-commerce market share in China last year, made history with a record $25 billion initial public offering in September 2014. Traders in New York clamored for the stock, which was priced at $68 a share, as a way to tap into the potential profits available from the country s growing middle class. The shares have dropped 6.4 percent to $75.92 since May 25 when the company said that the SEC is looking at data reported from the company s Singles Day promotion, Alibaba s biggest shopping day, and how the company consolidates results from affiliates, including logistics partner Cainiao Network. While SoftBank s divestment comes as part of a broader strategy to find new investments in startups and strengthen its debt-heavy balance sheet, the move can be unsettling to investors as the Japanese technology giant first bought into the company 16 years ago, said Henry Guo, a New York-based analyst at M Science. The stake sale by SoftBank caught the market off guard, which damped Alibaba shares as it s one of the early investors, Guo, who has been covering Chinese internet stocks traded in the U.S. for about 10 years and has a positive outlook on Alibaba, said by phone.',
'Amazon is preparing to launch streaming music service - sources: Amazon.com Inc is preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service, placing it squarely in competition with rival offerings from Apple Inc and Spotify, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The service will be offered at $9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, and it will offer a competitive catalog of songs, the sources said. Amazon (AMZN.O) is finalizing licenses with labels for the service, which likely will be launched in late summer or early fall, the sources said. Amazon, which offers a free streaming music service with a limited catalog to subscribers of its Prime shipping and video service, did not respond to a request for comment about the new, full-fledged music plan. Although it will be a late entrant to the crowded streaming space, Amazon believes a comprehensive music service is important to its bid to be a one-stop shop for content and goods, the sources said. The new music offering also is intended to increase the appeal of the Amazon Echo, its home speaker, which searches the Internet and orders products from the retailer with voice commands.',
'Why Line s Two-Year Wait for IPO Cost It $4 Billion in Valuation: Line Corp. has finally pulled the trigger on an initial public offering after a two-year hiatus. That period of hesitation may have cost the messaging service $4 billion in valuation as Facebook Inc. began encroaching on its turf and markets cooled on technology company debuts. Japan s leading mobile messaging service is aiming to raise as much as 113 billion yen ($1 billion) in July at a market value of roughly 588 billion yen, according to data in its Friday IPO filings. That s down 40 percent from an estimated 1 trillion yen when it first filed for an offering in 2014. The price range will be set on June 27, and the final price July 11. That may be as good as it gets. Line s gearing up for a battle with far larger rivals like Facebook and China s WeChat as it looks to expand its 218 million user base beyond its strongest markets of Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. The Tokyo-based company, owned by South Korean search portal Naver Corp., plans to use the proceeds to spearhead an expansion across Asia and, eventually, the U.S. Line will have its market in Japan fairly fortified from the likes of WhatsApp or even Facebook Messenger, said Amir Anvarzadeh, manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. Outside of its core markets, it s going to be a massive challenge. ',
'Thomas J. Perkins, Pioneering Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley, Dies at 84: Thomas J. Perkins, who nurtured Silicon Valley s venture capital industry into a force that later helped foster the growth of companies like Google and Amazon, died Tuesday night at his home in Marin County, Calif. He was 84. Mr. Perkins co-founded the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972, at a time when parts of Silicon Valley were still fruit orchards. Mr. Perkins and his partners popularized a model of investment that involved putting small amounts of money into promising young start-ups in return for a stake in the companies, giving them advice and counsel to spur their growth. Some of the investments turned into gigantic hits. Mr. Perkins had said that his favorite investment was Genentech, a biotechnology company that has since been acquired by Roche. Over time, Kleiner Perkins and its home on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif. became a destination for other venture capitalists. Mr. Perkins helped recruit venture capitalists like John Doerr to his firm, leading to investments in a new generation of technology companies, including Netscape, AOL, Amazon and later Google. The firm s success transformed Silicon Valley and the technology and biotechnology industries, leading to a proliferation of venture firms in the region and creating an ecosystem of investment in start-ups that today remains unrivaled in any other part of the world. Later in his life, Mr. Perkins was embroiled in several controversies. In 1996, he was convicted in France of involuntary manslaughter from a yacht collision. In another, he stepped down from the board of Hewlett-Packard in 2006 after he said the company had used illegal methods to obtain his phone records. The allegations led to the resignation of H.P. s chairwoman and an overhaul of the board. He also publicly broke with Kleiner Perkins in 2014 after writing an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he compared the progressive war on the American 1 percent to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The comments set off a firestorm, and the firm moved to distance itself from Mr. Perkins, who later apologized for his language. David A. Kaplan, who wrote a biography of Mr. Perkins titled Mine s Bigger: The Extraordinary Tale of the World s Greatest Sailboat and the Silicon Valley Tycoon Who Built It (2007), said in an interview on Thursday that Mr. Perkins s legacy won t be helped by all the excessive things he said in recent years and the grudges he nursed, though he was a seminal figure for Silicon Valley.',
'Amazon confirms international expansion of its Fresh grocery delivery service: Amazon announced an overseas expansion of its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service on Thursday, starting with a rollout in certain neighborhoods in London. Recode reported two weeks ago that Amazon planned to expand to a variety of new markets this year, including the U.K. and Boston in the U.S., after an 18-month hiatus on new city launches. The service will cost Londoners about $10 a month on top of their regular Amazon Prime membership, or about $120 a year. In the U.S., an Amazon Fresh membership costs about $200 on top of the normal $99 Prime membership program. Orders of around $58 or more come with free delivery in London. Amazon delivers the groceries which can include both packaged groceries as well as perishable items like meat and cheese on the same day for morning orders, or the next day for late afternoon and evening orders. Amazon Fresh launched nearly a decade ago, but has expanded slowly as the company has tried to figure out a business model that works. The service was previously only available in parts of Washington, California, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The online grocery market is still tiny in the U.S., but is more mature in the U.K. That means more competition for Amazon, but perhaps the opportunity to grow the business more quickly.',
'Uber Feels UberPop Hangover With French, German Legal Setbacks: Uber Technologies Inc. is feeling the sting of European judges from Paris to Frankfurt over UberPop, suffering setbacks in France and Germany months after it took the ride-sharing option out of its app there. On Thursday, a French criminal court fined the company and two of its executives a total of 850,000 euros ($960,000), half of which was suspended, and a German appeals court separately said it wouldn t overturn a ban of UberPop in the country. French prosecutors had attacked Uber for fraudulent commercial practices and encouraging illegal activity through UberPop, as well as improper use of personal data. UberPop went on for months illegally, though the company and its executives knew very well what the applicable legal context was, judge Cecile Louis-Loyant said in Paris. She fined Uber France 800,000 euros, the head of its French operations, Thibaud Simphal, 20,000 euros and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the company s general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, another 30,000 euros, saying they incited others to break the law by working for the service, leading to riots and taxistrikes in the French capital. UberPop, which allows anyone with a vehicle and driver s license to offer a cab-like service, stopped in July in France and was banned in Germany in March 2015. Meanwhile Uber s main chauffeured-car service, that requires registration with authorities, is still going.',
"The app boom is over: The mobile app boom kicked off in July 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store. Now it is over. People are still making plenty of apps, of course. And many people are still downloading them. But the go-go growth days are gone. If you are an independent app developer or publisher, you have probably known this for a while, because you have found it very difficult to get people to download your app the average American smartphone user downloads zero apps per month. But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones. Last month, the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20 percent in the U.S., according to research from Nomura, which relies on data from app tracker SensorTower. So you can still break through the saturated app market, if you are very very very lucky, and good. But the odds are stacked against you.",
'Why everyone should worry about this scary glitch that affected rich drivers: Carmaker Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus rushed to fix a software bug Wednesday that had caused a malfunction in vehicles GPS, climate control and infotainment, or front console radio systems. It disabled the backup camera and hands-free phone functions as well. Errant data broadcast Tuesday by the company s traffic and weather service confounded vehicles\' "Enform" infotainment system installed in 2014, 2015 and 2016 Lexus vehicles and the 2016 Toyota Land Cruiser, the company said. The data made the subscription-based Enform system continuously reboot itself, rendering it unusable and drawing the ire and of many a driver. Lexus s social media accounts were flooded with complaints through Wednesday morning and by 9 a.m., the company told customers to stand by for a momentary fix. Owners should force a reset of their vehicle s computer by disconnecting its 12-volt battery for at least 5 minutes, the company said. Owners can also bring their vehicles to a Lexus dealer to reset their system. The company halted the offending data stream overnight, but did not anticipate lingering problems in its vehicles. Lexus said it is still determining how many vehicles the bug impacted. The same way smartphone or software companies remotely update their products, car companies are increasingly doing the same to fix operating system glitches and even update road maps and car-friendly mobile applications. That s because cars are increasingly becoming giant rolling computers, capable of doing an untold number of tasks while getting from Point A to Point B. Consider the Enform service, which includes smartphone and app connectivity, SiriusXM satellite radio, traffic and weather updates and Bluetooth connectivity. A new car might have 100 million lines of code, according to a report by research and accounting firm Stout Risius Ross. The more luxurious the car, the more interconnected its technological components may be.',
'What to Do With Apple Cash Irish Dilemma as EU Ruling Looms: As Ireland braces itself for a possible European Union order to claw back Apple Inc. s unpaid taxes, government officials warned Finance Minister Michael Noonan that he would face two crucial questions upon delivery of a ruling that could come soon. The first is whether to appeal at the EU s top court. The second, is what to do with the large recovery amounts pending the outcome. Ireland could be sitting on the cash for several years, according to a briefing note from last month published Wednesday. Amid growing speculation that Apple could be forced to pay back billions of euros of tax breaks, officials said they are preparing for the worst and that an adverse ruling could have significant negative implications for Ireland, in terms of reputation and the creation of uncertainty around our tax system. ',
"Apple Pay competitor CurrentC is the disaster everyone thought it would be: Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. When Walmart and other big retailers said in 2012 that they were creating a consortium called MCX to build a payments app, a lot of people laughed. The idea of a bunch of retailers collaborating effectively on a joint venture seemed far-fetched, let alone one where technology would play a critical role. Then there was the motivation for the venture, which seemed shortsighted: Get customers to pay with anything but traditional credit cards, since they cost Walmart and other retailers higher transaction fees than other forms of payment. There were plenty of other signs along the way spelling out trouble. Just a sampling: Customers who signed up for the app had their email addresses leaked in a hack in 2014, and the new CEO who arrived in 2015 said the launch likely wouldn't happen until 2016. In the meantime, some big MCX partners like Best Buy said they would start accepting Apple Pay. Finally, Walmart perhaps MCX's biggest initial backer announced its own app, Walmart Pay. Some Walmart insiders were obviously tired of waiting for CurrentC to become a reality.Turns out there was good reason for these red flags. On Tuesday, the company notified beta users of its payments app, CurrentC, that the test was ending and their accounts were being deleted. This news followed MCX layoffs in May. It finally looks like game over for CurrentC.",
'Online Reviews Researchers Give Them a Low Rating: Reviews tell us what to read next, where to eat dinner and what to order there, where to go on vacation and what doctor to call. Soon, as Google demonstrated with the introduction of its voice-activated Google Home device in May, reviews will be read aloud to you as you lie on the couch, wondering what movie to see next. But if reviews are ubiquitous, there are also persistent controversies over how many of the reviews on the internet were bought by the subject rather than written as finely reasoned opinions from a neutral party, and whether that distorts all results.But if reviews are ubiquitous, there are also persistent controversies over how many of the reviews on the internet were bought by the subject rather than written as finely reasoned opinions from a neutral party, and whether that distorts all results. In May, Yelp issued 59 new Consumer Alerts, which are notices it puts on a business s page that it has been caught trying to pay for better reviews. Among those cited were a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and an emergency room in Humble, Tex. Lifehacker.com recently took on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, arguing their way of compiling reviews was fundamentally flawed. FiveThirtyEight.com reported that men are sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women. (Why Because they can.) Bart de Langhe, an assistant professor of marketing at Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, used to see numerical reviews online and accept them implicitly. Then, when his son was born three years ago, he needed to buy a car seat. Mr. de Langhe noticed that the seat rated lowest by Consumer Reports got a high rating on Amazon, and the one rated highest by Consumer Reports received a low rating on Amazon. The more popular seat on Amazon was also more expensive. Were reviewers, he wondered, paying more attention to things like price and brand than the objective, measurable ability of the seat to protect its occupant With two other researchers, Philip Fernbach and Donald Lichtenstein, Mr. de Langhe began a study that compared online reviews for items like air-conditioners and car batteries with the evaluations in Consumer Reports. Navigating by the Stars was published in April in The Journal of Consumer Research. After analyzing 344,157 Amazon ratings of 1,272 products in 120 product categories, the researchers found a substantial disconnect between the objective quality information that online reviews actually convey and the extent to which consumers trust them. In other words, the consumer saw a number 4.6 stars out of 5 and took it much more seriously than it merited. Nearly half the time, Amazon reviewers and the Consumer Reports experts disagreed about which item in a random pair was better. Moreover, average user ratings did not predict resale value in the used-product marketplace, another traditional indicator of quality.',
'Amazon to Invest Additional $3 Billion in India, CEO Bezos Says: Amazon.com Inc. will invest $3 billion more to build its business in India, bringing the company s total pledged investment in the country since 2014 to $5 billion as it chases growth outside the U.S. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of the Seattle-based online retailer, announced the investment Tuesday at the U.S.-India Business Council s Leadership Summit in Washington, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to executives from U.S. companies. We have already created some 45,000 jobs in India and continue to see huge potential in the Indian economy, Bezos said in a statement from the council. Our Amazon.in team is surpassing even our most ambitious planned milestones. Amazon gets most of its international revenue from the U.K., Germany and Japan. The company doesn t break out sales from India, instead including it in a group with other international markets. Revenue from that group in 2015 reached $7.4 billion, or 6.9 percent of total sales. Amazon has targeted India as an area ripe for growth, and has been spending to challenge local e-commerce company Flipkart. Bezos said at a conference last week that Amazon is doing most of the last-mile deliveries and opening more distribution centers in India. Bezos also highlighted achievements in India in his annual letter to shareholders. They included the launch of Seller Flex, which uses Amazon sellers warehouses to store other products sold on Amazon, helping the company quickly expand its delivery capabilities. Amazon s cloud computing division is also developing new infrastructure in India.',
'Sovereign wealth funds throw funding lifeline to tech ventures: A succession of funding deals by deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds have thrown a life preserver to some of the world s biggest private tech firms whose high valuations have come under scrutiny in the past year. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States along with state-backed investors in Singapore and China have ploughed money into hot tech investments such as ride-sharing company Uber and Chinese Internet giant Alibaba and its private affiliates. With overall funding for start-ups slowing down by a third to $25.5 billion in the last two quarters, according to data from CB Insights, high-profile ventures are turning to government funds or institutional money to create "private IPOs" rather than to venture capitalists or chancing public listings. These capital injections have helped to keep valuations high as other tech ventures such as those of cloud storage service Dropbox or Indian takeaway food ordering app Zomato have been marked down by some earlier backers. Saudi Arabia\'s Public Investment Fund said last week it invested $3.5 billion in Uber, Silicon Valley\'s most highly valued private company. At $62.5 billion, the car-sharing firm is worth more than the stock market capitalizations of automakers BMW or GM and close to VW, Daimler and Ford. Also last week, Singapore\'s two big government investors bought $1 billion of Alibaba Group shares, while in April, China Investment Corp, took part in a $4.5 billion round in Alibaba\'s financial services affiliate ANT Financial with other investors, marking the largest ever funding round in a fintech firm. Saudi Arabia\'s $3.5 billion stake in Uber was the largest ever single private investment in a tech company while the Kuwait Investment Authority took the lead this year in a $165 million private equity funding for struggling U.S. wearable devices maker Jawbone, one of seven tech and healthcare ventures it has made in the last two years. Qatar Investment Authority invested in Uber and Indian ecommerce firm Flipkart in 2014. Norway s $865-billion fund, the world s largest sovereign wealth investor, is a major backer of publicly traded tech stocks such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O), but it can only invest in an unlisted company in the final run up to a public offering. Restrictions on private investments mean it passed on an offer from Facebook (FB.O) to invest several years ago.',
'The unsexiest trillion-dollar startup: Steve Jobs went ballistic when public shipping manifests leaked the existence of the iPhone 3G. That s about the only time something exciting happened in the freight forwarding business. The circulatory system of the global economy is a trillion-dollar industry, yet no one really talks about it, or builds tech for it. That s what makes freight such a massive disruption opportunity for a startup likeFlexport. Transparency begets data, which begets efficiency. Smarter shipping shrinks the physical world the way faster internet shrinks the digital one. New businesses emerge. High bandwidth connections paved the way for Netflix. Now Flexport could make meatspace merchants as nimble as Amazon. With $26.9 million in funding, Flexport grew the volume of goods it ships by 16X this year. Y Combinator president Paul Graham says Flexport is one of that small handful of startups that are going to change the world. Freight might finally be getting the weight of attention it deserves. Stick with me. Anything weighing over 150 kilos can t be sent like a parcel through the postal service. It qualifies as freight, and can require several separately owned vehicles to deliver it across land, sea, or air from its source like a factory to a destination like a retail store. To get the best deal on each leg of the journey and handle the hand-offs through customs, freight forwarding services serve as an organizational logistics layer. They have direct relationships with carriers like truck owners and massive shipping container boats. But like I said, it s an unsexy business, so until recently, freight forwarding was still being done with a jumble of Excel, email, fax, and paper manifests shipped around the world. That made it extremely tough to spot overspending or snags in supply chains. That is, until Flexport indexed all the available carriers into a searchable database in its free software for organizing and tracking shipments. In 2016 it s moved freight to or from 64 countries for over 700 clients like Ring and Le Tote, with a $1.5 billion annual run-rate of merchandise value shipped. There s 2.4 million toys and 412,000 pieces of glassware currently in transit on the Flexport platform. Its investors include First Round, Founders Fund, Felicis, GV (Google Ventures), Box Group, Bloomberg Beta, and Ashton Kutcher. That s quite an ascent considering Petersen admits I didn t learn what the term freight forwarder meant until a year into starting the business. ',
'Uber Rolls Out App Improvements to Meet Driver Demands: Tensions have long simmered between Uber and its drivers who power the ride-hailing service. Drivers held protests when Uber cut fares with little warning and have filed class-action lawsuits to be recognized as company employees rather than independent contractors. Uber is now trying to improve the experience of its drivers. On Monday, the company announced a host of software improvements to its app to address driver demands. Among the changes, drivers can now more easily pause ride requests, making it easier for them to take bathroom breaks and fill their gas tanks. Drivers can now also be paid instantly for each ride they complete, rather than weekly, and see on the app s dashboard how much they have earned.Among the many changes for drivers that Uber announced on Monday was a partnership with companies that can give tax advice to drivers. Uber said drivers could now also receive discounts on Uber rides, auto maintenance and cellphone data plans. In addition, Uber created a fuel finder function in the app that shows drivers the cheapest places nearby to fill up the gas tank, with the aim that Uber can someday negotiate with filling stations to provide discounts to Uber drivers. And the Uber app will automatically start a ride two minutes after arriving at a rider s location so that drivers are paid if they have to wait for passengers. Tardy passengers are a frequent complaint on driver blogs.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg',
'Line Plans Year s Biggest Tech IPO, Pitching U.S. Investors: \nJapan s Line Corp. is headed for what could be the biggest initial public offering for a technology company this year, including a major pitch to American investors. The company behind one of Asia s most popular messaging apps plans to go public in Tokyo and New York in mid-to-late July, with a goal of raising between $1 billion and $2 billion at a valuation of $5 billion to $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tokyo-based company aims to get about half the money from U.S. investors as it plots a long-term expansion there after pushing further into Southeast Asia, said the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Line is already profitable and it will make that a focus for investors when it begins a roadshow toward the end of this month, according to one of the people. If it reaches its goals, Line would be this year s biggest tech offering globally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, providing a rare bright spot for the moribund market for listings. No business has raised more than $150 million in a technology IPO in 2016, even though more than 160 private companies are currently valued at $1 billion or more. The market debut would come two years after Line filed an application to list in Tokyo in July 2014. That offering valued the company at 1 trillion yen ($9.2 billion), people familiar with the situation said at the time. A deal didn t materialize and the company, controlled by South Korea s Naver Corp., later replaced its chief executive officer. Naver shares, which aren t trading on Monday due to a national holiday, are up 7.4 percent this year.The lower valuation for next month s expected listing reflects the company s slowing user growth and a cooling in technology valuations and listings. Global tech companies raised about $900 million in the first quarter of this year, down from $6.5 billion during same period in 2014 and $2.8 billion in the first quarter of last year, according to Ernst & Young LLP. This year s biggest tech listing is Australia s WiseTech Global Ltd., a logistics software company that raised about $130 million in April, according to Bloomberg data.\n\n\n\n\n\n',
'Japan s Line Corp. is headed for what could be the biggest initial public offering for a technology company this year, including a major pitch to American investors. The company behind one of Asia s most popular messaging apps plans to go public in Tokyo and New York in mid-to-late July, with a goal of raising between $1 billion and $2 billion at a valuation of $5 billion to $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tokyo-based company aims to get about half the money from U.S. investors as it plots a long-term expansion there after pushing further into Southeast Asia, said the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Line is already profitable and it will make that a focus for investors when it begins a roadshow toward the end of this month, according to one of the people. If it reaches its goals, Line would be this year s biggest tech offering globally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, providing a rare bright spot for the moribund market for listings. No business has raised more than $150 million in a technology IPO in 2016, even though more than 160 private companies are currently valued at $1 billion or more. The market debut would come two years after Line filed an application to list in Tokyo in July 2014. That offering valued the company at 1 trillion yen ($9.2 billion), people familiar with the situation said at the time. A deal didn t materialize and the company, controlled by South Korea s Naver Corp., later replaced its chief executive officer. Naver shares, which aren t trading on Monday due to a national holiday, are up 7.4 percent this year.The lower valuation for next month s expected listing reflects the company s slowing user growth and a cooling in technology valuations and listings. Global tech companies raised about $900 million in the first quarter of this year, down from $6.5 billion during same period in 2014 and $2.8 billion in the first quarter of last year, according to Ernst & Young LLP. This year s biggest tech listing is Australia s WiseTech Global Ltd., a logistics software company that raised about $130 million in April, according to Bloomberg data.',
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'T-Mobile is giving every customer a share of its stock: T-Mobile had another of its un-carrier events today, which now have so many regular giveaways they are starting to look like an episode of Oprah. First, the company announced that every current T-Mobile account holder on a postpaid plan will get one share of common stock in the company, which is currently worth about $43. New qualifying customers will also get one share once they sign up with T-Mobile. Plus, existing customers will be able to earn another free share (or two if you ve been a customer for over five years) for each new customer they refer to the company maxing out at 100 shares a year. The prospectus for the offering is here, and gives a little more color on how exactly the promotion will work. Once a customer redeems the share via T-Mobile s new app, the security will be held in a brokerage account at LOYAL3 Securities. Stockholders can then hold on to their new investment, sell their shares via the platform or transfer their shares to another brokerage account. Customers can even electronically participate in proxy votes to vote their shares. Notably, instead of issuing additional shares, T-Mobile says shares needed to meet the needs of the program will be purchased on the open markets.',
'Facebook founder Zuckerberg\'s social media accounts restored after alleged hack: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg\'s Twitter and Pinterest accounts have been resecured, a spokesman from the social media platform said on Monday, responding to questions about weekend media reports that the founder\'s sites had been hacked. Zuckerberg\'s Twitter and Pinterest accounts were compromised over the weekend, according to a report on Sunday from technology news website VentureBeat. Those accounts have since been "re-secured using best practices," a Facebook spokesman told Reuters, adding, "no Facebook systems or accounts were accessed." Zuckerberg\'s Twitter account, @finkd, last used in January 2012, posted a tweet on Sunday with the message, "Hey, @finkd You were in LinkedIn Datatbase with the password \'dadada\' ! DM (direct message) for proof," according to a screenshot posted to Twitter by Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall), founder of Katacoda, an interactive learning platform for software developers. The tweet appeared to ask Zuckerberg to contact the sender, who claimed to have accessed his account. Zuckerberg\'s Pinterest page, meanwhile, was defaced with the headline "Hacked By OurMine Team" according to a screengrab of the page posted by VentureBeat. "Hey , we are just testing your security ,please dm (direct message) us for contact! twitter:twitter.com/_OurMine_," the compromised page said in a message that seemingly identified the hackers as being associated with the linked Twitter account. The Twitter page associated with that account, @_OurMine_, has since been suspended.',
"WeWork Is Cutting About 7% of Staff: WeWork, the world s largest shared-workspace startup, plans to cut about 7 percent of its staff and has instituted a temporary pause on hiring, according to e-mails obtained by Bloomberg. The cutbacks come just three months after the New York company said it raised a round of $430 million led by Chinese investors. Managers were instructed to begin dismissals this week, said one of the e-mails. The startup, which lets members rent desks in an open office, ballooned from about 230 employees early last year to more than 1,000 today, according to research firm Mattermark. WeWork said it hired 175 people in May and expects to add about 500 employees by the end of the year. The company said it expects to lift the pause on hiring as soon as next week. The funding round in March valued WeWork at $16 billion with a focus on financing expansion throughout Asia, people familiar with the matter said at the time. WeWork's valuation is more than those of major landlords such as SL Green Realty Corp., which has a market value of $10.6 billion. Boston Properties Inc., the largest U.S. publicly traded office landlord, is valued at $19.6 billion.",
"Nest CEO Tony Fadell is out: Tony Fadell, the CEO and co-founder of Nest, is leaving the company two years after his connected device firm was acquired by Google. Fadell announced his departure in a tweet on Friday, capping off a rocky tenure under the search giant, which reorganized itself as Alphabet in August and placed Fadell at the helm of his independent company. Marwan Fawaz, a former Motorola executive and adviser to the home security company ADT, is joining as Nest CEO. The move comes after a series of public dramas and critical departures at Nest, which has failed to meet initial expectations since Google acquired it for over $3 billion two years ago. As we reported, Nest brought in around $340 million in revenue last year short of the goals set before the company acquired the videocamera startup Dropcam. That acquisition, by all measures, went terribly: Most of the Dropcam team departed, largely due to the frustrations of working under Fadell. Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy voiced those frustrations very publicly, writing that he regretted selling his company to Nest and Google. Fadell will stay on as an adviser to Larry Page, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, the company said in a statement. Several sources have said that a major issue for Nest was the integration of corporate cultures. Fadell, a former Apple executive, brought several others from that company and tried to retain Apple's unique, tenacious culture. That often clashed with Google's more open, experimental ethos, a fact that many Googlers noted often in many forums.",
'Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage: Snapchat has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users. Snapchat has been growing quickly, boosted by its popularity among young people. The app had 110 million daily users in December, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren t authorized to speak about the numbers. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc. but has since been surpassed by Facebook s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Twitter has 310 million monthly active users, according to its most recent earnings report. The company doesn t disclose how many of those people check in daily, but in the third quarter, it said about 44 percent of monthly users are active each day in the service s top 20 markets. Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said at the time that the percentage had been stable but that we ll be sure to disclose if there was a significant change. The company hasn t given an update since then. This implies a daily active user count of 136 million. Snapchat has made communicating more of a game by letting people send annotated selfies and short videos. It has allowed people to use its imaging software to swap faces in a photo, transform themselves into puppies, and barf rainbows. (In March, Facebook said it acquired the startup behind an app called Masquerade, which offers similar photo-manipulation tools.) Snapchat encourages people to visit the app frequently with features such as the "Snapstreak," which counts the number of consecutive days they ve been communicating with their closest friends. Snapchat s other content, such as news and Live Stories, disappear after 24 hours.',
"The incredibly brilliant way people are now paying for things in Asia: When Apple first rolled out Apple Pay in 2014, it was billed as a simpler way to buy goods and services. You take your phone out, tap it to the credit card reader, and off you go. Seems convenient, right But some consumers in Asia think there's an even better way to pay. In recent years, millions of people have grown accustomed to using messaging apps to communicate. Some of these apps now support person-to-person digital cash transfers. So the next step is pretty logical: Asian retailers have begun using these same messaging platforms to sell everything from clothing to hamburgers to train tickets. And as a consumer, you never have to leave the app to pay. On the surface, this alternative sounds a lot like Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay, or Android Pay, etc.). But conducting real-life and online transactions through messaging apps stands to change retail like none of these other services have. What we're seeing in Asia is the rise of mobile payments that run primarily on software, not hardware as we've tried to implement here in the United States. And that simple distinction may be the key to everything from accelerating the spread of mobile payments to unlocking deep, digital interactions with customers in brick-and-mortar stores to democratizing e-commerce away from giant online businesses like Amazon.To buy a meal with WeChat, which in China goes by the name Weixin, customers simply pull up a QR code in the app that's connected to their credit card or other financial account. Once the cashier scans the code, that's it no further action is needed. Retailers in China will typically offerdiscounts to WeChat users as an incentive to pay with the app.",
'No Uber IPO in Sight After $3.5 Billion From Saudi Arabia: Once upon a time, Silicon Valley startups raised money from venture capitalists and then, with some luck and a promising business, held an IPO to cash in and expand. Uber has no need for such traditions. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009 and valued at $62.5 billion, has now raised $11 billion as it spends heavily to expand globally and battle well-funded rivals such as Lyft Inc. and China s Didi. The ride-hailing company s latest infusion of cash -- a record $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia s sovereign wealth fund -- means Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has the finances to continue avoiding a listing of his company any time soon. "I m going to make sure it happens as late as possible," he told CNBC earlier this year. The money from Saudi Arabia is a new wrinkle in the shifting way the world s largest technology startups are being funded. The $3.5 billion raised by Uber Technologies Inc. this week is far larger than what most companies are able raise when they hold public offerings: Twitter Inc. netted $1.82 billion during its 2013 IPO and First Data Corp. raised $2.56 billion in the largest technology IPO of the past 12 months. In 2004, Google raised $1.67 billion during its stock-market debut.',
'Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion: In its quest to build a global empire, Uber has turned to the Middle East for its biggest infusion of cash from a single investor. Uber said on Wednesday that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom s main investment fund. The money was part of the ride-hailing giant s most recent financing round and continued to value the company at $62.5 billion. The investment does not cash out any of Uber s existing investors.Uber, which has viewed the Middle East as an important area in its expansion, said the investment further aligned the company with Saudi Arabia as the kingdom planned to transform its economy, reducing its dependence on oil and improving employment. The investment from Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest single investments collected by the technology world s top privately held companies. Uber, whose valuation makes it Silicon Valley s most valuable private business, has collected billions at a rapid clip over the last three years. Uber has drawn from a wide variety of investors, including traditional venture capital firms, mutual fund giants like BlackRock and wealthy clients of firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Other sovereign wealth funds like that of Qatar have also invested. Other smaller tech companies have not fared as well in raising money over the last several months. Some so-called unicorns, the term used to refer to businesses valued at more than $1 billion, have struggled to collect new investments, and some, like Jawbone, have had to raise money at lower valuations. Uber is racing to defend its territory which covers 460 cities in more than 69 countries against incumbents in other regions like Southeast Asia and Europe. China, in particular, is a difficult battleground, as Uber is spending millions in a subsidy war with Didi Chuxing, the dominant ride-hailing start-up in the country. Both companies have made no indications that they will back down. Though Uber dominates the American market for ride-hailing, it has increasingly seen overseas markets as crucial to its growth. Among Uber s increasingly important overseas markets is the Middle East, where the company has already said it plans to invest $250 million. The service operates in 15 cities and nine countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia.',
'No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted: The business world is filled with starry-eyed entrepreneurs who hope that the blessings of angel investors and venture capitalists will transform their start-up dreams into companies with billion-dollar valuations. But some successful start-ups have been bucking the trend by growing and expanding without taking a dime from major outside equity investors.Those who buck the odds by bootstrapping their own enterprises are rare, experts say. It s a huge anomaly, said Mark Walsh, head of innovation and investment at the Small Business Administration He estimated that as few as one in 50 brick-and-mortar companies and one in 10 online companies could build their businesses into $50 million or $100 million enterprises on their own. But taking venture capital can be risky. In their haste to get financing, start-up founders often fail to read the fine print and later discover that they have signed away huge shares of the profits. In some cases, founders may be removed by the board of their own companies by the time the businesses are rapidly growing or plan to go public. For these reasons, some founders opt to take debt capital from banks and investors instead of giving away equity.',
"Internet Boom Times Are Over, Says Mary Meeker s Influential Report: Global internet and smartphone user growth are slowing dramatically, but at least things are looking up in India. Growth of internet users worldwide is essentially flat, and smartphone growth is slowing, too. Those sobering insights were among the hundreds packed into the much-awaited Internet Trends report, an annual tech industry ritual led by Mary Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Developing countries have proven harder to capture than expected because internet access remains inaccessible or unaffordable for many, the report said. Here are some other highlights from the report: India is the one country where internet usage is growing, up 40 percent compared with 33 percent a year ago. India passed the U.S. to become the No. 2 global market behind China in 2015. The Asia Pacific region represented 52 percent of smartphone users globally in 2015. The rapid growth in recent years has begun to slow, dropping to 23 percent in 2015 from 35 percent in 2014. North America, Europe, and Japan represented 63 percent of global GDP in 1985. By 2015, their contribution dropped to 29 percent. China and emerging markets in Asia represented 63 percent of global GDP last year. Online advertising is still not very effective. Advertisers are spending an outsize amount on legacy media. Global birth rates are down 39 percent since 1960. So where will technology growth come from Who knows, but at least there's this: Global life expectancy is up 36 percent since 1960.",
'Elizabeth Holmes, Founder of Theranos, Falls From Highest Perch Off Forbes List: Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing company Theranos, was a rare breed, something more rare than even the Silicon Valley unicorn she created: a self-made female billionaire. Forbes, the business publication that has made a franchise of cataloging the rich, had put Ms. Holmes on the top of its list last year of America s richest self-made women.The magazine s new estimated tally of her wealth It went from $4.5 billion to $0. Ms. Holmes s unusual status, as a young woman who created and controlled a company seemingly valued at about $9 billion, captivated the media: She graced countless magazine covers, including T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Theranos, she said, would revolutionize the lab industry by offering blood tests from a single finger prick at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing. But over the last year, Theranos became the subject of a series of hard-hitting Wall Street Journal articles and intense regulatory scrutiny from an array of federal agencies. The media is now mesmerized by Ms. Holmes s fall. Truth be told, the half of the $9 billion valuation ascribed to Theranos and previously listed as Ms. Holmes s wealth was nothing more than an estimate based on investors best guesses. Taking into account all the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the value of the company s top-secret technology, Forbes is now guessing that the company is worth more like $800 million. While Ms. Holmes still owns at least half of the company, much of that value would be tied up with outside investors.Not surprisingly, Theranos refused to shed any light on the matter, except to dispute Forbes s analysis.',
"Early days, but Apple Pay struggles outside U.S.: More than 18 months after Apple Pay took the United States by storm, the smartphone giant has made only a small dent in the global payments market, snagged by technical challenges, low consumer take-up and resistance from banks. The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; Australia and New Zealand Banking Group in Australia; and Canada's five big banks. Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion last year, the vast majority of that in the United States. That is less than the annual volume of transactions in Kenya, a mobile payments pioneer, according to research firm Timetric. And its global turnover is a drop in the bucket in China, where Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent dominate the world's biggest mobile payments market - with an estimated $1 trillion worth of mobile transactions last year, according to iResearch data. Anecdotal evidence from Britain, China and Australia suggests Apple Pay is popular with core Apple followers, but the quality of service, and interest in it, varies significantly. To use Apple Pay, consumers tap their iPhone over payment terminals to buy coffee, train tickets and other services. It can be also used at vending machines that accept contactless payments. Apple Pay transactions were a fraction of the $84.5 billion in iPhone sales for the six months to March, which accounted for two-thirds of Apple's total revenue.",
"Singapore buys $1 billion in Alibaba stock in SoftBank sale: Singapore sovereign wealth funds bought $1 billion of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's shares as part of an $8.9 billion sale by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp, Alibaba's biggest shareholder, the company said on Wednesday. Singapore's GIC Private, Ltd and Temasek Holdings each purchased $500 million of Alibaba shares at $74.00 apiece through subsidiaries, Alibaba said, offering details of the SoftBank sale announced on Tuesday. Alibaba purchased $2 billion of its own stock at the same price, in a move which would add to earnings, Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai told analysts on a call. Members of the Alibaba Partnership of senior executives and founders purchased another $400 million, as expected, at the $74 per share price, he added. SoftBank also offered $5.5 billion in debt securities, which can be exchanged for Alibaba stock in three years, Tsai said. SoftBank Group said on Tuesday it would sell at least $7.9 billion of shares in Alibaba to cut the Japanese company's debt. It said it would remain Alibaba's largest shareholder after the sale. Shares of Alibaba fell about 6.5 percent to close at $76.69.",
"Salesforce takes aim at e-commerce with $2.8 billion Demandware buy: Cloud-based software maker Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) said on Wednesday it would buy Demandware Inc (DWRE.N), whose software is used by businesses to run e-commerce websites, for about $2.8 billion. The deal would help Salesforce open a new front as it seeks to take more market share from traditional software providers such as Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) and SAP AG (SAPG.DE), both of which already offer cloud-based e-commerce services. The e-commerce market has been growing at a blistering pace as retailers expand their online presence, boosting demand for software that helps manage functions such as payment processing and inventory management. Salesforce's cash offer of $75.00 per share represents a 56.3 percent premium to Demandware's Tuesday closing. The lofty premium indicates that multiple bidders were likely at the table for Demandware, Stifel Nicolaus & Co analyst Thomas Roderick said, naming Adobe Systems Inc ABDE.O and Oracle as the other possible contenders. Demandware's shares, which have fallen about 21 percent in the past year, rose 55.9 percent to $74.81 on Wednesday. Shares of Salesforce, considered a barometer for the cloud-computing industry, edged down 0.3 percent.",
'Amazon sues sellers for buying fake reviews: Seller beware if you buy reviews for your products on Amazon, the company might sue you. As part of its effort to combat fake reviews on its platform, Amazon sued three of its sellers today for using sock puppet accounts to post fake reviews about their products. Amazon has been aggressively pursuing reviewers it does not consider genuine over the last year, often using lawsuits to discourage the buying and selling of reviews, but this is the first time it has sued the sellers themselves. Today s suits are against sellers who Amazon claims used fake accounts to leave positive reviews on their own products. The fake reviews spanned from 30 to 45 percent of the sellers total reviews. The defendants are Michael Abbara of California, Kurt Bauer of Pennsylvania, and a Chinese company called CCBetter Direct. Amazon is asking for the defendants to be banned from selling products on any of its sites or accessing its services. The suits also ask for the profits the sellers made on Amazon, attorneys fees, and damages exceeding $25,000. Amazon says that, since early 2015, it has sued over 1,000 people who posted fake reviews for cash. Now, the company is going after the retailers themselves. Amazon said that it intends to eliminate incentives for sellers to buy fake reviews for their products. Our goal is to eliminate the incentives for sellers to engage in review abuse and shut down this ecosystem around fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation, an Amazon spokesperson said.',
'Why you should delete the online accounts you don t use anymore right now: Despite falling out of vogue years ago, MySpace that old precursor to Facebook still has details on more user accounts than the United States has people. And now a hefty chunk of those account credentials has been leaked to the entire Internet, in a humbling reminder that the Matchbox Twenty-inspired username you probably made in high school is still worth a heck of a lot to companies and criminals. As many as 360 million MySpace accounts turned up for sale Friday in a 33-gigabyte dump online, according to reports that were confirmed Monday by MySpace\'s parent, Time Inc. The massive leak includes passwords, email addresses and usernames that were swiped from MySpace in a hack dating back to June 2013, before MySpace made a site redesign that closed some security gaps. It\'s unclear how many of the accounts in the MySpace hack were still "active," in the sense that they belong to people who continue to log into the service today. But chances are at least some of these accounts hadn\'t been touched for years. The reason this makes you vulnerable is the same reason experts say you shouldn\'t use the same username and password for every online service it makes it easy to take one set of stolen credentials and plug them into others, giving hackers potential access to large swaths of your digital life. Personal data from the MySpace breach was going for sale to the tune of thousands of dollars, highlighting how even outdated information can still carry significant value. But whether your old data gets used for marketing, fraud or some other nefarious purpose is still at least partly within your control.',
"Inside Uber s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car: In its relentless pursuit for growth, Uber needs new drivers, and many of those drivers need cars. To help them get started, Uber has been offering short-term leases since July through a wholly owned Delaware-based subsidiary called Xchange Leasing, LLC. It partners with auto dealerships, advertises to drivers, manages risk, and even pays repo men to chase down cars whose drivers aren't making their payments. Xchange may be key to Uber's continued expansion as it tangles with Lyft in the U.S. and a bevy of competitors abroad. Uber announced a partnership with Toyota last week to finance even more cars. This year, Uber said its financing and discount programs, which include Xchange, will put more than 100,000 drivers on the road. That requires dipping into the vast pool of people with bad or no credit. In a deal led by Goldman Sachs, Xchange received a $1 billion credit facility to fund new car leases, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal will help Uber grow its U.S. subprime auto leasing business and it will give many of the world's biggest financial institutions exposure to the company's auto leases. The credit facility is basically a line of credit that Xchange can use to lease out cars to Uber drivers.",
'Instagram Adds Business Profiles in Advertising Growth Push: Facebook s photo-sharing application Instagram is unveiling tools to help businesses differentiate themselves from regular users in a bid to help drive advertising revenue. Instagram, which has been heralded by analysts as a key source of growth for Facebook, will now let businesses create special profiles that will allow customers to contact them directly rather than posting public comments. Instagram will also offer business users new data on which posts are getting the most engagement and give them the ability to turn posts into advertisements. Facebook is working to leverage Instagram s 400 million monthly users to keep up its pace of revenue growth. Instagram ads are expected to bring in $1.53 billion in revenue in 2016, or 15 percent of Facebook s total ad sales, according to eMarketer. Instagram has 8.5 million users in Canada, Levine said.',
'Microsoft sells patents to Xiaomi, builds \'long-term partnership\': Software maker Microsoft is selling about 1,500 of its patents to Chinese device maker Xiaomi [XTC.UL], a rare departure for the U.S. company and part of what the two companies say is the start of a long-term partnership. The deal, announced on Wednesday, also includes a patent cross-licensing arrangement and a commitment by Xiaomi to install copies of Microsoft software, including Office and Skype, on its phones and tablets. Both companies declined to discuss financial terms of the deal. Jonathan Tinter, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said the company was keen to tap into Xiaomi\'s young, affluent and educated users by having its products pre-installed on their devices. He declined to go into detail about the patent deals, but said the overall deal was something "we do only with a few strategic partners." Microsoft has cut licensing deals with many Android device makers over the years, but has had less luck with Chinese manufacturers. Florian Mueller, a patents expert who consulted for Microsoft in the past, said it was rare for Microsoft to actually sell its patents, adding "it\'s possible Microsoft found it easier to impose its Android patent tax on Xiaomi as part of a broader deal that also involved a transfer of patents." ',
'The military s stealth motorcycles are as quiet as an electric toothbrush: The military is funding stealth motorcycles, which would allow riders to quickly sneak up on unsuspecting enemies. The motorcycles operate at 55 decibels about the level of an electric toothbrush or typical conversation yet still can reach 80 mph in speed. The extreme quiet is due to the use of electric motors. The motorcycles also feature two-wheel drive to improve traction on gravel, sand or any challenging terrain. The narrow dimensions of the motorcycles allow them to be driven in forests or other places some military vehicles can t go.The electric motors have limited range the SilentHawk lasts two hours and the other bike, NightMare, has 60 miles of power. So the motorcycles are modified with hybrid engines that can burn almost any type of fuel, such as gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene or diesel. The thinking is these hybrid engines, which are about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, can be used on the part of a mission where being quiet isn t essential. Using the back-up engine increases the SilentHawk s range to 170 miles.',
"VR Experience From McDonald's Lets You Watch Life-Size Angry Birds Take Over a Restaurant: McDonald's ald's has partnered with Sony and Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, to create a 360-degree video promoting the upcoming feature film The Angry Birds Movie. The 60-second spot puts the viewer in the center of a McDonald's restaurant, as the film's feathered flying stars zip in the air from table to table, dance in the aisles and take selfies with dining families. The film was created in partnership with DDB Chicago and has racked up more than 4.5 million views in less than a week. According to John Maxham, chief creative officer at DDB Chicago, it's the first 360-degree video for McDonald's (unless you count the VR Happy Meal painting activation during SXSW). Maxham said it's also the first time a 360-degree film has been shot for any quick service restaurant. To combine animation with reality, DDB Chicago worked with Rovio for the animations using pre-existing bird assets and with Optimist to stitch everything together. According to Shelby Georgis, DDB's creative director, the trick was choreographing animations ahead of time so that the actors were set to work on a specific cadence that makes it look like they're interacting with the animals.",
"China to open e-commerce, other sectors to foreign investment: newspaper: China will lift restrictions to investments by foreign firms in a range of service industry sectors, including e-commerce, logistics, accounting and auditing, the China Securities News quoted commerce minister Gao Hucheng as saying. Gao said China would also promote the orderly opening of other service fields including finance, education, culture and health care, the report published on Saturday said without elaborating or giving a time-frame. China's trade in services would exceed $1 trillion by 2020, the minister predicted. The Ministry of Commerce has previously said the value of China's services trade was expected to exceed $750 billion this year.",
'Thiel-Gawker Fight Raises Concerns About Press Freedom: The story of Gawker versus Hulk Hogan or, perhaps more accurately, Peter Thiel has some asking whether press freedom in the United States is in peril if a scorned billionaire can help deliver a crippling blow to a media company. But since Mr. Thiel spoke to The New York Times on Wednesday about his reasons for funding the lawsuit against Gawker, the debate surrounding the dispute has expanded to encompass ideological battles in media, technology and politics. A variety of observers, including other billionaires and figures involved in GamerGate, have entered into the fray to address themes like Mr. Thiel s political motivations, and the wider issue of Silicon Valley power players and their involvement with the news media. Several journalists felt that Mr. Thiel s political views and connection withDonald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, could be worrisome based on Mr. Trump s previous comments about changing libel laws to make it easier to sue media outlets.',
"Twitter's retreat from 'Buy' buttons puts its payments partner Stripe in an awkward spot: In September, payments startup Stripe trumpeted a new product that would allow retailers to sell goods directly in social networking and content apps. The biggest partner app Stripe launched with was Twitter, whose 'Buy' buttons allowed users to buy items directly from a tweet. But just a month later, Twitter disbanded the team working on 'Buy' buttons, as Recode reported on Thursday, and shifted its focus on commerce to other initiatives. The 'Buy' button technology still exists, and retailers can still use Stripe's new product, Relay, to sell products on Twitter. But the perception that Stripe's biggest partner no longer considers it a priority doesn't look good. You could imagine the challenge convincing potential retail partners that they should invest in a program whose biggest platform partner no longer appears to be interested. The idea behind Relay is that people will increasingly want to purchase items online wherever they discover them, even if it's not on a shopping site or app. And as people spend more of their online time on Twitter and other social apps, they should have the option to complete transactions quickly without leaving those apps, the thinking goes, rather than getting redirected to another site that may be difficult to navigate on a mobile phone. In addition to Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook have also bought into this thinking to some degree. Each has introduced 'Buy' buttons, with varying levels of investment. But neither one of them currently works with Stripe on the Relay product. The open question for Stripe is whether retailers and users will show real interest in Twitter's Buy buttons without the company promoting them and, if not, whether Stripe can find another big-name app to replace Twitter as the anchor partner.",
"Amazon built a tool that puts Alexa in your browser: Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is super useful in the Echo and lot of fun to use. But if you don't have an Echo or can't buy one because you're outside of the US, it can be hard to appreciate Alexa's skill set. In light of this, Amazon has created a web app that lets you play with Alexa right in your browser. You can access the web app at echosim.io and it lets you ask Alexa all kinds of questions. What it doesn't let you experience is the always listening nature of the Echo device and its far field microphone array you have to click and hold a button on the site before you speak to it. (That makes it closer to the experience you get with the Amazon Tap than the Echo itself.) The real purpose of this simulator is to let international devs see what Alexa is capable of, since Amazon doesn't yet the Echo or other Alexa devices outside of the US. Amazon says it was inspired by a project from a hackathon last year. Still, it's open to anyone with an Amazon account, so fire it up and start pelting Alexa with questions.",
'Google Prevails as Jury Rebuffs Oracle in Code Copyright Case: A jury ruled in favor of Google on Thursday in a long legal dispute withOracle over software used to power most of the world s smartphones. Oracle contended that Google used copyrighted material in 11,000 of its 13 million lines of software code in Android, its mobile phone operating system. Oracle asked for $9 billion from Google. Google said it made fair use of that code and owed nothing. The victory for Google cheered other software developers, who operate much the way Google did when it comes to so-called open-source software. Unlike traditional software created by corporations and tightly held, open-source products are released, often with some restrictions, for anyone to use and modify. Great news for progress and innovation, Chris Dixon, a technology investor with Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, posted on Twitter after the verdict. Android relies in part on Java, an open-source software language that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Oracle argued that Google executives violated Oracle s copyright by using aspects of Java without permission. The courtroom fight was something of a watershed for technology and could offer clarity on legal rules surrounding open-source technology, which is used in everything from smartphones and digital recording devices to the software that runs many of the world s biggest data centers. People who work with open-source technology worried that a victory for Oracle would have led other companies to make similar demands of open-source products. It does give a lot of breathing room to other companies and individuals trying to do a lot of innovative activity, said Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.',
'Bessemer-Backed Twilio Files for Initial Public Offering: Twilio Inc., the San Francisco-based company that helps clients including Uber Technologies Inc. build web and mobile applications, filed for an initial public offering. The software developer, backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, filed with an initial offering size of $100 million, a placeholder amount used to calculate fees that will probably change. Twilio had more than 28,000 active customers at the end of March, according to the prospectus filed Thursday. They include enterprise-software company Box Inc., department-store chain Nordstrom Inc. and rideshare company Uber. Twilio said in the filing its communications software is embedded in Uber s mobile app, helping it update riders in real-time about their ride requests as well as helping the company scale its business. Bessemer holds a stake of 28.5 percent in Twilio, according to the prospectus. Union Square Ventures holds 13.6 percent and Fidelity owns 6.1 percent. Twilio has yet to make a profit. It posted a net loss of about $36 million in 2015, on sales of $167 million, even as revenue grew 88 percent that year after a 78 percent bump in 2014. The company said that it expects its growth rate to decline over time. WhatsApp Inc. contributed a significant chunk of that revenue. The messaging tool owned by Facebook Inc. uses Twilio s technology in its applications to verify new and existing users. WhatsApp accounted for 17 percent of Twilio s sales last year and 15 percent in the first three months of 2016.',
'Snapchat raises $1.81 billion in new funding round: Messaging app Snapchat has raised $1.81 billion in funding, the company reported in a U.S. regulatory filing on Thursday, a sign that investor interest is strong despite concerns among some venture capitalists that the platform is struggling to attract advertisers. Venture capital database PitchBook estimated the company\'s valuation after the financing at $17.81 billion, up from $16 billion at it most recent financing in February.Snapchat, headquartered in Venice, California, has faced concerns from big investors familiar with the company that its estimated valuation is not justified because of an uneven revenue stream. Its advertising business, which began last October, is the company\'s only significant revenue source. But, with a strong user base of 13- to 24-year-olds, the app provides an attractive platform to reach millennials and hook young consumers on brands. The company has more than 100 million active users, about 60 percent of whom are 13- to 24-year-olds. Snapchat early this year raised $175 million from Fidelity Investments in a "flat round" of financing that did not adjust the company\'s valuation. The mutual fund bought shares at $30.72 each. Fidelity has repeatedly adjusted the estimated valuation of its stake in the company, slashing it by at least 25 percent last year only to boost it by more than 60 percent in February. Investors in this latest round include General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine, among others, tech blog TechCrunch reported on Thursday. TechCrunch also reported that Snapchat\'s revenues in 2015 were $59 million, according to a presentation to investors that was seen by the news site. That\'s up from $3.1 million for the first 11 months of 2014, sources told Reuters last year.',
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"InMobi grapples with senior, mid-level attrition amid concerns about future: Online advertising startup InMobi , one of India's early 'unicorns,' is struggling to retain senior executives amid questions about whether new strategic initiatives are working as well as worries about the future of the company. InMobi, which was founded by Naveen Tewari in 2007 and was the first startup in which Japan's SoftBank invested, now has some 1,500 employees compared to twice that number at its peak. The Japanese conglomerate, which has since backed Snapdeal and Ola, poured $200 million into InMobi in 2011 but wrote down most of that amount in 2014. The exits also come during a time when InMobi is struggling to raise funds and chart out a sustainable business model that can adapt to the massive changes that are taking place in the online and mobile advertising space, according to both current and former executives at the company. According to these executives, InMobi, which was estimated to be valued at $1 billion, now generates between around $300 million in annual revenue. InMobi has not registered profits since its founding in 2007. InMobi's challenges have been compounded by the fact that its flagship product Miip -- that targeted global retailers like Walmart -- hasn't taken off. Miip also took much longer than expected to scale and customers found the product underwhelming, according to at least two customers who have used the product.",
'Alibaba Facing SEC Investigation Over Accounting Practices: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell the most in four months after the e-commerce giant said it s being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices and whether they violate federal laws. The company is providing documents and cooperating with the probe, according to the Hangzhou, China-based company s annual report. The investigation is looking into consolidation practices, related party transactions and data reported from its Singles Day promotion. Singles Day is Alibaba s biggest shopping day, attracting more than 90 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) of sales on its e-commerce platforms in a 24-hour period last year. Alibaba fell 6.8 percent to $75.59, the biggest drop since January. It was down less than 1 percent this year through Tuesday.',
'In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge: Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about. Valleywag declined to play the game. It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised but were off the table. It said Google co-founder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That the Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker s wedding was seriously over the top. Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay. This was gossip with an attitude, and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Mr. Thiel s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in $140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing. The revelation of Mr. Thiel s involvement in the suit this week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media once again to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies are less transparent about what they do.',
"HP Inc profit beats Street amid weak market for PCs, printers: HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday. HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday.The company's revenue fell about 11 percent to $11.59 billion.Revenue in the personal systems business, the company's biggest, fell 9.9 percent in the second quarter, while revenue declined 15.8 percent in the printing division.Total costs and expenses fell by 10.3 percent to $10.75 billion in the second quarter ended April 30, from a year earlier.",
'Salesforce inks deal with AWS to expand international presence: AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com, with Salesforce naming the cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increase its international presence without having to build its own data centers in countries that have data sovereignty laws, which require that data stays in-country. It s expensive to build their own, so they are turning to a public cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon to do the heavy lifting for them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke glowingly of AWS. There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base, he said in a statement. It s worth keeping in mind, however that Salesforce also has a deep relationship with Microsoft and CEO Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce s massive customer conference last fall. But the relationship has a flip side and the companies also compete with one another. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research, points out that this announcement should help Salesforce compete with Oracle and Microsoft overseas.',
'Terrapattern is reverse image search for maps, powered by a neural network: Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn t Google come up with this 10 years ago Click on a feature on the map a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It s remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. How does that work And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it and for under $35,000 The secret, as with so many other interesting visual computing projects these days, is a convolutional neural network. It s essentially an AI-like program that extracts every little detail from an image and looks for patterns at various levels of organization similar to how our own visual system works, though the brain is infinitely more subtle and flexible. In Terrapattern s case, the neural network was trained to look at small squares of the landscape and, comparing those patterns to a huge database of tagged map features from OpenStreetMap, it learned to associate them with certain concepts. Think of how a camera recognizes a face and knows when it is blinking or smiling. It doesn t actually know what faces, smiles and eyes are, but it associates them with certain patterns of pixels, and can reliably pick them out. Once Terrapattern had been trained to recognize and categorize all manner of geographical features, from boats to water towers, its creators set it free on detailed maps of the greater New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Francisco areas. It scoured the landscape and built a huge database of features and similarities which can be quickly queried and the results returned immediately (the neural network isn t doing any thinking when you click on a feature its work is done for this dataset). Of course, you could just search for tennis fields in Oakland or the like and get perfectly good results, but this allows one to search for things that may not be listed so formally. What if you were looking for houses in the middle of fields, or cul de sacs, or dead lawns, or circular parking lots Terrapattern knows where those are just as much as it knows where the airports and ferry terminals are. They re all just assemblages of features to the neural network.',
'Facebook will shut down FBX, its desktop ad exchange: Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this is part of Facebook s shift to mobile (in its most recent earnings report, mobile accounted for 82 percent of Facebook s ad revenue). He said: "Mobile is now a necessary component of effective marketing campaigns, and Facebook is helping millions of businesses understand their customers purchase path across devices. Dynamic Ads and Custom Audiences have mobile at their core and are delivering excellent results for businesses, so Facebook Exchange spending has shifted towards those solutions. This is about giving people more relevant ads and marketers more effective formats, especially in an increasingly mobile world. Our ads API is open to all developers so they can innovate on our platform and build great ad experiences for brands and their customers." Facebook launched FBX back in 2012, but its focus seemed to have shifted away from the exchange in recent years.',
'Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too: The company is taking a $950 million charge to unwind the last vestiges of the Nokia deal. Microsoft is further scaling back its flagging phone business, exiting the consumer market and cutting another 1,850 jobs. As part of the move announced Wednesday, Microsoft will take a $950 million charge and cut what little remained of its Finland-based phone hardware business, unwinding the last of its disastrous $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia\'s phone unit. Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end"feature phone" business. The company has been scaling back its phone ambitions ever since the Nokia deal closed, with CEO Satya Nadella quickly shifting to a strategy focused on bringing Microsoft\'s software and services to Android and iOS rather than trying to convince phone buyers to shift to Windows. Despite all the cuts and having already seen its market share dip below 1 percent Microsoft says it isn\'t totally out of the phone-making business. The company insists it will continue to serve phones aimed at the business market and license Windows 10 to any other hardware makers that want to give Windows Phone a try.',
'Toyota and Volkswagen Step Up Investments in Tech Start-Ups: On Tuesday, two of the world s largest automakers, Toyota and Volkswagen, said they were stepping up to invest in technology start-ups that are working to change the way people travel by car. Toyota said it had formed a partnership with and invested an undisclosed amount in Uber, the biggest ride-hailing company. Gett, the app popular in Europe, said it was working with Volkswagen, and the automaker was investing $300 million in the start-up. The alliances are the latest in a string of pairings between technology companies and traditional automakers that are scrambling to reposition themselves. For decades, automakers had abided by the well-worn formula of making bigger and more powerful cars to fuel their growth. But start-ups like Uber and Lyft and technology companies like Google and Tesla have disrupted that cadence. These companies, mostly located in Silicon Valley, have in the last few years sped the development of self-driving cars, electric vehicles and ride services. Automakers have become increasingly concerned about those technologies and their potential to help people travel easily and cheaply without owning a car or even without knowing how to drive. In January, General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft, the ride-hailing app popular with American users, with a focus on developing networks of autonomous vehicles. Ford Motor is making over its Dearborn, Mich., headquarters into a Silicon Valley-like campus of green buildings connected by self-driving shuttles. And a few weeks ago, Fiat Chrysler and Google agreed to produce a test fleet of driverless minivans. Both BMW and Mercedes-Benz have started to pilot ride services. Even other technology companies only tangentially related to automobiles are becoming more involved in ride services. Apple, which is working on its own autos project, said this month it had invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing company that competes fiercely with Uber.',
'French Tax Investigators Swoop on Google s Paris Offices: French police and prosecutors swooped on Google s Paris offices on Tuesday, intensifying a tax-fraud probe amid accusations across Europe that the Internet giant fails to pay its fair share. The raids are part of preliminary criminal investigation opened in June 2015 after French tax authorities lodged a complaint, according to a statement from the nation s financial prosecutor. The probe is seeking to verify whether Google s Irish unit has permanent establishment in France and whether the firm failed to declare part of its revenues in France. Prosecutors will probably go after Google s management in Ireland, according to Alain Frenkel, a tax lawyer in Paris. That doesn t mean Google won t also face a recovery order from France s tax authorities, he said in a phone interview. The raids come as Google, which is part of parent company Alphabet Inc., faces outrage in Europe over the small amount of tax it pays in the region. France has called on the company to pay back taxes of about 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion). While no one has been charged of any wrongdoing, French penalties for aggravated tax fraud have recently been ramped up. Convicted managers can potentially face as long as 7 years in jail and a 2 million-euro fine.',
"Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spin off its troubled services business in an $8.5 billion deal: Six months after the Silicon Valley stalwart Hewlett-Packard split into two companies, one half announced a surprise plan to split yet again. Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it will spin off its long-troubled services unit and merge it with the IT services firm CSC in a deal worth about $8.5 billion. The complex deal, in which HPE will combine its $20 billion Enterprise Services unit accounting for more than one third of HPE's 2015 revenue with CSC into a combined company of which HPE shareholders will end up owning about half. The total consideration of the deal includes the creation of $4.5 billion of new shares, a cash dividend worth $1.5 billion, and the transfer of about $2.5 billion in debt and other liabilities off HPE's books and into the new company. HPE also expects to trim its operating costs by about $1 billion as a result of the spinoff. What will remain at HPE is a leaner $32 billion company that leads the world in sales of servers, the computers that are stacked together in data center racks that power the Internet. It competes with networking giant Cisco Systems in selling gear for corporate networks, with EMC in data storage gear, and also sports a small software business that did about $3.6 billion in sales last year. The new company HPE and CSC are calling it Spinco for now will be a pure player in the low-margin, IT outsourcing market that had been a shrinking, expensive weight around the old HP's neck during the time it was struggling to bounce back. Revenue in the unit has declined for several years, during years that its customers went through wrenching changes in how they purchase and consume technology. The move will also unwind what in hindsight has turned out to be one of the worst acquisitions in the old HP's history, the $14 billion acquisition of the IT services firm EDS, consummated in 2008 under yet another prior HP CEO, Mark Hurd, now the CEO of Oracle.",
'Snapchat is raising more money around $20 billion valuation: Snapchat may have first made its name in the crowded world of mobile apps with an ephemeral messaging service, but the startup and its wildly popular app are not disappearing anywhere soon. TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that Snapchat is raising yet more financing at around a $20 billion valuation. Sources with knowledge of the deal say the social media giant is in the process of a round of about $200 million. This new financing, we understand, is a follow-on to the $175 million Series F round led by Fidelity. Snapchat was said to be valued at $16 billion in that round, flat on the year before. However, filings from earlier this month and embedded below, uncovered for us by market analysts VC Experts, show that the Series F was expanded.Expanding the Series F with a Series FP, as it s described in the document below, would also fit in with a description we ve heard more than once about Snapchat s fundraising: The startup is always raising on a rolling basis, partly because investors are so interested. They get offers all the time, one investor close to the company said. And once you start to grow on this path, many people come to give you money. You don t know how to value the company, so the best way to do that is to do some kind of rolling funding. When you have a hot company and many people are approaching you, you do a market of discovery. That may be different from other startups, but in a way it reflects Snapchat s own fast growth and its taste for trying out new things like QR codes to connect to accounts and content, their crazy face-changing filters and more.',
"Spotify revenue surged, losses grew too, but far more slowly - which is great news for Spotify: Spotify lost more money in 2015. And its managers and investors are probably very happy about that. That's because the music streaming service's revenue increased much faster than its losses something it hasn't always been able to say. Given that Spotify has told its investors it is headed for an IPO in the next few years, it's the kind of performance it will need to be able to replicate with consistency. Filings show that Spotify, based in Sweden and the U.K., generated revenue of $2.12 billion last year, up about 80 percent from the $1.18 billion it brought in the prior year (all prices in the story converted from euros to dollars at the exchange rate from December 31, 2015). Losses, meanwhile, hit $188.7 million but that number was only up 6.7 percent from the previous year's total of $176.9 million. That's a much, much better performance than 2014, when Spotify's losses ballooned by 289 percent, and its revenue was only up 45 percent. As in the past, most of Spotify's revenue comes from its subscription service, which now boasts more than 25 million users worldwide. And most of that money goes right back out the door to music labels, artists and other music rights-holders. If Spotify can keep it up, then it will have pulled off something special by showing it can run and grow a streaming music service at scale. Traditionally, streaming music services have struggled because their music expenses increased at the same pace as their growth or even faster than their growth.",
'Amazon no longer offers price match refunds on anything but TVs: Amazon has quietly ended its price protection policy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company s policy comes at a time when a handful of startups have launched to help consumers automate the process of requesting refunds when prices change on online sites, including Amazon and dozens of other e-commerce stores. For example, newcomer Earny recently debuted a mobile app that helps consumers get their money back on purchases after price drops. Earny co-founder Oded Vakrat says that, so far, around 50 percent of the refund requests the app handled were for Amazon purchases. Earny also competes with Paribus, which offers a similar service both online and on mobile. Meanwhile, older sites like camelcamelcamel allow consumers to track Amazon price drops and receive alerts. Prior to this policy change, Amazon s price protection policy was already one of the least friendly to consumers, as it used to provide seven days of price matching on price drops. That means if you purchased an item from Amazon which the company later marked down, you could request a refund. However, unlike many stores, Amazon only matched its own prices for items, not competitors pricing with the exception of TVs and cell phones. In comparison, other stores have more pro-consumer policies, including Best Buy, which provides price matching during its return and exchange period (15 days is standard) and Walmart, which offers 90 days of protection, for example. As for how this change will impact startups like Earny and Paribus Vakrat optimistically referred to this blow as a great opportunity to show why consumers need startups like Earny to have their back. Amazon insists that its price policy has not changed it says that its prices are dynamic and that its customer service agents have made exceptions in the past, but that wasn t the rule. In addition, Amazon wants to caution its customers that sharing their credentials with third-parties puts their accounts at risk.',
'To halt smartphone slide, Samsung rewrites playbook: From the way it chooses smartphone components to the models it brings to market, Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has undergone a painful process of breaking from its past to reverse a slide in its handset business. For example, the world\'s largest smartphone maker agonized over camera specs for its flagship Galaxy S7 until the last moment - ultimately defying industry convention by opting for fewer pixels in exchange for improved autofocus features and low-light performance, a move that contributed to early success. It also pared back its product line-up, overcoming internal resistance, enabling it to streamline production, an executive said. The handset business has now stabilized, and had its best profit in nearly two years in January-March, though historically low smartphone industry growth still leaves Samsung looking for the "next big thing". After peaking in 2013, a sharp drop in mobile profits exposed Samsung as slow to adjust to the changing market: its budget devices were overpriced and unappealing versus Chinese offerings, and the 2014 version of its Galaxy S flopped. That prompted a cull among executives and stoked investor worries Samsung might not be able to recover as rivals including Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi gained market share at its expense. There was no sweeping, across-the-board fix. Rather, Samsung embarked two years ago on an overhaul that included a shift from a phone-for-all-needs approach towards a line-up that emphasized economies of scale. It revamped design, using metal frames and curved screens, and gave high-end features such as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens to its low- and mid-tier products. The product cull paid off; the revamped models helped Samsung recover in big markets such as India. "There was a feeling the sheer number of phones in the market was confusing for customers," said a Samsung India executive, declining to be identified as he was not authorized to speak with the media.Samsung\'s Kim says his focus now is on premium-end smartphones - those costing $600 and above - where not all industry players have the muscle to compete.',
"Selling Uber Shares May Be Tougher Than You Think: SharesPost Inc., a broker of private technology stocks, approached investors with what seemed like an alluring offer: a potential investment in a fund that would hold Uber Technologies Inc. shares. In exchange for exposure to the high-flying ride-hailing startup, they were asked to part with at least $100,000 each and agree to hold the stake until the company goes public or gets acquired, with no vote in business decisions or visibility into its operations or finances. But SharesPost said it called off the proposed deal. The plan was to purchase as much as $10 million in preferred shares from Uber s most recent round of financing and package them in an investment fund to be sold at a premium, according to offering documents obtained by Bloomberg. SharesPost said it wouldn t pursue the transaction, citing a lack of investor interest. It became clear that the minimum funds would not be collected for this deal, and as a result, the sales team began to inform interested clients of this fact, Greg Berardi, a spokesman for SharesPost, wrote in an e-mail. The erstwhile offering shows the complexity of giving investors the chance to gain shares in a startup that wants to tightly control who gets a sliver, no matter how small. Like many startups, Uber limits sales of its shares. Such transactions can distort a company's valuation, leave control in the hands of unknown investors and result in tax liabilities for the company, its employees and other shareholders. Uber declined to comment on the SharesPost proposal, but a spokeswoman said when Uber learns of potential unauthorized shares on the market, the company contacts the people involved. SharesPost's role in share sales has drawn regulatory scrutiny. The broker settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012 to resolve claims that the online marketplace for private-company shares acted as an unregistered broker. SharesPost paid $80,000 and Greg Brogger, then the company s president, paid $20,000, without admitting wrongdoing. Brogger is now SharesPost s chief executive officer and chairman, and the company is registered with the SEC. SharesPost's spokesman called the 2012 settlement completely irrelevant to a 2016 fund that never got off the ground. Speaking to a Silicon Valley audience in March, SEC Chair Mary Jo White cautioned that secondary transactions could amplify errors or misconceptions in valuation. She highlighted the lack of transparency in such deals as cause for concern. For the proposed Uber transaction, the documents said a fund managed by a member of SharesPost s board of directors would buy the shares at a 2 percent premium to their price in last year s funding round, which valued the company at $62.5 billion, and then resell them for 5 percent more. It s unclear where the SharesPost fund would acquire the Uber stake from. VC Experts, a private-market research firm, estimated that the transaction would give Uber an implied valuation of more the $70 billion.",
'Modi s Mini-Shuttle Set to Blast Into Elon Musk s Race for Space: India is set to launch a scale model of a reusable spacecraft on Monday, a project that in time could pit the nation against billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The winged vessel -- one-fifth of full size -- is due to blast off on a rocket from Sriharikota base on the southeastern coast, reach an altitude of 70 kilometers (43 miles) and glide back at supersonic speeds to Earth for a splashdown in the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.India put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014 for just $74 million, demonstrating a combination of technological capability and low costs that chimes with the goal of more frequent space travel being championed by Musk s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Bezos s Blue Origin LLC. Both companies seek to curb costs by making rockets reusable and are conducting test launches more often.India plans to spend about 75 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) on its entire space program in the year through March 2017, a fraction of the yearly $19-billion-dollar budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S. The reusable space vehicle is supposed to provide a cost-effective and reliable option for operations such as launching satellites, according to the Indian space agency. Mock-upson government websites resemble the long-defunct NASA space shuttles.The nation remains about eight years away from a full-scale version of the reusable space vehicle, and still has to cross the hurdle of steering the vessel safely back to land rather than water, according to the Indian space agency. Musk s SpaceX in December pulled off a soft, vertical touchdown after the two-stage rocket propelled its payload. Less than month earlier, Bezos sent one of his test rockets to the edge of space and landed it safely back on Earth. "India has to start somewhere, sometime," Lele said. "That time is now."',
'Start-Ups Once Showered With Cash Now Have to Work for It: The balance of power is shifting across tech start-up land. Not long ago, entrepreneurs had the upper hand. With investors eager to get a piece of the next Uber or Airbnb, entrepreneurs often just lifted their little fingers to get financing. Some investors let the entrepreneurs choose their own terms, while others gave multimillion-dollar paydays to start-up founders long before their companies were a success. Now investors have the advantage. Instead of venture capitalists begging to be allowed to invest, entrepreneurs are coming to them begging for cash. Investors are exerting their newfound power by asking more questions about a start-up s prospects and taking more time to invest. Some are pushing for management changes or for financing terms that would help cushion any losses they might face. Venture capitalists are putting founders through everything short of a proctology exam before they invest, said Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The changing balance of power is evident in the numbers. Venture capitalists have put less money into start-ups in the United States in the last two quarters, according to the National Venture Capital Association; funding dropped 11 percent to $12.1 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier. With a smaller capital pie, entrepreneurs have to work harder for a piece. Investors have also been better able to negotiate financing terms that benefit them. According to a survey from the law firm Fenwick & West, investors of richly valued start-ups have been getting more provisions such as guaranteed payouts and minimum investment gains. Such terms are still relatively rare, but tend to become more common after the number and size of deals decline, said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick & West partner. Above all, investors are no longer paying any price to invest in a start-up. Since the beginning of this year, about 30 companies have had to settle for lower valuations than they previously received when they raised money, according to the research firm CB Insights. That is nearly as many as in all of 2015. Investors have materially more time to do diligence than before, said Ben Ling, a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. Across our portfolio, even for the best companies, fund-raising is a longer process. ',
'Warren Buffett Stake Suggests Apple Is All Grown Up: With this week s imprimatur from the legendary investor Warren Buffett, it should now be official: Apple, the world s largest company by market capitalization and a symbol of American technological innovation, is a value stock. That may prove to be a decidedly mixed blessing. Mr. Buffett is the world s most prominent and successful proponent of value investing an approach that seeks stocks that are undervalued and sell for less than their intrinsic value, as Benjamin Graham put it his 1949 classic The Intelligent Investor. Mr. Buffett credits Mr. Graham with shaping his own approach to investing. So value investors took notice when Mr. Buffett s holding company,Berkshire Hathaway, disclosed it had invested $1 billion in Apple stock during the last quarter. We ve just looked at it again, said Bill Smead, who manages the Smead Value Fund, one of the most successful large-cap value mutual funds over the last five years, according to Morningstar. Anybody that discounts the thinking at Berkshire Hathaway does so at their peril, in my opinion. Value stocks are typically unpopular among many investors, their shares often battered by disappointing short-term revenue and earnings results. They usually trade at very low price-to-earnings ratios, a common valuation measure. Nonetheless, some academic studies have suggested that over time, they outperform other stocks, in part because expectations are so low. Today there are numerous value investors, value mutual funds and value exchange-traded funds that pursue variations of the strategy, many of them probably now considering adding Apple to their portfolios, if they haven t already. Apple is going to attract more value investors, said Toni Sacconaghi, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein who covers Apple. They re looking for beaten-down stocks with negative sentiment. Apple has traded below a market multiple for years and sentiment has become increasingly pessimistic, especially over the past month. ',
'Walmart Outperforms Estimates, but Online Retail Lags: Walmart reported on Thursday that its quarterly revenue had risen 0.9 percent, exceeding analysts forecasts and signaling that its strategies to combat a tough retail environment were working. The results were particularly striking after dismal earnings reports by several retail chains last week, and Walmart s shares shot up nearly 10 percent.Amazon does much more business than Walmart.com, Mr. Saunders said, and yet it still reports double-digit growth. Amazon reported that net product sales rose 13 percent, to $79.3 billion in 2015, while Walmart reported that global annual e-commerce revenue had risen 12 percent to $13.7 billion in its latest fiscal year. In other areas, Walmart significantly outperformed its peers.Over all, Walmart reported that profit fell to $3.08 billion, or 98 cents a share, compared with $3.34 billion, or $1.03 a share, a year earlier. That beat expectations of 88 cents a share, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Revenue was $115.9 billion; analysts had expected $113.2 billion. Walmart, especially with apparel, did better than other retailers for a really stressful period, Mr. Sosnick said.',
'Salesforce Surges as Big Money Deals Help Drive Sales Growth: Salesforce.com Inc. is targeting the biggest of customers to get big itself. The company, once known for selling business productivity software to small- and medium-sized clients, is getting more traction with large companies while drawing closer to an annual sales goal of $10 billion. Salesforce said Wednesday it landed the most large deals ever in a three-month period during the fiscal first quarter, including one worth at least $100 million. The company also forecast revenue in the current quarter that topped analysts estimates, sending shares up the most in almost three months Thursday. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff is benefiting from a multiyear effort to persuade corporations to adopt software delivered over the Internet, or the cloud. During a call with analysts, the company touted new deals with Samsung Electronics Co., Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that expanded on existing relationships. Salesforce jumped 4.1 percent to $81.09, at the close in New York, the biggest advance since Feb. 25. That brings the gains for the year to 3.4 percent. Sales will be $2.01 billion to $2.02 billion in the fiscal second quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement. Analysts on average had estimated $1.98 billion, according to data complied by Bloomberg. Revenue increased 27 percent to $1.92 billion in the fiscal first quarter ended April 30, topping the average estimate of $1.89 billion.',
"Samsung to partner with Alibaba on mobile payments in China: Samsung Electronics said it had struck a deal with a Alibaba Group Holding for owners of its phones to be able to more easily make payments with Alipay accounts - a move it hopes will boost sales in the world's biggest smartphone market. Users of Samsung Pay will also have the option of paying with their Alipay accounts without having separately access the Alipay application. Alipay, which is operated by Alibaba unit Ant Financial Services Group, has 450 million active registered users. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, launched its own mobile payment system, Samsung Pay, in China in March, about one month after Apple Inc launched Apple Pay.But Alipay's dominant position has meant that it will be difficult for any latecomers in mobile payments to gain significant ground just on their own. Samsung has been losing out to Chinese rivals Huawei and Xiaomi as well as Apple and no longer ranks among the top five smartphone brands in China, according to market researcher Strategy Analytics.",
'This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff: Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed.: Atlassian, which makes popular project-management and chat apps such as Jira and HipChat, doesn t run on sales quotas and end-of-quarter discounts. In fact, its sales team doesn t pitch products to anyone, because Atlassian doesn t have a sales team. Initially an anomaly in the world of business software, the Australian company has become a beacon for other businesses counting on word of mouth to build market share. Customers don t want to call a salesperson if they don t have to, says Scott Farquhar, Atlassian s co-chief executive officer. They d much rather be able to find the answers on the website. The way technology companies sell software has changed dramatically in the past decade. The availability of open source alternatives has pushed traditional brands and rising challengers to offer more free trials, free basic versions of their software with paid upgrades, and online promotions. Incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which employ thousands of commissioned salespeople, are acquiring open source or cloud companies that sell differently, says Laurie Wurster, an analyst at researcher Gartner. Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub are among the companies trying to attract corporate clients with small-bore efforts that rely largely on good reviews. The idea is to distribute products to individuals or small groups at potential customers big and small and hope interest spreads upstairs. So far, though, Atlassian remains the most extreme example of this model. It s a 14-year-old company, valued at $5 billion since going public in December, without a single salesperson on the payroll. More than 80 Fortune 100 companies use Atlassian s software, and venture capitalists and peers often talk about trying to follow, at least partly, its sales strategy.Atlassian s roots lie in Sydney s barren tech scene. It was kept aloft early on not by venture capital, but by the founders credit cards, meaning it didn t have impatient investors to answer to. I don t think their success is replicable, says Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures.',
"Cisco's forecast tops Wall Street estimates; shares rise: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported better-than-expected results and gave an upbeat forecast for the current quarter, sending its shares up about 7 percent in extended trading. The company has been beefing up its wireless security and datacenter businesses to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. Results in the latest reported quarter were mainly driven by a 17 percent jump in sales in its security business, which offers firewall protection as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems. Revenue in the company's collaboration unit, which sells IP phones, rose 10 percent in the third quarter ended April 30. Sales in the data center business, which makes servers, rose 1 percent. The company's legacy switches and routers business is still by far its largest, accounting for nearly 60 percent of total revenue. Sales in the switching unit fell 3 percent, while router sales fell 5 percent, painting a grim picture of corporate technology spending.The company's net profit fell to $2.35 billion, or 46 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $2.44 billion, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 57 cents per share. Analysts on an average had expected a profit of 55 cents per share and revenue of $11.97 billion. Revenue fell to $12.00 billion from $12.14 billion.",
'Tesla to raise $1.4 billion with public offering to fund Model 3 production:Tesla will raise at least $1.4 billion through a secondary stock offering, the company announced in SEC filings today, and an additional 5.5 million shares will be purchased by CEO Elon Musk via a stock option exercise. The funds will be used to "accelerate the production ramp of Model 3," according to the filing, with Tesla moving its 500,000 vehicle per year build plan to 2018 from 2020. Musk will exercise all his outstanding stock options for a total of 5,503,972 shares, with 2,777,901 of those being offered for sale to cover his tax burden. Tesla will not receive any of the proceeds from that sale, and Musk\'s net holdings in Tesla will increase. The Tesla Model 3 was unveiled in March and is the first "affordable" Tesla car, priced at around $35,000. Tesla says it will go more than 215 miles on a full charge and the success of the Model 3 will determine the future of the company. The first deliveries of the car are expected in late 2017, with volume production beginning in 2018. Initial demand for the car appears to be very strong, with the company reporting that it had taken roughly 400,000 preorders with refundable $1,000 deposits as of late April. In the filing Tesla revealed that as of May 15th, it currently had 373,000 preorders after 8,000 customer cancellations and 4,200 duplicate orders were cancelled by the company. Tesla is no stranger to secondary offerings. It raised around $500 million in a smaller offering last year.',
'LinkedIn Says Hackers Are Trying to Sell Fruits of Huge 2012 Data Breach: LinkedIn said on Wednesday that hackers were attempting to sell what they claimed were 117 million email addresses and passwords of its users, suggesting that a data breach in 2012 was magnitudes bigger than initially thought.LinkedIn is investigating the authenticity of the data, the company said. But a security researcher, Troy Hunt, said on Twitter that he had verified a portion of the breach and that it was highly likely this is legit. The hacker is trying to sell the data on an illegal marketplace for five bitcoin, or about $2,200, according to Motherboard. In 2012, the account information of 6.5 million users was posted to a Russian hacker site. LinkedIn settled a class-action lawsuit in 2015, agreeing to compensate 800,000 people who had paid for its premium services. Since the attack, the company has stepped up its security procedures, including enabling two-step verification, a technique security experts recommend for your most sensitive online accounts.',
'Google Home vs. Amazon Echo. Let the Battle Begin. Google on Wednesday introduced Google Home, a voice-controlled, Internet-connected speaker that competes directly with Amazon s smart speaker, Echo, which costs $180. The company also introduced Allo, a messaging app, and a rebranding of its virtual assistant. Here s a quick explanation of what these major announcements, made at the Google I/O developer conference, mean for consumers. What do Home and Echo have in common Home and Echo are both speakers that require a wired power connection. They stream music and perform tasks like web searches, adding calendar appointments and looking up movie showtimes over an Internet connection. What are the differences between Google Home and Amazon Echo Google has yet to share many important details, including a price tag, about Google Home, which is scheduled for release this fall. However, from the announcement we can glean a few differences: Home, which can easily be held in one hand, is shorter and more compact than Echo. Both speakers have a cylindrical shape, but the top of Home is slanted downward, whereas Echo s top is flat. Google is allowing consumers to choose from different colors for the bottom part of Home, while Echo comes only in black. (Amazon also sells a smaller voice-controlled speaker called Tap.) Most important, the brains of Home will be Google s virtual assistant, which draws from Google s extensive search database, whereas Echo relies on Alexa, Amazon s assistant. In other words, consumers can expect voice commands that already work with Google s assistant to work with Google Home. In a recent test comparing virtual assistants from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, Google s assistant was the most capable of performing basic tasks, largely because it drew data from Google s search engine. Is Home smarter than Echo Thanks to Home s reliance on Google s search engine, it will probably be a smarter speaker than the Echo when it comes to basic tasks like web searches and looking up traffic data. However, when it comes to actions offered by outside companies like the ability to order a pizza from a restaurant or to set your Internet-connected thermostat Home s success will depend largely on whether Google persuades third-party developers to create tasks that work with it.',
'China Quietly Targets U.S. Tech Companies in Security Reviews: Chinese authorities are quietly scrutinizing technology products sold in China by Apple and other big foreign companies, focusing on whether they pose potential security threats to the country and its consumers and opening up a new front in an already tense relationship with Washington over digital security. Apple and other companies in recent months have been subjected to reviews that target encryption and the data storage of tech products, said people briefed on the reviews who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the reviews, Chinese officials require executives or employees of the foreign tech companies to answer questions about the products in person, according to these people. The reviews are run by a committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country s Internet control bureau, they said. The bureau includes experts and engineers with ties to the country s military and security agencies. While other countries, including the United States and Britain, conduct reviews of some tech products, they usually focus on products that will be used by the military or other parts of the government that are concerned with security, and not on products sold to the general public. The Chinese reviews stand out because they are being applied more broadly, including to American consumer software and gadgets popular in China, the people briefed on the reviews said. And because Chinese officials have not disclosed the nature of the checks, both the United States government and American tech companies fear that the reviews could be used to extract tech knowledge as well as ensure that the United States was not using the products to spy. Ultimately, the reviews could be used to block products without explanation or to extract trade secrets in exchange for market access. Those secrets could be leaked to Chinese competitors or expose vulnerabilities, which, in turn, Chinese hackers could exploit. Further, tech companies are concerned that the reviews could set a precedent and that other countries will follow suit, each demanding different checks that would not only be costly but also put the companies at risk of having to hand over further secrets in exchange for market access.',
"Google's launch of a carpooling service Monday marks the beginning of its seemingly inevitable entry into the ridesharing wars. The pilot program, which is being offered via Google's Waze navigation app, aims to connect commuters who need a ride with drivers who can supply one. In exchange, riders will help cover the drivers' fuel costs. Consolidating rides means fewer cars on the road which is better for traffic congestion and the environment, according to Waze. Google's launch of a carpooling service Monday marks the beginning of its seemingly inevitable entry into the ridesharing wars. The pilot program, which is being offered via Google's Waze navigation app, aims to connect commuters who need a ride with drivers who can supply one. In exchange, riders will help cover the drivers' fuel costs. Consolidating rides means fewer cars on the road which is better for traffic congestion and the environment, according to Waze.",
'Apple CEO Makes First India Trip With Billion Phone Sales at Stake: Smartphone shipments may be sputtering in the U.S., Europe and other mature markets, but in India, there s the prospect of a billion new device sales. It s probably no surprise then that Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is making his first trip to the country. Cook, who begins his multiday visit on Wednesday, will unveil a development center for digital maps in Hyderabad and introduce an accelerator program for iOS developers in Bangalore, a person with knowledge of the trip said. Apple is pushing to open its first retail stores in the country, though it s not clear whether any discussions will be part of the CEO s agenda on this trip. The prize is more than 1 billion in smartphone sales in the next five years, according to researcher Counterpoint. As China s market becomes more saturated and people across the globe upgrade their smartphones less frequently, Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. and other vendors are keen to sell to India s middle class, which is projected to quadruple to 200 million by 2020. Signs of this explosive rise in consumption already emerged in the first three months of this year, when Apple reported that shipments in India grew 56 percent, even as iPhone sales declined globally for the first time ever.',
'Can virtual reality translate into real profits A growing number of U.S. companies are counting on virtual reality for real profits. With growth hard to come by amid the lethargic economy, companies ranging from snowmobile manufacturers to furniture sellers are incorporating virtual reality that so far has mostly been found in video games. Their bet: that the trendy headset-based technology can help them build sales and cut costs. Theme park operator Six Flags Entertainment Corp (SIX.N) is outfitting riders on some of its aging roller coasters with Samsung VR headsets, allowing the company to brand the rides as brand-new without having to build costly new attractions. nowmobile manufacturer Arctic Cat Inc (ACAT.O) has developed virtual reality rides that customers can use to try out new models at dealerships, while eBay Inc\'s (EBAY.O) StubHub is testing technology that allows fans to check out the view from different seats before buying tickets. In the most recent round of corporate earnings reports, some 38 companies - including the New York Times, GoPro, and furniture-seller Wayfair - highlighted virtual reality as a part of their business plans. That was a 375 percent jump from the 8 that did so at this time last year, according to a Reuters analysis of earnings calls transcripts. Nearly all were either consumer or technology companies, suggesting that virtual reality technology has a ways to go before becoming mainstream. Yet for all of the enthusiasm, there is little evidence that virtual reality can deliver substantial growth. here are few pure plays for investors who want to buy into virtual reality. Facebook Inc (FB.O), which paid $2 billion for its Oculus virtual reality division in 2014 and began shipping its first $599 Oculus Rift headsets in March, has the best-known virtual reality head gear, though other well-known companies including Google\'s parent Alphabet and Apple are rumored to be working on high-powered headsets of their own. Neither company returned requests to comment. Virtual reality is such a small part of Facebook\'s business that most analysts do not break out Oculus in their revenue or earnings estimates. Nor did Facebook give any numbers on how many Oculus headsets it expects to sell on its most recent earnings call. "This is very early and we don\'t expect VR to take off as a mainstream success right away ... but eventually we believe that VR is going to be the next big computing platform and we\'re making the investments necessary to lead the way there," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said.',
'For online lenders, it s suddenly touch-and-go: A year ago, privately held online lenders like Prosper, SoFiand Avant looked all but certain to go public at the same unicorn valuations their venture investors had assigned them if not higher. They were seemingly reshaping the student, consumer and small business lending business. The market they re chasing is enormous: The U.S. consumer lending market is a $3.5 trillion business, and 22 of the largest online marketplace platforms originated just more than $5 billion of unsecured consumer credit in 2014 and more than $10 billion in 2015. They also talked a big game. When SoFi raised a whopping $1 billion from Softbank last year, CEO Michael Cagney told Bloomberg: I m looking at over $1 trillion of market cap from the banks, and I think it s all vulnerable. Fast forward to today, and it s online lenders that suddenly look like sitting ducks. In an SEC filing yesterday, Lending Club, which announced the surprise departure of its founder and CEO last Monday, revealed that investors who contributed a significant amount of funding for loans are now examining that performance or are otherwise reluctant to invest. For many casual observers in Silicon Valley, the first signs of trouble in the online lending category emerged in late April, when the WSJ reported that Avant made $514 million worth of new loans in the U.S. in the first quarter, a 27 percent drop from the fourth quarter of 2015. Then, two weeks ago, Prosper confirmed that it planned to cut roughly 28 percent of its staff in response to falling loan volume. And Prosper s news came just a day after OnDeck Capital said its own first-quarter losses had more than doubled as demand for its loans began to nosedive. Of course, the kicker came last week, when Lending Club CEO Renaud LaPlanche resigned following an internal audit that turned up $22 million in loans that were sold to Jefferies yet didn t meet the investment bank s criteria. Smartly, some players are already looking to reimagine themselves as broader financial outfits. For example, SoFi, which began as a way for students from top universities to refinance their debt, has since branched into personal loans, wealth management and mortgages. It also said last month that it s hoping to drum up more investor demand for the debt it originates by starting a hedge fund that will buy its own loans. Baker expects that to survive and thrive, more online lenders may need to remodel themselves into the institutions they vowed to replace, either by becoming banks, buying or selling to banks or else striking up partnerships with banks. OnDeck and JPMorgan made one such pact. Last month, JPMorgan quietly began offering online loans to its existing small-business customers using OnDeck s technology. Indeed, there is a silver lining, and it s that huge market opportunity. The trick for online lenders will be finding new ways to pursue it while remaining viable businesses.',
"Why a staggering number of Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to: Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday. This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities. The survey showed that nearly 20 percent of the survey's respondents had personally experienced some form of identity theft, an online security breach, or another similar problem over the year before the survey was taken last July. Overall, 45 percent said their concerns about online privacy and security stopped them from using the Web in very practical ways. The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.",
'Uber China Rival Didi to Consider U.S. IPO as Soon as 2017: Apple may not need to wait that long before it reaps the benefits of investing $1 billion in Chinese car-hailing service Didi Chuxing. Didi is targeting an initial public offering in New York next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The timing will depend on how its battle with Uber Technologies Inc. in China plays out, said the people, who requested not to be named because the matter is private. Such a move may put the Chinese app ahead of its U.S. rival in going public, with Uber having said it wants to hold off as long as possible. China s biggest ride-hailing app is in the process of raising about $3 billion of funding, including Apple s $1 billion contribution, which has swelled the company s valuation to about $26 billion, people familiar have said. Didi, already backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., has reached break even in about half of the 400 Chinese cities it operates in as Uber spends heavily to win both drivers and riders. At Didi s current valuation, a U.S. IPO could be the biggest by a Chinese company since Alibaba s record offering in 2014. The company is among a list of ride-sharing apps including Uber and Lyft Inc. that could conduct a public offering. Didi hasn t decided on which exchange and which banks to hire yet, the people said. Didi was created last year when separate apps backed by Tencent and Alibaba merged after brutal competition drove up losses. The company now has 14 million registered drivers in China, delivering more than 11 million rides a day, and last month said it s on track to turn an operating profit soon. ',
"Exclusive: Warren Buffett, Quicken Loans founder in Yahoo bid - sources: Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chairman Warren Buffett is backing a consortium vying for Yahoo Inc's internet assets that includes Quicken Loans Inc founder Dan Gilbert, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. While there is no certainty that the consortium will prevail in the auction, the interest of Buffett and Gilbert is a boost for the Sunnyvale, California-based company, which has been surpassed in recent years by rivals such as Alphabet Inc in the race for internet users and advertising dollars. The consortium's participation in the sale process also represents a challenge to U.S. telecommunications carrier Verizon Communications Inc, whose deal to acquire AOL last year for $4.4 billion has made it a favorite to prevail in its bid for Yahoo's assets among industry analysts.",
'Amazon is going to sell its own lines of food, detergent and diapers, and it\'s going to be a really big deal: Amazon is going to start selling its own brands of snacks, diapers, detergent a move lots of traditional retailers have already made. But Amazon isn\'t a traditional retailer, so this move could be very meaningful for Amazon, and its competitors. The e-commerce powerhouse will soon begin selling its own packaged goods, exclusively to Amazon Prime members under brands like Happy Belly and Mama Bear, the Wall Street Journal reports. While some people will point out that so-called "private-labeling" is nothing new -- grocery stores and big-box retailers have been increasingly pushing their in-house brands -- this is a much bigger deal. That\'s because the growth in retail is all going to be online, and Amazon owns online. It already accounts for half of all sales growth in U.S. e-commerce. So Amazon\'s move into consumer packaged goods gives it even more opportunity to flex its muscle with suppliers. That means giving its own products better placement on its site, and undercutting competitors on pricing. The move also offers Amazon the chance to pad its bottom line -- something Jeff Bezos hasn\'t traditionally been willing or able to do. Private-label brands typically carry higher profit margins , in part because the companies selling them don\'t put big marketing campaigns behind them. Think of the damage Amazon already does its to competitors as a low-margin business. Now imagine what happens when if it starts generating real profits on stuff like cereal and soap. The move is also a way to increase the power of Amazon Prime, the $99-a-year unlimited shipping program that fuels Amazon\'s retail growth. Prime customers spend more on Amazon than non-members and are more loyal, too. By adding another perk, Amazon can make its best customers even even more loyal. There\'s risk here, of course. Some Amazon-branded products have already flopped, including its Amazon Element diapers, which were pulled for design flaws shortly after launch.',
'Facebook, Facing Bias Claims, Shows How Editors and Algorithms Guide News: Facebook, the largest social media network, published internal editorial guidelines on Thursday, the company s latest attempt to rebut accusations that it is politically biased in the news content it shows on the pages of its 1.6 billion users. The 28-page document details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the Trending Topics section of users Facebook pages. Facebook describes a list of processes it uses to display some of the most popular content across the network, including relying on algorithms to detect up-and-coming news trends as well as a team of editors who, much like a newsroom, direct how those topics are presented and decide what should be displayed to people who regularly use the service. As the guidelines make clear, at practically every point in the process, a human editor is given the leeway to exercise his or her editorial influence. The document was released just days after a report on the tech news siteGizmodo said Facebook editors had intentionally suppressed news topics from conservative publications trending across the network. The report also said editors were able to artificially inflate the importance of other topics by injecting them into the Trending section of users Facebook pages. Since those claims surfaced, Facebook has been questioned by news sites across the political spectrum and by legislators in Washington. On Thursday, critics urged the company to consider the biases of its editors. As long as Facebook is hiring editors who lean left politically, those stories are going to get preferential treatment, Erick Erickson, former editor in chief of the conservative website RedState and founder of another conservative site called The Resurgent, said in an email. I d hope that Facebook would take care to consider all views and all news. The company has continued to deny accusations of political bias and pointed to editorial rules that discourage Trending Topics staff members from taking one viewpoint or another.',
'Alibaba Bears Retreat as Sales Growth Endures China Slump: Chart: Bearish bets against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have dropped to the lowest level since January after the Chinese e-commerce leader s quarterly revenue beat analysts forecasts even as the nation s economy grows at the slowest pace in 25 years. Short interest fell to 7.1 percent this week after peaking at a two-year high of 8.5 percent two months ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit Ltd. The U.S.-traded stock has risen 4.4 percent since the company reported its quarterly results, while its main competitor JD.com Inc. tumbled 12 percent after reporting a slowdown in sales volume.',
'Intel Sells $2.75 Billion of Bonds to Refinance 2016 Debt: Intel Corp. sold $2.75 billion of bonds on Thursday to refinance debt due this year and a portion of notes maturing in 2017. The world s biggest chipmaker issued debt three parts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The longest portion was $1.25 billion of 30-year notes yielding 1.55 percentage points above comparable government debt. That s down from an initial offer of 1.7 percentage points, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information isn t public. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. managed the sale.S&P Global Ratings gave the bonds an A+ grade, according to a statement on Thursday. Intel is the latest U.S. blue-chip company to offer notes in what s poised to be second-busiest week for issuance this year. In its last multibillion-dollar deal, Intel sold $7 billion of bonds in July to finance part of its $16.7 billion takeover of Altera Corp. The company plans to repay its $1.5 billion of 1.95 percent notes due in October and a portion of the $3 billion of 1.35 percent bonds due next year. Investment-grade companies have sold more than $49 billion worth of bonds so far this week as they take advantage of low borrowing costs after posting earnings for the quarter ended March 31. Companies are also front-loading issuance before the summer slowdown, according to Ben Emons, a money manager at Leader Capital Corp. in Los Angeles.',
"Apple invests $1 billion in Chinese Uber rival ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing: Apple said on Thursday it has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market. The investment comes as Apple is trying to reinvigorate sales in China, its second-largest market. Apple recently has come under pressure from Chinese regulators, with its online book and film services shut down last month, and Cook is traveling to the country this month. The investment gives Apple, which has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year, a sizeable stake in Uber Technologies Inc's chief rival in China. Cook said in an interview that he sees opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.",
"Strong demand for graphics chips to boost Nvidia's revenue: Nvidia Corp forecast better-than-expected revenue for the current quarter as it sees robust demand for its chips that power complex computer graphics. Shares of the company, which also reported profit and revenue above analysts' estimates, were up 7.5 percent in extended trading. The chipmaker last week unveiled its GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics processors based on its Pascal technology.Revenue from its gaming business, which designs graphics cards such as GeForce for PCs, rose 17 percent to $687 million. The company has weathered a shrinking personal computer industry by focusing on game enthusiasts, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for processors used in playing graphically demanding games.Revenue from its data center business, which includes its Tesla processors, rose 62.5 percent to $143 million.Nvidia's net income rose to $196 million, or 33 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 1 from $134 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 46 cents per share, handily beating analysts' expectations of 32 cents. Revenue rose 13.4 percent to $1.31 billion, while analysts were expecting $1.26 billion. The company also said it intends to return about $1 billion to shareholders in fiscal 2017 through quarterly dividends and share buybacks. ",
'What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant: To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor s overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson s true identity to students until after they d turned in their final exams. Students were amazed. I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class! wrote one in the class s online forum. Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey! said another. Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education. While he doesn t foresee the chatbot replacing teaching assistants or professors, he expects the chatbot s question-answering abilities to be an invaluable asset for massive online open courses, where students often drop out and generally don t receive the chance to engage with a human instructor. With more human-like interaction, Goel expects online learning could become more appealing to students and lead to better educational outcomes. At the start of this semester Goel provided his students with a list of nine teaching assistants, including Jill, the automated question and answering service Goel developed with the help of some of his students and IBM. Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course s online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last spring he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions. As Goel looked for a technology that could help, he settled on IBM Watson, which he had used for several other projects. Watson, an artificial intelligence system, was designed to answer questions, so it seemed like a strong fit. To train the system to answer questions correctly, Goel fed it forum posts from the class s previous semesters. This gave Jill an extensive background in common questions and how they should be answered. Goel tested the system privately for months, having his teaching assistants examine whether Jill s answers were correct. Initially the system struggled with similar questions such as Where can I find assignment two and When is assignment two due Goel tweaked the software, adding more layers of decision-making to it. Eventually Jill reached the point where its answers were good enough. The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Goel found that was the threshold at which he could guarantee the system was accurate. There are many questions Jill can t handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants. Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn t human.',
'Cowen: It Looks Even More Like Amazon Will Become America\'s Top Clothing Retailer in 2017: It\'s been a tough few weeks for retailers, and today is no different. But there is one exception: Amazon.com Inc. Whereas XRT, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF is down over 4 percent, Amazon shares are up over 2 percent. One driver of the retail selloff is Macy\'s, whose earnings report sent shares tumbling this morning after the retailer cut profit forecasts and missed analyst estimates on revenue. That\'s the opposite of what happened to Amazon last week when the web giantblew past analyst estimates. Given this recent action in the retail space, analysts at Cowen and Company are reiterating their call for Amazon to displace Macy\'s as the number one U.S. apparel retailer by next year. "[Our calculation] implies a gain in U.S. Apparel & Accessories market share from 5 percent to 14 percent," the team, led by John Blackledge write in their note, adding, "We have seen a continued shift away from more traditional retailers...In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Apparel purchasers were up ~19 percent year-over-year, while Apparel purchasers fell ~1 percent year-over-year and ~5 percent year-over-year at Wal-Mart and Target, respectively." The team previously made this call in July of 2015, saying they were confident that Macy\'s would lose its top spot within two years. Looking at revenue from electronics and general merchandise at Amazon, the trend is obvious. Amazon has seen continued growth in its retail business with the expansion of its Prime offerings. Their stock prices have certainly reflected these trends. Amazon is up 65 percent over the past year, whiles Macy\'s is down more than 50 percent. ',
'Google s answer to Amazon\'s Echo is code-named Chirp and is landing soon: A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google\'s search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo, Recode has learned. Google\'s device will resemble its OnHub wireless router, according to several sources. We don\'t know if it has a name yet, but internally the project goes by "Chirp." Google declined to comment. The Information previously reported that Google was plotting a competing version of Echo, a portable speaker with voice assistant tech. Sources said the device is unlikely to launch next week at Google\'s I/O developer conference, but plans are for it to land at some point this year. We should, however, get a peek at it and its potential next week voice search and intelligent personal assistance will occupy center stage at the company\'s splash show, along with virtual reality. Google has long had voice assistant tech in its Android phones beckoned by the words "Okay, Google" that many in the industry see as leading the pack. (People inside Google think so, too.) But it has yet to bake that into the home, a key growing marketing for Google and its rivals. Its OnHub router, released last summer, does not have voice recognition capabilities. Amazon, on the other hand, has moved headlong into the home with Echo. One analyst estimated that Amazon has sold three million units. And Echo is collecting the type of data what consumers search for, listen to and buy, and how they talk to machines that Google loves. Amazon has long been considered a big threat to Google\'s core business as web and mobile app users go to the online retailer for product searches.',
'Amazon and YouTube get ready to rumble over online video: Amazon is moving into the space long held by YouTube, announcing on Tuesday thelaunch of a new platform that allows anyone to post original content. Called "Amazon Video Direct," the site offers creators a way to make money in a variety of ways, including royalties on videos streamed by paying Amazon Prime members, revenue shares for videos rented or purchased, ad impressions for free-to-watch videos, and any combination of these models. The new platform places Amazon in direct competition with Google\'s YouTube, the firm leader in the video upload space that counts 1 billion users. YouTube has its own revenue sharing model for its top creators. Starting in 2007, it launched its Partners Program, which gave popular content creators a cut of the ad revenue earned from views to their pages. But there has been controversy in connection with the cut that YouTube takes, which is 45% of the revenue, and the site does not offer to cover any video creation costs, leading some YouTube creators to speak out about comparatively unfair profits. Amazon has not yet detailed what percentage of revenue creators will get with the Video Direct service. But it is offering a pay-to-subscribe option direct to each individual channel, similar to Twitch, which allows users to follow specific content creators for a fee. The owner of the channel would make a percentage of the profit from those subscriptions. Amazon will also pay out $1 million as a bonus among the creators of the top 100 videos viewed by Prime members each month.',
'Three More Signs Smartphone Downturn Is Going From Bad to Worse: Three suppliers that seldom command much attention, working behind the scenes to make devices sold under the brands of better-known customers, put out back-to-back earnings reports Tuesday. They spell trouble ahead for smartphone makers and other companies that once thrived on mobile mania. Pegatron Corp., which assembles iPhones, missed profit expectations and said April sales dived 16 percent. Minebea Co., which makes LED lights for mobiles, lagged its own forecasts for revenue and earnings. Japan Display Inc., which supplies screens to Apple and others, said profit has deteriorated so rapidly it will lose money for the fiscal year and suspend a promised dividend. Adding to the gloom, Lenovo Group Ltd. tumbled to a four-year low as analysts warned of rising competition. Pegatron and its peers are merely the latest in a string of ill omens for a market facing its worst pace of expansion since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Much of the gloom centers on China, the phenomenal growth engine that s now headed for an epicshakeout. Smartphones are no longer a novelty and most domestic brands target the mid- and low-price ranges, where buyers don t upgrade as frequently as those for high-end Apple and Samsung phones.',
'WhatsApp launches desktop apps for Mac and Windows: WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service that claims a billion users, has launched desktop clients for Mac and Windows. The release comes about 15 months after WhatsApp released its first web app. People who have already been using WhatsApp on their web browsers will find that software isn t significantly different. The company said in an announcement our desktop app is simply an extension of your phone, with all messages synced between devices. WhatsApp s success in countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa is of course driven by the high penetration of smartphones in those markets, but giving power users including people who rely on WhatsApp for work communications desktop options helps it competes against other messaging services, like iMessenger, WeChat, and Skype. WhatsApp is currently testing out B2C accounts, which would give it a new revenue source after dropping its 99 cent annual subscription fee.',
'Report claiming bias in Facebook \'trending\' topics sparks social media outcry: Facebook workers have often omitted conservative political stories from the website s "trending" list, the technology news site Gizmodo said on Monday in a report that sparked widespread comment on social media. An unnamed former Facebook employee told Gizmodo that workers "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers," according to Gizmodo, while "artificially" adding other stories into the trending list. Facebook told Reuters on Monday that there are "rigorous guidelines in place" to maintain neutrality and said that these guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in trending topics. Facebook did not respond directly though to questions about whether employees had suppressed conservative-leaning news. "These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another," a spokesperson for Facebook said. The report alarmed some social media users, with several journalists and commentators criticizing Facebook for alleged bias. "Aside from fueling right-wing persecution, this is a key reminder of dangers of Silicon Valley controlling content," tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald. Well, you go to Hell, Facebook," tweeted Kyle Feldscher (@Kyle_Feldscher), a reporter at the Washington Examiner, a conservative-leaning publication. "For anyone who cares about press freedom, this is frightening stuff," tweeted Bloomberg Editor Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin), with a link to Gizmodo\'s story.',
'As Lending Club Stumbles, Its Entire Industry Faces Skepticism: Renaud Laplanche and his crew steered a 105-foot racing boat through New York Harbor one day last spring, its towering sails ripping across the water at 30 knots. An accomplished sailor and founder of Lending Club, Mr. Laplanche was hosting executives from hedge funds, Goldman Sachs and other banks part of his effort to win over Wall Street on his plans to upend traditional banking with a faster, more democratic form of lending. He already had endorsements from Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, and John Mack, the former chief of Morgan Stanley, who joined his board. At Lending Club s initial public offering in December 2014, the company was valued at over $8 billion. But on Monday, Lending Club announced that Mr. Laplanche had resigned after an internal investigation found improprieties in its lending process, including the altering of millions of dollars worth of loans. The company s stock price, already reeling in recent months, fell 34 percent. The company s woes are part of a broader reckoning in the online money-lending industry. Last week, Prosper, another online lender that focuses on consumers, laid off more than a quarter of its work force, and the chief executive said he was forgoing his salary for the year. Marketplace lenders like Lending Club have created easy-to-use websites that match consumers and small businesses, hoping to borrow a few thousand dollars, with individuals or Wall Street investors looking to lend money. Freed from the costs of brick-and-mortar branches and federal regulations requiring that they reserve money against their loans, marketplace lenders have been able to grow quickly and with fewer expenses. The process is almost entirely online, with loans approved in days rather than the weeks a traditional bank might take. While marketplace loans account for less than 1 percent of the consumer loans in the United States, a recent report by the investment bank Jefferies said that in some segments like installment loans the new lending companies account for more than 10 percent of the market. But in the first quarter, lenders like Lending Club, Prosper and OnDeck Capital had difficulty convincing investors that their business models are sound. Wall Street s waning demand for loans exposed the Achilles heel of marketplace lending. Unlike traditional banks that use their deposits to fund loans, the marketplace companies discovered how fleeting their funding sources can be.',
'Researchers say computer screens change how you think about what you read: You probably spend a lot of time staring at screens -- but all that computer time may be making you miss the big picture, new research has found. Reading something on a screen -- as opposed to a printout -- causes people to home in on details and but not broader ideas, according to a new article by Geoff Kaufman. a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Mary Flanagan, a professor at Dartmouth. "Digital screens almost seem to create a sort of tunnel vision where you\'re focusing on just the information you\'re getting this moment, not the broader context," Kaufman said. The article is based on a series of studies involving a total of more than 300 participants that were carried out while the two researchers worked together at Tiltfactor, a Dartmouth game design lab. The studies covered in the latest article were prompted by earlier research from Kaufman and Flanagan that found players using the iPad version of a disease prevention strategy game struggled with long-term strategy much more than those playing a physical copy of the game.',
'Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup. Then It Self-Disrupted: Zenefits makes online software that automates health insurance, payroll, and other essential office drudgery kind of a human resources version of TurboTax. It s not a sexy idea, but with 6 million small businesses in the U.S., it s enormously useful. The company was founded in 2013 by Parker Conrad, who realized he could streamline small businesses managerial needs, saving them hundreds of hours of mind-numbing paperwork not to mention the cost of staffing an HR department by putting everything online. Conrad was known to be a little frenzied and disorganized but fiercely intelligent. From an investment philosophy we look for the magnitude of the genius, as opposed to the lack of issues, says Andreessen s founding partner Ben Horowitz. And in a way, [Conrad] was like the prototype. Conrad had no background in health insurance but quickly learned the intricacies of the business as well as any veteran. If you re an insurance broker, he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2013, we re going to drink your milkshake. Then In California, they found, some of the sales team used Conrad s macro to systematically cheat on the state s training course, which included a section on ethics. As far as a company doing what Zenefits has done, I don t know that we have seen this before, says Nancy Kincaid, press secretary for the California Department of Insurance, which has also opened an investigation. In March, Massachusetts division of insurance opened a third. Zenefits confirms that other states have since followed but won t say which ones or even how many. Sacks became CEO and is guiding Zenefits through its crisis cleanup. He has banned alcohol at the office and changed the company motto from Ready. Fire. Aim. to Operate With Integrity. In February the company laid off 250 employees, including the enterprise team. Sales Vice President Blond, Semaan s boss, and any executive or manager known to have helped disseminate the macro are also gone. Zenefits says it has self-reported the findings of its internal investigation to all 50 states and is working with those that have opened formal inquiries. Fidelity Investments, which owns a stake, has slashed its valuation of Zenefits from $4.5 billion to less than $2 billion. There are rows of empty desks at the San Francisco office; the company plans to downsize from four floors to three. The Star Wars-themed conference rooms will soon be renamed after inspirational entrepreneurs. Kegs have been replaced with cold-brew coffee. The stairwells are condom-free. Zenefits might also survive for the one reason that made its product so appealing to business owners in the first place: Shopping for health insurance remains really frustrating. The company says it now has 20,000 accounts. As long as their problems don t affect our company, we ll stay, says Todd Harmond, vice president for finance and operations of the e-book service Scribd, which uses Zenefits to offer Kaiser Permanente and Anthem health insurance plans to its 85 employees. Unless something else goes really wrong with Zenefits, we ll stick with them for a while, says BlogMutt s Yates. It s too much of a hassle to switch. ',
'What Do Consumers Want Look at Their Selfies: Allison Shragal, 28, of Chicago, isn t a model, or Internet famous she s an administrative assistant for a general contracting company. But almost every day companies pay her to snap photos of herself engaging in routine activities brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, cleaning the bathroom. Her seemingly mundane images, when combined with thousands of others, contain insights that companies like Crest are eager to mine. They are using a Chicago-based company called Pay Your Selfie to gather those insights and present them in reports on consumer behavior that are meant to go where focus groups and surveys cannot. Among the tidbits that Crest, owned by Procter & Gamble, learned from its recent monthlong quest for selfies: There s a huge spike in brushing from 4 to 6 p.m., probably tied to a desire for happy-hour fresh breath. That knowledge could be useful when Crest decides which times of the day to start future social media campaigns. Users of the app receive anywhere from 20 cents to $1 for each task completed in Crest s case, a snapshot taken while brushing your teeth with your favorite Crest product. Users can t double-dip; the app allows only one selfie per task. The selfies are a good way for companies to obtain information that people can t or don t articulate in focus groups or other traditional research methods, said Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. For example, they could lead to an understanding of which rituals go along with certain types of consumption, he said. Pay Your Selfie, which has been in business since last September, doesn t require participants to have followers on a site like Instagram. In fact, users don t have to share their images publicly at all (although they can). That makes it different from a company like Popular Pays, which offers Instagrammers the chance to post about brands like Nike in exchange for giveaways or cash.',
'Companies are betting on a new way to protect your identity: the selfie: The selfie is about to get serious. Already ubiquitous at parties and for capturing Instagram-worthy landscapes, the act of raising a phone to your face and finding the perfect photo angle could take on a whole new role in people s finances. Some banks, tax agencies and tech companies are making the selfie an integral step for people checking their bank accounts, shopping online and filing tax returns. Forced to find creative ways to guard against the rising threat of identity theft, a growing number of companies are moving from a system that tests people on what they know, such as a password. Now they want to ask consumers to provide evidence of something that can t easily be changed or copied: their face. A photo also can serve as a way for consumers to offer proof that it was indeed them and not an imposter who made that purchase or submitted that form. For instance, MasterCard plans to roll out a service nicknamed Selfie Pay this summer through its member banks. Through the program, consumers would shop online as usual and after checking out, they would confirm the purchase by taking a selfie with a MasterCard mobile app. And Georgia will roll out a pilot program for the next tax season at the end of the year that gives taxpayers the option of creating a secure account where they verify their identities by taking a photo. If there is a match, taxpayers will be asked take a photo on their smartphones before their tax returns can be processed, ensuring the return was not submitted by a fraudster. To overcome that risk, the companies are requiring selfies that are a little different than the ones you might see on Facebook. After finding the right angle, consumers are asked to move around to confirm that the camera is capturing a live person and not a photo. In the MasterCard and USAA programs, users are told when to blink. Georgia s tax program will prompt people to position their faces a certain way and scan for motion. ',
'AlexaSite wins the Disrupt NY 2016 Hackathon Grand Prize: AlexaSite lets designers update websites using their voice. This technology could be particularly useful for designers working with clients. You could make small adjustments on the go without having to dive into your CSS sheets. AlexaSite uses Amazon s Alexa API and works with Squarespace websites. Impressive! Runner-Up #1: Bumperz: Bumperz aims to make cutting edge accident, prevention and collision avoidance technology available to all drivers. It warns you when you re approaching a dangerous area with a historically higher than average accident rate. It also warns tired drivers when they re accidentally changing lanes. Bumperz leverages New York City s open data when it comes to car crashes. Useful! Runner-Up #2: Hungry Host: Hungry Host helps you find and cook the best recipes with whatever you have in your fridge. But this hack s secret sauce is that it works with your Amazon Echo and natural language. You can simply tell Hungry Host your ingredients, then the app will guide you step by step with instructions and timers. Neat!',
'Palantir Struggles to Retain Clients and Staff, BuzzFeed Reports: Palantir Technologies Inc., one of Silicon Valley s most highly valued private companies, has struggled to retain employees and prominent customers, according to areport by BuzzFeed. In 2015, Palantir generated $420 million in revenue, BuzzFeed reported, citing interviews with former and current employees, as well as more than 1,000 internal e-mails and documents. The secretive big data company spent more than $500 million last year, the report said. A spokeswoman didn t immediately respond to a request for comment. Palantir s bookings, which refer to the value of contracts that typically span many years, exceeded $1 billion in 2014 and continued growing in 2015, a person with knowledge of the matter said last year. BuzzFeed reported Palantir bookings of $1.7 billion in 2015. American Express Co., Coca-Cola Co. and Nasdaq Inc. were among the companies that walked away from contracts with Palantir over the last year or so, BuzzFeed reported. Hershey Co. is reevaluating its relationship with Palantir, and Kimberly-Clark Corp. considered becoming a customer before deciding that Palantir s high prices were unjustified, the report said. Palantir also counts Axa SA, Bridgewater Associates LP, Credit Suisse Group AG and First Data Corp. among its clients. Its biggest customer is BP Plc, which signed an agreement with Palantir in November 2014 worth $1.2 billion over 10 years, plus bonus payments as determined by executives from both companies, according to BuzzFeed. Employee defections accelerated early this year, and at the current pace, the attrition rate this year would be 20 percent, BuzzFeed reported. The departure rate in 2015 was 14 percent and 12 percent in 2014, the report said.',
'Reliance on China health sector raises searching questions for Baidu: The death of a student following experimental cancer treatment he found through China\'s biggest search engine, Baidu Inc, has exposed the faultlines in the company\'s business model, which relies heavily on income from the country\'s lightly regulated health sector. Before his death, student Wei Zexi, 21, criticized the military-run hospital that provided the failed treatment for misleading claims about its effectiveness and accused Baidu, which controls 80 percent of the Chinese search market, of promoting false medical information. Baidu has come in for fierce online criticism for how it handles adverts within its search results, especially from an industry as sensitive as healthcare, which analysts at Nomura and Daiwa say provides 20 to 30 percent of its search revenues. In 2015 search revenues were 55.7 billion yuan ($8.6 billion), or 84 percent of Baidu\'s total sales. "Whatever page you\'re looking at on Baidu is a mess of adverts," said username FreedLiu on China\'s Weibo microblog, discussing Wei. "They\'re profiting from loads of people who don\'t know Baidu auctions (its search results)." Baidu said it applied particular vigilance to healthcare customers, with screening for misleading adverts and a verification program with additional scrutiny for medical advertisers. Criticism in several state media outlets this week suggests a hardening attitude in government. "Pursuing profits is not wrong, but putting profits over helpless patients\' lives is against any ethical standards," said a column in the official People\'s Daily on Monday. Any decision by authorities to restrict healthcare advertising could have a material impact on Baidu\'s earnings, a concern that has contributed to a sharp fall in its shares in the last three sessions. Daiwa said 10-15 percent of Baidu\'s search revenue could evaporate under a worst-case scenario.Like most search engines, Baidu places paid-for ads in its search results, but in a series of Reuters search tests it included at least twice as many ads as Alphabet Inc\'s Google, which is blocked in China, and placed them higher in its list. Though Baidu marks such items as promotions, Google also highlights the word "Ad" in a yellow box.',
"Apple's Tim Cook to visit China for government meetings - source: Tim Cook plans to visit Beijing later this month to meet high-level government officials, at a time when it is facing some setbacks in its most important overseas market, a source familiar with the matter said. Cook has frequently traveled to China since taking the helm of Apple five years ago, but his latest visit comes during a critical period. From weakening smartphone sales to the loss of an iPhone trademark dispute and the suspension of some of its online entertainment services, the U.S. technology giant has been facing a flurry of problems in recent weeks in its second-largest market after the United States. That has raised concerns over Apple's growth momentum, as the company reported last week its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years. Last week, billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said in an interview with cable television network CNBC that he had sold his entire stake in Apple, citing China's economic slowdown and worries about whether the government could make it very difficult for Apple to conduct business.During his China visit, Cook plans to meet senior government and Communist Party leaders - including officials in charge of propaganda, said the source, who declined to be named as the plan is not public yet.",
'GoPro delays its highly anticipated drone until winter: GoPro announced its first-quarter earnings today, and the details were fairly bleak. It saw its revenue drop by 49.5 percent from the same period in 2015, and it swung from a $22 million profit to a $121 million loss. The company also announced that its new drone, the Karma, will be delayed until the winter holiday. It was originally slated to be released in the first half of this year. The news comes after a disappointing year for GoPro. While the company shipped more cameras than ever before in 2015 (6.6 million), GoPro had a rough fourth quarter, bringing in about $200 million less than it did in the fourth quarter of 2014.',
'What 25 hours in virtual reality feels like: A Los Angeles writer set a world record after spending 25 hours playing a single game in virtual reality. Derek Westerman, 32, took on the challenge after trying virtual reality for the first time earlier this year. Westerman was left wondering how long anyone could last in an experience that he considered intense and overwhelming. When Westerman found out there was no world record for time spent in a virtual reality headset, Westerman pitched the stunt to Super Deluxe, a maker of comedic YouTube videos. For the challenge Westerman spent the 25 hours making three-dimensional artwork in a game called Tilt Brush. Each hour Westerman would start a new painting, and shift between standing, sitting down or lying on the floor. Westerman, who ultimately said it was a great experience, hasn t worn a virtual reality headset since setting the world record a month ago. For 24 hours after the experience Westerman said that everything looked uncanny. Spending a day in virtual reality changed how his brain registered space. Objects in the distance looked odd, as if they weren t real. Human senses are capable of adapting well to new and different circumstances, according to University of Maryland professor Amitabh Varshney, who leads its virtual reality research efforts. Varshney recalled an experiment in which an Australian professor outfitted his assistant with glasses that inverted his vision, turning the world upside down. While initially confused, before long he was able to perform everyday tasks such as ride a bicycle.',
"Alibaba's revenue soars, but new ventures hit profit: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China's biggest e-commerce company, said fourth-quarter sales rose 39 percent after its core online shopping business grew, but profit fell for the first time as it spent on ventures like food delivery. Net income excluding extraordinary items, Alibaba's preferred measure for earnings, shrank 1.4 percent to 7.6 billion yuan from the previous year, as the company continued to invest heavily in new but shakier businesses. Investors welcomed the higher-than-expected revenue, sending the firm's American Depository shares up 3.7 percent. But, not all of Alibaba's businesses looked rosy. Its online finance affiliate Ant Financial Services Group, one of founder Jack Ma's crown jewels in his e-commerce empire, recorded a net loss in the quarter. That business has spent heavily on its intense competition with WeChat Payment, one of the world's largest payments systems and owned by Alibaba arch-rival Tencent Holdings. Ant, which houses the massive Alipay online payment platform, is now valued at $60 billion and is gearing up for an IPO, despite the fact it is now losing money. Alibaba did not disclose how much Ant lost. Alibaba's revenues rose to 24.2 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in the quarter ended March 31 from 17.4 billion yuan a year earlier. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or the total value of goods transacted on its platforms on China retail marketplaces, rose 24 percent to 742 billion yuan. The previous quarter it had risen 22.5 percent - the slowest pace on record.",
'Dorsey\'s Square posts bigger-than-expected loss as costs surge: Square Inc, the mobile payments company run by Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, reported a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss on Thursday as costs surged, sending its shares sharply lower in after-hours trading. Slowing growth at formerly fast-growing Square Capital, which lends to small merchants, also aroused concerns. The company said Square Capital lent $153 million in the first quarter, up just 4 percent from the preceding quarter, largely due to "more challenging credit market conditions." The business acts as a middleman to offer funds to customers who can\'t otherwise borrow easily. Most funds are arranged by Square through third parties, who commit to buy the future receivables. "Lenders are no longer wanting to finance alternative lending," said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. Square loses $2 for every $1 of hardware sales, Luria said. "The growth is coming from the wrong places." Square, which went public in November, facilitates payments between businesses and customers with a credit card reader that turns any mobile phone into a payment terminal. The company also makes point-of-sale registers and chip-enabled card readers. Square\'s shares were down 12.3 percent at $11.44 in after-hours trading despite several bright spots in the results. The company\'s net revenue jumped 51.4 percent and gross payment volume - the total dollar amount of all card payments processed by sellers - jumped 45 percent to $10.3 billion. Square also raised its annual adjusted revenue projection to $615 million-$635 million from $600 million-$620 million. But its net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $96.8 million from $48 million in the same period a year ago as operating expenses jumped 72 percent to $207 million.',
'SAP announces new partnership with Apple to expand iOS in the enterprise: SAP announced a broad partnership with Apple today to bring iOS to SAP s enterprise customer base. The announcement comes almost two years after Apple made a similar deal with IBM. Steve Lucas, president for SAP s Digital Enterprise Platform says while it s natural to see similarities between the two deals two large enterprise companies making a deal with Apple he says there are major differences. For starters, he says SAP is firmly an enterprise software company and it has built a cloud platform to access all of the software it has developed, whether its core ERP product, SuccessFactors or Concur. He says having that core certainly is a differentiating factor in his view. Still there are similarities too. As with IBM, SAP has been working closely with Apple to bring its profound design sense to this endeavor. The objective of this partnership is no less than to revolutionize work on the iPad and iPhone, Lucas says. It s no secret that Apple wants a bigger piece of the enterprise market and these kinds of agreements help solidify their enterprise position and drive Apple hardware sales inside companies that were traditionally PC shops and hence more often considered Microsoft territory. Finally, much like IBM it wouldn t be a deal without an educational component to round it out, so SAP is also offering SAP Academy for iOS as a training ground for SAP programmers to learn to use the HANA iOS SDK. Lucas says the company is absolutely committed to this educational effort and it s not something they will announce and go away in a few months, but a program that he sees lasting well into the future. While you might not see a natural fit between SAP and Apple, when the IBM partnership was launched in 2014, it certainly raised some eyebrows too, but by the end of last year the partnership had created 100 apps and that number has surely increased since then. In fact, SAP is also planning on building 100 apps. The apps and the SDK are not yet available, but they say they should start to trickle out in Beta later this year. Many of the apps are in progress, according to Lucas, but they are not ready to ship yet. Apple also signed a partnership with Cisco last summer.',
'Tesla Falls on Cash Concerns, Doubt About Manufacturing Goals: Tesla Motors Inc. fell Thursday after the company, aiming to dramatically boost production, withdrew its projection to generate more cash than it uses this year and said it will probably need to raise capital. Shares in the electric-car maker fell 4.9 percent to $211.71 at 1:28 p.m. New York time. The shares had surged late Wednesday and early Thursday after Tesla moved ahead by two years its target date for reaching annual production of 500,000 vehicles before sinking on skepticism about the ambitious assembly goals and concerns about cash. Tesla said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday that to meet the new production target, capital expenditures this year will probably be about $750 million more than the $1.5 billion originally planned. A capital raise of about $2 billion would dilute current owners by about 7 percent, UBS analyst Colin Langan wrote in a note.',
'Netflix reveals what images hook viewers on new shows: Netflix has found that its viewers spend only 1.8 seconds considering whether to watch a show or movie that is presented to them. With so little time to make a successful pitch to potential viewers, the company has become obsessed with making it easy for members to make a quick decision about whether a show is interesting. For Netflix that means perfecting the promotional artwork imagery that runs alongside an explanation of the show. Members spend 82 percent of their time focusing on artwork while browsing Netflix, according to the company. This week Netflix released new findings about the power of the images its presents to viewers while introducing them to shows, and what traits in an image can encourage a viewer to watch a show. Netflix finds that images with expressive facial emotion that convey the tone of the show do well. Artwork featuring recognizable or polarizing characters also succeed. Even if a show has an ensemble cast, when it comes to promotional purposes someone needs to hog the spotlight. While ensemble casts are fantastic for a huge billboard on the side of a highway, they are too complex at small sizes and ultimately not as effective at helping our members decide if the title is right for them on smaller screens, explained Netflix s Nick Nelson in the blog post. While the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black featured eight cast members in its Season 1 image, Netflix scaled back to a single character for seasons 2 and 3. Netflix reached these conclusions through what s called A/B testing, in which audiences are split into groups and shown different images. Analysts then gauge how audiences respond to the different options.',
'India rejects Apple\'s plan to import used iPhones: India has rejected a plan by Apple Inc to import used iPhones, government officials said on Wednesday, a blow to the U.S. tech giant that has been seeking to revive waning sales of its flagship smartphones. Apple sells what it calls refurbished iPhones at a discount in some countries, including the United States. Extending this practice to India would have likely helped it increase its share in one of the world\'s fastest growing smartphone markets against competitors with much cheaper offerings. But India, which is pushing a \'Make in India\' initiative to boost the competitiveness of its manufacturing sector, rejected the proposal citing rules against importing used electronics. Apple\'s proposal was opposed by domestic phone makers who claim selling refurbished iPhones - devices that have been returned by buyers or repaired to factory condition after damage - would breach India\'s anti-dumping rules. The Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association had written to India\'s telecom ministry to stall the move. The news comes at a time when Apple posted its first-ever drop in iPhone sales amid weakness in China, its most important market after the United States. In India, Apple only has about a 2 percent market share but its sales there surged 56 percent in the first three months, driven mainly by cheaper older-generation devices such as the iPhone 5S while demand for the new iPhone SE disappointed. "The 5S\' success in India has more to do with affordability of a premium brand than a preference for smaller phones, and the move to the more expensive SE will discourage budget buyers," said Wilmer Ang, an analyst at research firm Canalys. The newly launched iPhone SE retails at 39,000 rupees ($585) in India - almost $200 higher than its U.S. price. To successfully tap into India\'s smartphone boom - where sales are expected to grow 25 percent this year - Apple will need a better retail presence and cheaper versions of the iPhone given the average smartphone in the country sells for less than$150, according to analysts. Apple, which currently retails in India through local partners, is already seeking government approval to set up its first store in the country.',
"Tesla's Wild New Forecast Would Change the Trajectory of an Entire Industry - If Met: Tesla just took the most ambitious automotive production timeline since the Ford Model T and moved it up two years. The company now plans to produce 500,000 electric cars every year starting in 2018. That's 10 times the number of vehicles it produced in 2015, and enough to ensure that all 400,000 customers who put down a $1,000 deposit on the forthcoming Model 3 will qualify for a significant U.S. subsidy. Talk about doubling down even the original 2020 goal was considered a long shot by Wall Street. This new target would pledge the carmaker to a faster production growth rate than Ford Motor Co. managed in the early 1900s. That's when Henry Ford pioneered the production line with the Model T, the first mass-market combustion-driven car. A century later, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk wants the Model 3 to be its electric grandchild. He's now aiming for close to a million sales by 2020. BNEF tracked 234,000 electric car sales worldwide last year, of which Tesla made up a fifth of the market, Morsy said. For Tesla to stay on its new track, it would need to produce more cars next year than the entire global electric-car industry made in 2015. Tesla's first mass-produced car, the $35,000 Model 3, will need to come to market on schedule, and with great momentum, in late 2017. Telsa's battery factory in Nevada must flourish, costs must come down, and car-making capacity must scale up at an astonishing rate. For context: Tesla has never managed to hit one of Musk's timelines for a new product launch. Not once. ",
'Fitbit shares tank after reporting a weak outlook amid rising competition: Fitbit is not having a good day, with the stock crashing more than 11 percent after reporting its first-quarter results. Here s the rub: its guidance for the second quarter came in light. Very light. Industry watchers were expecting the company to report earnings around 26 cents per share, while the company put its outlook at earnings between 8 cents per share and 11 cents per share. That s a pretty big miss, and another indicator that the company will be facing some challenges in the wearable market. Here s the quick rundown of the report: Devices: 4.8 million units sold. Earnings: 10 cents per share, against analyst estimates of 3 cents per share. Revenue: $505.4 million, against analyst estimates of $443 million. In the past six months, Fitbit shares are down more than 50 percent. Fitbit is facing a ton of increasing competition, not only from Apple with the Apple Watch, but from international manufacturers like Xiaomi and the usual competition from Jawbone. Fitbit s usual strategy has been to go after the fitness-tracking market with a portfolio of devices, but recently it s somewhat diverged from that with the launch of a smartwatch. Naturally, given Fitbit s previous success, a shift in strategy may not be very welcome to investors looking for continued growth in the company and a strong return. All this has forced Fitbit to find more unique ways to prove to consumers that it is the best option when it comes to fitness tracking. One recent example was an integration with the Amazon Echo, in which users can ask with their voice how they are performing through their Fitbit devices. It s novel use cases like these that might propel the company above the competition, but so far we haven t seen any kind of dramatic success on that front.',
'Flipkart valuation marked down by two more investors: Two small mutual fund investors at Flipkart have marked down the company s valuation, joining other investors who believe that India s largest e-commerce firm is overvalued. Valic Co 1 marked down Flipkart s value by 29.4% as of February, compared with August 2015, according to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Valic valued Flipkart s Series D stock at $98 a share in February, down from $139 a share in August.Fidelity Rutland Square Trust II marked down Flipkart s value by as much as 39.6% as of February, compared with last August, according to a filing with the SEC. Fidelity valued Flipkart s Series D stock at $82 a share in February, down from $135.8 a share in August. The Economic Times reported about the markdowns earlier on Wednesday. To be sure, Fidelity and Valic hold very small amounts of Flipkart stock. Their holdings together are worth less than $6 million. That s a minuscule fraction of Flipkart s overall value. The company last raised $700 million from investors in July last year at a valuation $15 billion. But taken along with other markdowns by Morgan Stanley and T Rowe Price, both of which together own hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Flipkart stock, it confirms the view that Flipkart s own investors believe the company is overvalued by a significant amount. In late February, Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust, another mutual fund investor in Flipkart, slashed the value of its holdings by as much as 27%. Then, last month, T Rowe Price disclosed in a filing that it cut the value of its stake in Flipkart by 15%.',
'Free Code Camp survey reveals demographics of self-taught coders: If you ve ever wondered who exactly is signing up for all these free learn-at-home coding classes and tutorial websites, Free Code Camp (which is one of them) has kindly surveyed 15,624 users with regard to various basic demographics and some more code-centric items. Some of the stats are expected (few women around 1 in 5 surveyed) and a few are surprising for instance, only 18 percent said they d like to work for a startup. Thirty-eight percent don t plan on specializing in UX, backend stuff or other specific disciplines, which they might want to revisit later. And they re all over the world mostly the U.S., with India a close second but the long tail comprises 167 more countries.',
'Uber enables global e-hailing through Alipay to fend against Lyft/Didi alliance: Starting today, Uber riders from China won t have to worry about language barriers or currency when traveling outside of the country. Now, riders will be able to pay for and hail a ride in the Alipay app in the more than 400 cities in which Uber operates. It s an extension of Uber s existing partnership with the company, which initially only allowed passengers in China to pay for their rides using Alipay. The move comes just a few weeks after Lyft and China s Didi launched a similar integration that allows Didi riders to hail a Lyft in the U.S. using the Didi Chuxing (formerly Didi Kuaidi) app, and vice versa. That partnership is part of a larger global ride-hail alliance that also includes South East Asia s Grab and India s Ola. The clear winner in this entire situation is Alipay s affiliate company, Alibaba. That s because the Chinese e-commerce company is playing both sides of the fence Alibaba is an investor in both Didi and Lyft, and Ant Financial, which operates Alipay, has had this partnership with Uber since 2014. It s certainly true that Alibaba has a higher stake in Lyft and Didi beating out Uber, but the transportation industry isn t a zero-sum game. Since there s room for both sides to coexist, Alibaba can afford to put bets on Didi and Lyft, and Uber too. But Alipay may be playing favorites. According to company SVP of business Emil Michael, Uber will be the primary featured transportation app on Alipay s platform outside of the U.S. Alipay is essentially promoting Uber to its 450 million users.',
'Instagram is selling a new type of video ad: Instagram has been pushing users to create more video content. Now it s pushing advertisers to create more video ads. Instagram announced Tuesday that it will soon roll out video carousel ads, a move that will let advertisers share up to five separate videos with one single ad purchase. Each video can be up to 60 seconds long. Instagram already sells carousel ads, the kinds of ads that let users swipe between different pages (often called cards). But video functionality wasn t available until now. The change aligns with Instagram s conscious push into video more broadly, a strategy reminiscent of Facebook s video push a few years back. Instagram is adding video featuresand making video more prominent in search in hopes users will watch more of it. It s essentially feeding people what it wants them to consume and video can be good business. If users expect to see videos when they open Instagram, then video ads, which are typically more lucrative than static ads, won t feel out of place. These new video ads are now in beta and will roll out to all advertisers in the coming weeks, according to a company spokesperson.',
'Amazon, Web Giants Shift to Report Real Cost of Equity Pay: For more than a decade, technology companies doled out heaps of stock to recruit top talent -- then pretended this wasn t a normal part of doing business by reporting profit numbers that subtracted the cost. That s changing as the industry grows up and responds to pressure from regulators and investors. Amazon.com Inc. started breaking out stock-based compensation in the results of its different businesses in the first quarter. This is the way we now evaluate our business performance and manage our operations, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts after the earnings report last week. Facebook Inc. Chief Financial Officer David Wehner had a similar message. From now on, he said he ll talk about the social network s results and other metrics based on U.S. standards known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, which include equity-based pay costs, instead of a mix of GAAP and non-GAAP numbers. We view it as a real expense, he said. Some technology companies, such as Netflix Inc. and Intel Corp., already take this approach, but many don t. If the shift to focusing on the real bottom line catches on more broadly, it could slice billions of dollars off the reported profits and official forecasts that underpin the technology sector s lofty market valuations. Facebook stock trades at about 35 times estimated earnings over the next 12 months. Add in equity compensation expense and that price-to-earnings ratio jumps to 50, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analysis. Amazon would trade at 122 times projected profit, rather than a multiple of 63. Using GAAP numbers, Alphabet Inc. would trade at 26 times forecast profit, versus 21 times, Bernstein estimates. The change also highlights the struggles of smaller Internet companies like Twitter Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. to generate GAAP earnings. Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet may have high stock valuations, but they are also very profitable by GAAP and non-GAAP measures. Twitter shares trade at about 36 times estimated profit, but including stock-based compensation analysts expect it to have a loss over the next 12 months, Bernstein research shows. Some companies have been egregious with stock compensation, Fish said, citing LinkedIn, which has relatively high equity-based pay compared to its revenue and earnings. LinkedIn shares have declined 44 percent this year, while rival social network Facebook is up 13 percent.',
'Google, Fiat Chrysler to partner on self-driving minivans: Alphabet Inc\'s Google unit and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV have agreed to work together to build a fleet of 100 self-driving minivans in the most advanced collaboration to date between Silicon Valley and a traditional carmaker, the companies said Tuesday. The deal marks the first time that Google has worked directly with an automaker "to integrate its self-driving system, including its sensors and software, into a passenger vehicle," the companies said in a statement on Tuesday. Google and Fiat Chrysler engineers will work together to fit Google\'s autonomous driving technology into the Pacifica minivan. Some engineers for both companies will work together at a facility in Southeast Michigan, where Fiat Chrysler has its major North American engineering center, the companies said. Google said it is not sharing proprietary self-driving vehicle technology with Fiat Chrysler, however, and the vehicles will not be offered for sale to the public. The agreement between Google and Fiat Chrysler comes as rival technology and auto companies are accelerating efforts to master the complex hardware and artificial intelligence systems required to allow vehicles to pilot themselves.',
"Match Group revenue beats as Tinder attracts more paid users: Dating website operator Match Group Inc reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue on Tuesday, as its popular dating app Tinder attracted more paying users. The company's shares rose 7.3 percent to $11.98 in after-hours trading. Match Group, which also owns Match.com and OkCupid, gets bulk of its revenue from membership fees and paid features. The company said its average paid-member count jumped 36 percent to 5.1 million in the first quarter ended March 31, also helped by the acquisition of PlentyOfFish. Match Group, majority owned by media mogul Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, agreed to buy Vancouver-based PlentyOfFish for $575 million in July last year. Tinder surpassed 1 million paid members during the quarter. The Dallas-based company's dating business, its biggest, which includes apps such as Tinder, recorded a 24 percent rise in revenue to $260.4 million. Total revenue rose 21.4 percent to $285.3 million. Revenue from the company's non-dating business, which includes educational websites Princeton Review and Tutor.com, was flat at $24.9 million. Up to Tuesday's close of $11.16, Match Group's shares had fallen 7 percent since the company went public in November.",
'This new apartment is like a college dorm for grown-ups: WeWork, a provider of co-working spaces in 28 cities, isn t content to just offer you a place to do your job. This week it s opening WeLive, which offers furnished living quarters and a range of extra amenities in a fresh take on what apartment life should be like. The apartments themselves are on the small side, and many lack a complete kitchen or a full-sized fridge. In some apartments the beds fold into the wall to create more space. But when residents step outside their own walls they have access to common areas including large kitchens stocked with appliances, game rooms, quiet areas and a community garden. WeLive is designed around flexibility residents live month to month rather than signing a one-year lease. There s no need to wait for the cable guy to hook up one s TV or Internet service. And no one has to shop for a bed, couch or table. Residents need to arrive with little more than their clothes. A security deposit is required, but credit checks aren t done. A private studio in Crystal City starts at $1,640 a month, and a studio with two beds starts at $1,880. There are also one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments. A four-bedroom goes for $4,220 a month. Residents pay a $125 monthly fee that covers utilities, cable and Internet. The New York apartments are more expensive, with private units starting at $2,550. Stephanie Sutton, 31, moved into WeLive s Crystal City location a month ago. WeLive has brought in some residents early as part of a test period. Sutton said her favorite aspect has been the sense of community. It really does feel like home, she said. It s a great way to develop friendships without any pressure. Here you passively make 10 friends instantly. ',
'Mid-Career and Itching to Lead a Startup This VC Firm Wants You: It s easy to spot the silver hair among Jungle Ventures gallery of startup founders. Look closer and you ll find many have called the shots at banks and Fortune 500 outfits. That s no accident. Jungle Ventures strategy involves betting on executive-suite veterans over starry-eyed twentysomethings who dream of changing the world, saidAmit Anand, co-founder and managing partner of the Singapore-based firm. While peers crave youthful upstart vision, Jungle Ventures openly courts corporate bigwigs wondering where to take their careers. Singapore is an Asian base for global banking and technology firms such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- and that s its advantage, Anand said. Professionals more accustomed to navigating the corporate jungle than envisioning the next Facebook can become standout entrepreneurs with a little help, he said. And they know how to make a buck. Jungle s unusual approach seems to have paid off: it s cashed out of three startups in four years including ZipDial, bought last year by Twitter Inc. Its tactics have won investment from heavy-hitters like Singaporean state investor Temasek Holdings Pte, International Finance Corp. and the wealthy Thakral family. Anand said it s close to raising a new $100 million fund to add consumer tech and Internet of Things to a portfolio spanning e-commerce, finance and software across Asia.Anand and co-founder Anurag Srivastava were professionals-turned-entrepreneurs themselves before they met through Sony Entertainment Television co-founder Jayesh Parekh and started Jungle in 2012. Over the next four years, the pair witnessed the Singaporean startup scene transform from young university dropouts into an arena dominated by mid-career professionals with serious banking and Internet chops. They were leaving their jobs, knowing their industries inside out, wanting to disrupt their own industry. More seasoned, more experienced, going after very large ideas, Anand said. That s something we are going to double down on over the next years, to back more professionals turning into entrepreneurs in disruptive industries, trying to create new industries. ',
'Oculus will sell its virtual reality headset in Best Buy stores beginning this week: Facebook-owned Oculus wants to take virtual reality mainstream, so it s bringing its VR headset to the place mainstream shoppers can find it: Retail stores. Oculus announced Monday that it will begin selling a small number of Oculus Rift headsets in 48 Best Buy stores around the country later this week. It s the first time the Rift has been available in-store, although Best Buy has already been selling the Rift online. Perhaps more important than actually selling the headset from a physical store is Oculus plan to set up demos for these devices at each Best Buy location. Virtual reality is still a very niche industry that appeals primarily to gamers. Simply getting the word out that Oculus exists and is available for purchase is still a challenge. Putting demo stations inside Best Buys could help educate shoppers who stumble upon the product for the first time. Oculus started selling the Rift in January and shipping them in March, but the process hasn t been as smooth as expected. Lots of the orders have been delayed, so Oculus says that those waiting on a preorder can buy a Rift in-store and still get the rest of their preorder perks (like a game and first dibs on the Oculus controllers, which are alsodelayed). This backup was not-so-subtly hinted at in the company s blog post Monday: Quantities [in Best Buy] will be extremely limited while we catch up on Rift preorders. So don t hold your breath. In addition to selling in Best Buy starting May 7, Oculus will also sell online from Microsoft and Amazon beginning this week.',
'Brazil orders cell phone carriers to block WhatsApp for 72 hours: WhatsApp, Facebook s messaging service that recently rolled out end-to-end encryption to its users, will be blocked in Brazil for 72 hours, starting this afternoon. A judge from the small Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered telecom providers in the country to block WhatsApp today in a dispute over access to encrypted data. Judge Marcel Montalvao has ordered WhatsApp to turn over chat records related to a drug investigation, but WhatsApp has argued that it cannot access the chats in an unencrypted form and therefore cannot provide the required records to the court. Local newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that the ban would begin at 2 p.m. local time and that phone companies in the country would face fines if they did not comply. This isn t Montalvao s first clash with WhatsApp, which boasts more than 100 million Brazilian users. The judge ordered the arrest of Facebook s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, in March. Facebook has said that WhatsApp operates with relative independence and that Dzodan has no control over WhatsApp data. Brazil also cut off access to WhatsApp in the country last December. Although the block was ordered to last for 48 hours, it was lifted after just 12 hours.',
'How Foursquare knew before almost anyone how bad things were for Chipotle: Chipotle announced its first loss as a public company Tuesday. But two weeks earlier, an unlikely source the social media app Foursquare had beat Chipotle to the punch,predicting in a blog post that the burrito maker s sales would drop nearly 30 percent. Chipotle made it official Tuesday afternoon reporting a drop of 29.7 percent. The remarkably accurate prediction from a company consumers know for restaurant tips and the ability to check in at locations highlights the emerging power of the gobs of data our smartphones collect and the opportunity for savvy companies to convert that information into piles of cash. Foursquare has spent seven years collecting data and has 85 million places in its database. It describes its data trove as the biggest foot traffic panel in the world. Clients that buy Foursquare s data to glean insights include retailers, real estate developers, Wall Street traders and consumer package-goods companies. Foursquare, the seven-year-old start-up, cleverly turned smartphone data into predictions on Chipotle sales that matched Wall Street analysts with far more experience in projecting the successes of businesses such as Chipotle. Last year, Foursquare used its foot-traffic data to predict how many iPhones Apple would sell on a given weekend. Foursquarepredicted sales of 13 million to 15 million. Apple then announced sales of more than 13 million.Once a handful of Foursquare users have checked in at a location, the company knows that a given location represents a certain store. If the smartphones of another Foursquare user move inside these premises but doesn t check in Foursquare still knows the user was in the store. Foursquare relies on GPS data, WiFi, cell towers and beacons to pinpoint where smartphone users are. Data experts caution that there are limits to how far Foursquare can replicate its Chipotle predictions elsewhere. They say Foursquare s success will work best at large chains. Foursquare needs a lot of data to make such predictions, so it would probably struggle to accurately predict the sales of a retailer that has only a handful of locations.Another limitation to Foursquare s approach is the nature of a store. Chipotle lends itself to a foot-traffic analysis because customers overwhelmingly travel in person to a store to get their food. It would be more difficult to predict the sales at a business that sells a significant amount of goods online.',
"Gas Delivery Startups Want to Fill Up Your Car Anywhere. Is That Allowed : A new crop of startups are trying to make gas stations obsolete. Tap an app, and they'll bring the gas to you, filling up your car while you're at work, eating breakfast, or watching Netflix. Filld, WeFuel, Yoshi, Purple and Booster Fuels have started operating in a few cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia. But officials in some of those cities say that driving around in a pickup truck with hundreds of gallons of gasoline might not be safe. It is not permitted, said Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a spokesman for the San Francisco fire department. Baxter said if San Francisco residents see any companies fueling vehicles in the city, they should call the fire department. Yoshi, which operates in San Francisco, was surprised to hear Baxter's concerns. We haven't talked to them. I don't know about that. It s news to me, said co-founder Nick Alexander. The next day, he said he believed Yoshi was following the law and that it had been careful to limit the size of their gas tanks to stay under limits outlined in the International Fire Code, a guideline followed by many U.S. states. Filld, an 18-month-old startup with thousands of customers in Silicon Valley, plans to start service in San Francisco on Monday, deploying three delivery trucks at 1 p.m. You can never ask for permission because no one will give it, said Chris Aubuchon, the chief executive officer at Filld. The Los Angeles Fire Department said it s drafting a policy around gasoline delivery. Our current fire code does not allow this process; however, we are exploring a wayhis could be allowed with some restrictions, said Capt. Daniel Curry, a spokesman for the city s fire department. It s just one of these things that nobody has really thought about before kind of like how Uber popped up out of nowhere. But he said it s not a gray area: All I can tell you at this time is it s not allowed as per our current fire code. ",
'Why is Facebook doing so well Facebook reported yet another quarter of strong user growth, in marked contrast to Twitter, which has been eking out only very modest growth recently. In fact, over the past year Facebook s monthly active users grew by roughly two-thirds the size of Twitter s entire base. This wasn t a one-off Facebook has grown by over 150 million users year on year for the past four years at least, and growth has actually accelerated recently: Predictably, the strongest growth has been in the least mature markets Asia and Facebook s Rest of World geographic segments led the charge, with more than 75 million new users each over the past year, while North America and Europe added fewer users (but still grew decently). That reemphasizes the importance of Facebook s efforts to grow usage in those emerging markets and, hence, projects like Free Basics (recently shut down in India) and its other connectivity projects. So far, though, it seems to be doing just fine in these countries. Average revenue per user is also growing strongly across the board, led by the U.S. and Canada, where annual ARPU is approaching $50. Other regions have far lower ARPU the rest of the world combined has an annual ARPU of just $7. That overall ARPU growth multiplied by the user growth is driving phenomenal overall revenue growth. And, because that growth requires a much more modest increase in costs, it s also driving margin expansion. Revenue grew by 52 percent year on year for the second quarter in a row, and operating margin was up 11 points year on year. Just as a reminder, that revenue is almost all coming from ads at this point the FarmVille era is well and truly over at this point, and payments are a tiny fraction of total revenue for Facebook today. One of the hardest things to get at in Facebook s results is the role of Instagram. The app has been serving up ads for some time now, and management has been talking up the benefits in general terms for several quarters. But it doesn t break out metrics other than monthly active users (400 million at last count). In addition, Instagram users are excluded from the MAU count Facebook reports and on which it bases its ARPU calculations, even though Instagram revenue is included in ARPU. As such, there s a little misdirection going on, in that Facebook is including Instagram in the numerator but not the denominator here. There is, to be sure, a good chance that many Instagram users are also Facebook users, so there s not too much double counting, but I do wonder how much of the growth in ARPU is from Facebook monetizing Instagram better. From a perspective of internal threats to success, Facebook is placing some biggish bets on future projects like virtual reality (through Oculus) and research and development into new forms of connectivity, both projects outside its core business, and therefore both potential distractions and financial sinkholes. But the scope of these efforts seems to be modest in the context of Facebook s overall business, and its margins aren t suffering yet. Government action on Free Basics, as we ve already seen in India, is another possible threat, but a modest one at this point, and one few other governments seem willing to take on for now. Perhaps the biggest threat of all is that platform owners like Apple and Google end up owning the next round of devices and platforms in the same way they have smartphones, despite Facebook s VR investments, and steadily squeeze out third parties they perceive as a threat. Facebook seems aware of this possibility, and has invested not just in VR as a potential future interface but also an increasingly OS-like presence on smartphones.',
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'According to its cofounder and CEO Snapchat is mainly a camera company : Despite all of its new bells and whistles and the billions of videos, ads, and effects that have been added to the service, Snapchat chief executive Evan Spiegel still thinks of the new media juggernaut he s created as a camera company . While Snapchat Stories may be the feature that brings the company the revenue model it needs to validate its $16 billion valuation, and while the ephemeral messaging feature may be what initially attracted the hordes of millennials sending digital ephemera to each other billions of times a day, Spiegel says that the camera itself remains Snapchat s unifying feature. Snapchat opens to the camera, Spiegel said. Chat is available to the left of the camera, and Stories is available to the right of the camera. That not only differentiates it from other social media products, but allows Snapchat to straddle the line between the defining features of several of them. The beautiful thing is it sort of sits in the middle, but more importantly it opens to the camera, Spiegel said. The thing that feeds a social network is content Similarly with communication So in our view, when you take a snap and you choose this path between talking to your friends or adding it to your Story we end up with this harmony where both of these businesses feed themselves. I don t think it s one or the other. In a way, even the company s movement into filters, stickers, and lenses such as face swap are further extensions of the original thesis of Snapchat as a photographic communication tool. Now you can put the way you feel in the moment you re experiencing. For us that s just the beginning of some fun, creative tools, he said.',
'Amazon s Cloud Business Lifts Its Profit to a Record: Amazon delivered a blowout quarter on Thursday, joining Facebook as one of the rare bright spots in a technology sector that has recently produced a string of disappointing earnings reports. Helped by its fast-growing Amazon Web Services business, the company jumped to the most profitable quarter in its nearly 22-year history.For the first quarter, which ended March 31, Amazon reported net income of $513 million, or $1.07 a share, up from a loss of $57 million, or 12 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Revenue at the company rose to $29.13 billion from $22.72 billion a year ago. Amazon s share price jumped more than 12 percent in after-hours trading after the results were released. Investors were happy to see the company show profits after the disappointing run of reports from Apple, Google,Microsoft and Intel. The biggest source of the company s profits is Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business that started just over a decade ago and is now on track to bring in more than $10 billion a year in revenue. A.W.S., as the business is known, is the most popular cloud service for start-ups and for a growing number of big companies that want to rent computing capacity, rather than run their own hardware and software. Cloud computing is also much more profitable than Amazon s North American retail business, which runs on thinner margins, and its international retail business, which runs at a loss. The operating income for A.W.S. more than tripled in the quarter to $604 million. The profits from A.W.S. represented 56 percent of Amazon s total operating income, even though the $2.57 billion in revenue from A.W.S. up 64 percent from a year earlier amounted to less than 9 percent of total revenue.',
'Baidu First-Quarter Profit, Revenue Outlook Beat Estimates: Baidu Inc. posted earnings in the first quarter that beat analysts estimates and forecast revenue in the current quarter that also tops projections after China s biggest search engine provider controlled its spending and increased sales from new businesses. Earnings excluding some costs were $1.06 per American depository share in the first quarter, the Beijing-based company said Thursday. That compares with the average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg of $1.01. Sales for the quarter increased 24 percent to $2.45 billion compared with estimates for $2.44 billion. For the second quarter, Baidu said it expects revenue of $3.12 billion to $3.19 billion, compared with estimates of $3.10 billion.Baidu s depository receipts rose 5.5 percent to $195.80 in extended U.S. trading.',
'LinkedIn Rises on Better-Than-Expected Earnings Forecast: LinkedIn Corp. forecast earnings that beat estimates on improved performance from its main recruiting tools, suggesting a surprise slowdown earlier this year was not as dire as analysts feared. The operator of the largest online professional network said second-quarter profit, excluding some items, will be from 74 cents to 77 cents a share. That beat the 71-cent average analyst estimate. First-quarter earnings topped expectations by a wide margin and the company raised its full-year revenue guidance to $3.65 billion to $3.70 billion, from an earlier range of $3.6 billion to $3.65 billion. LinkedIn Corp. forecast earnings that beat estimates on improved performance from its main recruiting tools, suggesting a surprise slowdown earlier this year was not as dire as analysts feared. The operator of the largest online professional network said second-quarter profit, excluding some items, will be from 74 cents to 77 cents a share. That beat the 71-cent average analyst estimate. First-quarter earnings topped expectations by a wide margin and the company raised its full-year revenue guidance to $3.65 billion to $3.70 billion, from an earlier range of $3.6 billion to $3.65 billion. LinkedIn climbed as much as 16 percent to $142.89 in extended trading. The shares had declined 45 percent this year as of Thursday s close. ',
'Icahn: We\'re out of Apple, and it\'s China\'s fault: Billionaire investor Carl Icahn told CNBC on Thursday he has sold hisApple position as the tech giant\'s stock continues to shed value after disappointing earnings. "We no longer have a position in Apple," Icahn told CNBC\'s "Power Lunch," noting Apple is a "great company" and CEO Tim Cook is "doing a great job." Icahn previously owned a little less than a percent of the tech giant\'s outstanding shares, which were down more than 3 percent midafternoon Thursday after falling more than 6 percent Wednesday. He said he made roughly $2 billion on Apple, a stock he continued to tout as "cheap" despite his reservations.Icahn said China\'s attitude toward Apple largely drove him to exit his position. "You worry a little bit and maybe more than a little about China\'s attitude," Icahn said, later adding that China\'s government could "come in and make it very difficult for Apple to sell there ... you can do pretty much what you want there." He added, though, that if China "was basically steadied," he would buy back into Apple.',
'The Apple Watch did not change the Apple Store like we thought it would: It was just over a year ago that the Apple Watch was slated to be unveiled, and the Internet rumor and analysis machine was running in overdrive: Wall Street-types weighed in on whether the new gadget could propel the world s most valuable company to greater revenue and an even higher stock price. Tech geeks were chattering about the nitty-gritty of its features, and culture mavens debated whether it would become a game changer like the iPod or iPhone before it. And in the retail world, the major question was this: Would the arrival of a product that was not just a gadget, but also a luxury fashion item, push Apple to shake up its successful store format The root of the speculation, or at least, the primary fuel for it, was a single paragraph in a New Yorker profile of Apple s design chief, Jonathan Ive. In that story it was reported that Ive and Angela Ahrendts, Apple s senior vice president of retail, were working on a redesign of Apple stores, perhaps to make the setting more conducive to selling a luxury timepiece. The story noted that Ive had overheard someone saying, I m not going to buy a watch if I can t stand on carpet. And so analysts and reporters, including this one began wondering: Would certain sections of the store be carpeted Would they be outfitted with full-length mirrors so people could see how the watch fit into their overall look Would there be showcase lighting, like at an upscale jeweler If you ve set foot in an Apple store lately, you know the answer to all of these questions: No. Apple did end up adding a backroom VIP area to at least one store in New York where customers could try on the Edition, the luxe version of the watch that has a five-figure price tag. But the Apple Store, by and large, still has the same vibe and aesthetic that it did in the pre-Watch era. Sure, some newer stores have fresh features, such as one in Brussels that is outfitted with live trees. An Apple representative has said that a forthcoming store in Memphis is to be a next-generation Apple store, with new design elements such as a large TV screen that can display a changing array of products or artwork. But even with those kinds of potential changes, the Apple Store continues to be defined by a spare, contemporary look and feel and the changes that have been implemented or are on the way don t exactly seem linked to the unique needs of selling the watch.',
'Facebook revenue smashes expectations as mobile ad sales surge: Facebook Inc\'s (FB.O) quarterly revenue rose more than 50 percent, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its wildly popular mobile app and a push into live video lured new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to boost spending. The company\'s shares rose 9.5 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $118.39, setting it on track to open at a new high on Thursday, at nearly triple its initial public offering four years ago. Facebook also announced it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded. Some 1.65 billion people used Facebook monthly as of March 31, up from 1.44 billion a year earlier. Zuckerberg said users were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, a huge amount of time given the millions of apps available to users. "The company consistently \'warns\' about higher spending, but they consistently manage their spending to deliver earnings upside. They\'re an impressive company, and they leave very little room for criticism," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who called the operating margin a good surprise. Facebook did not offer details on sales of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but emphasized that it was early days and said that sales would not significantly impact 2016 revenue. The company\'s net income attributable to common shareholders nearly tripled to $1.51 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the first quarter from $509 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 77 cents per share, beating Wall Street\'s 62-cent consensus. Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 percent to $5.20 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 percent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 percent a year earlier.',
'PayPal beats the street on Q1 sales of $2.54B and EPS of $0.37: Payments giant PayPal posted strong Q1 earnings today, counter balancing some of the weaker showings from other tech stocks yesterday and outstripping the overall growth rate of e-commerce, in its own words. Following in the footsteps of its former parent, which alsoposted strong results for Q1, PayPal posted revenues of $2.544 billion with non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.37, rising 19% and 28% respectively on a year ago and both beating analysts projections of $2.5 billion and $0.35 EPS. The company says it has 184 million customers now, up by 4.5 million, with 1.4 billion transactions in the quarter up 26% on a year ago. Services like Venmo and the company s expansion into credit and other services has given the company a life on average transactions per customer, which were up 12% to 28 payments per user, and $81 billion in total payment volume. That $81 billion in TPV, it said, was faster than the growth rate of e-commerce. On the merchant side, there are now 14 million active accounts. When it comes to new-wave revenues, PayPal is showing some of its legacy: the company only completes 26% of transactions on mobile devices today, versus 22% a year ago.',
'A Silicon Valley VC says investors from China are joining Series A deals, and they re playing hardball : On valuations: The average thing coming out of Y Combinator is probably a half to three-quarters of what it was [in terms of valuation in recent years]. The average seed-stage deal is half. On hardball tactics: Docs are taking longer because there are new investors coming in, and they want more stuff in their terms. These are newer investors, often foreign investors, who are basically saying: I want senior preference to [a company s earlier] investors, and that s adding two or three weeks as they usually ask right as the docs are closing. They re almost all from China, and they want all of their preferences to be senior to everyone else s. What s happening is, since they know the capital s financials, they just wait it out. By that point, we ve already signed a term sheet and turned off a lot of other people who wanted to invest. These things never come up in the term sheet phase but later in the docs. They ll say, We did our diligence, and we need XYZ to invest. It s not a great way to start a relationship. People in the ecosystem around here are playing for the long term; they realize that sooner or later, they ll be on the other side of the table and don t want this stuff applied to them. This is mostly coming from Asia, where they play much harder hardball than here. And [these investors] do it with a happy face. That s just the environment [to which they re accustomed]. On the slowdown in tech valuations: I don t expect it to pick up any time soon, which is a function of retail and institutional investors looking for high-growth stories with profit associated with them. They want profit and growth. Meanwhile, a lot of companies that have strong revenue can t show that growth, and vice versa. There just aren t a lot of companies that could sustain being public right now.',
'Amazon is liable for billing you for your kid s wild in-app purchases, a judge says: A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Amazon is liable for billing parents for unauthorized in-app purchases made by their children. With the ruling, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour sided with the Federal Trade Commission in its lawsuit against Amazon for failing to get consent from parents for in-app purchases made by kids. Many of Amazon s arguments improperly assume a familiarity with in-app purchases on the part of consumers, the judge said in the ruling. For example, Amazon cites to a case determining that a reasonable Amazon customer is accustomed to online shopping, but online shopping and spending real currency while obtaining virtual items in a game are completely different user activities. The court has not yet ruled on how much Amazon will have to pay out to customers affected by the practice. The FTC previously settled with Apple and Google in similar cases, resulting in more than $50 million being returned to consumers.',
'Chinese phone makers Oppo and Vivo pass Xiaomi in global phone sales: Being the it smartphone sure doesn t last long. New data from IDC finds that Xiaomi now trails several of its less well known Chinese rivals when it comes to global market share. Overall, there were 334.9 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2016, IDC said, up very slightly from the 334.3 million units a year ago. That marks the smallest year-over-year growth on record. Oppo and Vivo, two names unfamiliar to most Americans, are now the No. 4 and No. 5 phone sellers behind Samsung, Apple and Huawei, another big Chinese hardware maker. Huawei is also on the rise, still far short of its goal of supplanting Apple and Samsung, but at least closing the gap on the two leaders. Oppo and Vivo are mostly known in the Chinese market, though Oppo now gets about 20 percent of its sales from outside its home turf.',
'It feels like every tech company is offering cash advances. Shopify is the latest: Following in the footsteps of PayPal and Square, e-commerce software company Shopify said on Wednesday that it would start offering cash advances to business owners who use its software. The program, called Shopify Capital, will let eligible Shopify merchants obtain a lump-sum cash advance in exchange for a fixed percentage of their daily sales. Cash advances are popular with small businesses that don t have the time or business history to secure a loan from a bank. The Shopify announcement comes more than two years after payments companies PayPal and Square began offering similar programs. Right now, companies that serve small businesses are seeing this market as a way to create a new revenue stream that can be sold to existing customers and, they hope, help retain them. They are joining an increasingly crowded space, as the online alternative lending space has heated up in recent years. Merchant cash advances have had a mixed reputation in the past, due to hidden fees and the risk of a business getting addicted to them. But internet companies like Shopify are trying to remove the stigma around them by promising to disclose up front how a business will pay back the advance. Square recently moved from offering cash advances to actual loans.',
'Apple\'s nine-year iPhone juggernaut stops with first sales decline since 2003: Apple on Tuesday posted its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years as the company credited with inventing the smartphone struggles with an increasingly saturated market. The company\'s sales dropped by more than a quarter in China, its most important market after the United States, and it also forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues. Its shares fell about 8 percent, dropping below $100 for the first time since February. A hike in Apple\'s share buyback and dividend as well as bumper revenue from services failed to mollify investors. While Apple executives had predicted iPhone sales would decline this quarter, they must reassure investors that the drop represents a momentary roadblock, rather than a permanent shift for the product that fueled its meteoric rise. After years of blockbuster sales, many investors fear the iPhone has reached saturation, spelling the end for Apple\'s exponential growth. Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told Reuters that the success of the iPhone 6 a year earlier had set a difficult bar to beat in the second quarter. "The iPhone 6 is an anomaly," he said. He pointed to the services division, which includes Apple Music and the App Store, as a bright spot. Its revenue grew 20 percent to $6 billion and surpassed iMac and iPad sales. Apple forecast third-quarter revenue of $41 billion to $43 billion, short of the Wall Street consensus of $47.3 billion. The drop in after-hours shares wipes out roughly $46 billion in market capitalization, roughly the value of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar. In reaction to Apple\'s results, shares of its suppliers Skyworks Solutions, Qorvo, Broadcom and NXP Semiconductors all fell 2 percent or more on Tuesday.',
'Twitter stock plunges as earnings miss estimates: Twitter disappointed investors yet again with first-quarter results that showed stagnant revenue growth as the microblogging service struggles to grab new users amid efforts to improve its complicated interface with several new features. Twitter shares plunged 13.6 percent to $15.34 in late trade on Tuesday after reporting lower-than-expected revenue, hurt by weaker than expected spending by big advertisers, and providing a current-quarter revenue forecast well below analysts\' expectations. Twitter\'s user base grew modestly to 310 million monthly active users in the quarter ended March 31 from 305 million in the fourth quarter, above analysts\' expectations. But investors were let down by the revenue miss since outlining a turnaround plan. First-quarter revenue rose 36 percent from a year earlier to $594.5 million, but widely missed the average analyst estimate of $607.8 million. Its net loss narrowed to $79.7.million, or 12 cents per share, from $162.4 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier. "It\'s obvious Twitter is having trouble," said Arvind Bhatia, analyst with CRT Capital. "It\'s not growing anywhere close to where people expected a while back."',
'Alibaba Financial Affiliate Raises $4.5 Billion: The Alibaba Group of China has become a colossus in the global Internet world, with a market value of nearly $200 billion. Now its online payment affiliate is aiming for similarly lofty financial goal: becoming one of the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world. The affiliate, known as the Ant Financial Services Group, said on Tuesday that it had raised $4.5 billion from investors. The private financing round suggests that the company is now valued at about $60 billion or more than $10 billion over the market value of PayPal Holdings, its closest analogue. Ant Financial may not be as well known in the West as Silicon Valley darlings like Uber Technologies, which was most recently valued at about $62.5 billion. But Ant Financial whose controlling shareholder isAlibaba s billionaire founder, Jack Ma has become an online power in its own right. It is one of the biggest electronic payment companies in the world by virtue of Alipay, a payment service that is commonly used in China. It is also one of the most prominent symbols of strength in China s private sector, particularly in the field of online payments. Slow-moving state-run banks and an initial absence of regulation have allowed privately run companies to weave themselves into everyday life. Ant Financial now encompasses not only online payments, but also low-risk money market funds and a wallet app that enables easy payment from smartphones around China. Chinese consumers use Alipay to shop online, transfer money to one another, hail taxis, buy movie tickets and even invest their spare change. A money-market fund affiliated with Ant Financial was once one of the world s largest. According to the announcement on Tuesday, Alipay has more than 450 million users, or more than double the number PayPal has. Such is the power of the company that its latest financing was led by some of China s biggest state-controlled banks, including arms of the China Construction Bank and China Life Insurance. That indicates the level of government support that the company enjoys in a country where much of the economy is still state-directed. Ant Financial s previous fund-raising round, which was held last year, included China s national social security fund and an arm of the China Development Bank. In a move that could further endear the company to Chinese officials, Mr. Ma has said he hopes to take Ant Financial public in China. Still, if Ant Financial follows through on the plan, it would be one of the biggest initial public offerings since that of Alibaba itself, which raisednearly $22 billion in 2014 in the biggest public offering on record.',
'EBay Forecast Beats Estimates as Traffic Efforts Pay Off: EBay projected sales on its marketplace for the second quarter and full year that will meet or exceed analysts estimates, suggesting efforts to boost traffic, such as using barcode scanning and a more searchable catalog, are gaining traction. Since separating from PayPal last year, Chief Executive Officer Devin Wenig has been under pressure to reverse sluggish growth at EBay in the face of competition from Amazon.com Inc., which continues to woo shoppers with fast delivery, and after Google changed its search algorithm in a way that hurt EBay traffic. The shares rose 2.1 percent to $24.98 in extended trading after the results were announced. They ended the day at $24.49, up 1.1 percent, and are down 11 percent so far this year. Revenue in the second quarter will be $2.14 billion to $2.19 billion EBay said in a statement Tuesday. The average analyst estimate was for $2.14 billion. For the full year, EBay said it expects revenue of $8.6 billion to $8.8 billion, compared with analysts estimates of $8.73 billion. Profit, excluding certain items, will be 40 cents to 42 cents a share in the current quarter, EBay said Tuesday, compared with analysts estimates of 44 cents. EBay s Gross Merchandise Volume -- the total value of goods sold on the marketplace -- of $20.5 billion in the quarter was up 1 percent from a year earlier.',
'As tide turns against chip industry, Samsung forges ahead of rivals: Gloom may be settling over much of the world\'s semiconductor industry but Samsung is expected to cope better than most due to its strong technological edge, enabling it to boost market share for some key products and possibly even lift revenue. A plunge in PC sales and slower growth for smartphones globally has hit the sector hard, prompting Intel Corp to say this month it would cut up to 12,000 jobs. Qualcomm has said fiscal third-quarter chip shipments could fall as much as 22 percent, while SK Hynix Inc on Tuesday reported a 65 percent slide in quarterly operating income - its weakest result in three years. Samsung, which reports its first-quarter earnings on Thursday, is also hurting. Chip profits - which accounted for just under half of its overall 2015 operating income - are widely expected to fall, with some analysts predicting a drop of more than 10 percent in January-March from a year earlier. But if its rivals are getting pummeled, the South Korean tech giant is merely bruised and is in many ways benefiting as clients shift towards premium power-conserving DRAM chips for smartphones, as well as solid-state drives for data storage using 3D NAND chips. "The technological gap between Samsung and its competitors in fields such as DRAM and NAND has been widening lately, which helps the company avoid the rate of profit decline seen at other firms," said Song Myung-sub, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities. Even with a first-quarter drop of around 10 percent, Samsung\'s chip operating profit is expected to be nearly five times that of SK Hynix. The world\'s No. 2 chipmaker also happens to run the world\'s biggest smartphone business, giving it a captive customer for its chips that none of its rivals have.',
'The future of TV is arriving faster than anyone predicted: Late last week, Comcast announced a new program that allows makers of smart TVs and other Internet-based video services to have full access to your cable programming without the need for a set-top box. Instead, the content will flow directly to the third-party device as an app, including all the channels and program guide. The Xfinity TV Partner Program will initially be offered on new smart TVs from Samsung, as well as Roku streaming boxes. But the program, built on open Internet-based standards including HTML5, is now open to other device manufacturers to adopt. As video services move from hardware to software, the future of the traditional set-top box looks increasingly grim. With this announcement, Comcast customers may soon eliminate the need for an extra device, potentially saving hundreds of dollars in fees. Many in the industry have long predicted eventual death for the box, driven in part by a rapid migration by pay TV providers (including fiber and satellite-based companies) to Internet standards for both video content and services, and by the enthusiastic response of consumers to a growing number of Internet-based alternatives. These include Roku, as well as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, SlingTV, Sony, HBO and many others. Consumers, especially younger ones, are interested in defining their own video experience, mixing traditional and self-produced content and enjoying it not just on televisions but on every connected device, including tablets, smartphones and other mobile gadgets. At this year s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it was clear that list would soon grow to include other non-traditional viewing platforms, such as cars, refrigerators and game consoles. Comcast s announcement suggests that future may already be here.',
'Facebook developing camera app similar to Snapchat: WSJ: Facebook is developing a stand-alone camera app, similar to disappearing photo app Snapchat, to increase user engagement, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.The app, being developed by Facebook\'s "friend-sharing" team in London, is in its early stages and may never come to fruition, according to the report. The company is also planning a feature that allows a user to record video through the app to begin live streaming, the newspaper reported.',
'The Gannett-Tribune offer: No one knows what a newspaper is worth anymore: Three years ago, Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for the Washington Post from the Graham family. Last year, Japanese publisher Nikkei paid $1.3 billion to take the Financial Times off the hands of the education conglomerate Pearson. Today s $815 million bid to buy Tribune Publishing, from USA Today owner and newspaper chain Gannett, basically falls in the middle of those two recent deals. And it suggests that as print revenue continues to decline, there s no such thing as a market price for newspapers anymore. Gannett is offering $12.25 a share (5.6 times Ebitda*), or a 63 percent premium on the current value of its stock, to buy the struggling newspaper publisher, which owns eleven dailies, including the Chicago Tribune and crown jewel Los Angeles Times. In 2013, Bezos paid what analyst Ken Doctor called a friendship premium of 17 times Ebitda; when Nikkei bought the FT, the going rate for European newspapers was 12 times Ebitda. Nikkei paid 35 times Ebitda. This isn t a friendly offer, meaning Tribune might not play ball, but investors sure seem to dig it. Tribune Publishing s stock opened the day by rocketing up more than 50 percent. Wall Street probably likes it because of Tribune s dwindling print business, which justifies the lower Ebitda on the Gannett offer.',
"Google Glass-based startup raises $17 million in funding: Augmedix Inc, a startup that uses Alphabet Inc's Google Glass to provide documentation services to doctors and other healthcare workers, said on Monday it had closed a $17 million funding round led by investment firm Redmile Group. Augmedix's employees transcribe doctors' notes and update patients' electronic medical record through Google Glass. The San Francisco company, which has raised $40 million so far, also said it had received investments from five U.S. healthcare networks, including Sutter Health and Dignity Health, which together have more than 100,000 healthcare workers. Augmedix, with 400 employees, said it serves doctors in nearly all 50 U.S. states. Funds raised will be used to build up the service to serve more health systems and private clinics, the company said. Augmedix is one of 10 partners authorized by Alphabet to deliver enterprise services through Google Glass.",
'A Marriage Gone Bad: Walgreens Struggles to Shake Off Theranos: The sprawling drugstore chain, now a part of Walgreens Boots Alliance, was Theranos s first and thus far only direct-to-consumer retail partner, promising to eventually make Theranos s wellness centers an integral part of its more than 8,000 stores nationwide. When it announced the deal in 2013, Walgreens hoped to drive traffic to its stores and bask in the reflected glow from one of Silicon Valley s hottest unicorns and its youthful founder and glamorous chief executive, Elizabeth Holmes. For unproved Theranos, the Walgreens endorsement was akin to the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Theranos s valuation vaulted to $9 billion and put Ms. Holmes on the Forbes list of billionaires. Nearly three years later, with Theranos under siege on multiple regulatory fronts and its reputation in tatters, it s clear that the relationship has been a disaster for Walgreens. The company has been trying to distance itself, halting expansion of Theranos testing in its stores and, in January, threatening to end the partnership if Theranos did not meet regulatory standards within 30 days. But that deadline has come and gone. With this week s news that Theranos is under criminal investigation for, among other things, possibly defrauding Walgreens and other investors, the question is: What will it take for Walgreens to end its troubled relationship Theranos s lawyers have taken a hard line, insisting that Walgreens is contractually bound by their agreement. So far, the approach has worked. Walgreens appears to have taken a cautious approach toward terminating the relationship, perhaps preferring to wait until federal regulators impose penalties or the criminal investigation yields formal charges, either of which would strengthen Walgreens s hand. But that could take years. Theranos can appeal any penalties, and a grand jury investigation could be a protracted process. And Theranos is likely to sue Walgreens in any event if it terminates their agreement. In the meantime, Walgreens risks being dragged into nearly every negative story about Theranos.',
'Inside One of the World s Most Secretive iPhone Factories: A few minutes past 9 a.m. at Pegatron Corp. s vast factory on Shanghai s outskirts, thousands of workers dressed in pink jackets are getting ready to make iPhones. The men and women stare into face scanners and swipe badges at security turnstiles to clock in. The strict ID checks are there to make sure they don t work excessive overtime. The process takes less than two seconds. This is the realm in which the world s most profitable smartphones are made, part of Apple Inc. s closely guarded supply chain. After years of accusations that employees in China were forced to work long, grueling hours, Pegatron and Apple adopted new procedures to keep iPhone assemblers from amassing excessive overtime. They re eager to show how the system works, and for the first time are granting a western journalist access into the inner sanctum.The factory at the corner of Xiu Yan and Shen Jiang roads is one of the most secretive facilities at the heart of iPhone production and covers an area equal to almost 90 football fields. In the center is a plaza with a firehouse, police station and post office. There are shuttle buses, mega-cafeterias, landscaped lawns and koi ponds. The grey and brown-hued concrete buildings are meant to evoke traditional Chinese architecture. The brand-new Shanghai Disneyland, which opens its doors in June, is a 20-minute drive away.Inside, the factory still hides a secret, according to China Labor Watch. Base pay remains so low that workers need overtime simply to make ends meet, the advocacy group said. It said 1,261 pay stubs from Pegatron s Shanghai facility from September and October 2015 show evidence of excessive overtime. Pegatron, an Asustek spinoff, is the world s biggest contract electronics manufacturer after Foxconn, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.Pegatron countered by saying the group miscounted because that period straddled state holidays, when pay was three times normal. Apple and Pegatron say they were never contacted by China Labor Watch, which said it approached Apple but didn t get a response. Since March, the group said it s collected an additional 441 pay stubs that point to continued excessive overtime. Back in the cafeteria, a group of women rush to finish lunch before their 50-minute break is over. They hail from across China, from Sichuan in the west to Shandong in the northeast. None has been there for more than a few months. This is relaxed compared to other factories, said Xu Na, 30, who followed her younger brother to work at the factory. We never work more than 60 hours. ',
"Flipkart is in the middle of a crisis of its own making stalled growth compounded by management churn and the imminent possibility that it will cede the top slot to Amazon. But it s not too late to change its strategy. Flipkart is in the middle of a storm of its own making: It is faced with a significant management churn at the top. For a company that pioneered e-commerce in the country, growth has virtually stalled since the middle of last year and the leadership team hasn t figured out a way to kick-start sales. Its innovation engine isn t firing. In e-commerce lingo, the gross merchandise volume (GMV) sold over a given period of time has not grown substantially. In the offline world, it is the equivalent of saying, the sales or revenue numbers aren t growing. And this, for the e-commerce pioneer that until now grew its GMV by over 200% per annum for the past three years. The very culture that made Flipkart a runaway success in the first phase of its existence is now hindering its progress. The battle won t be easy. Amazon will unleash Amazon Prime, Amazon Fresh and may even partner with offline retailers to consolidate its position as the default destination for online shopping. Amazon has rapidly scaled up its seller ecosystem and outstrips Flipkart today in several product categories. It has a chance to win India and that is being handed over on a platter thanks to the internal confusion at Flipkart. Amazon is here to play a 20 year game and any fumbles will cost competitors heavily. Now imagine the Flipkart investors dilemma. They ve poured in over $3 billion and own over 80% of the company. They are neck deep in a business that is burning $50-70 million a month and has to get ready for the next phase of battle in the market. If the cost-cutting moves misfire and market share starts to shrink, the founders could very well put a request for another $500 million for the fight against Amazon. What will the investors do A new investor is unlikely to step in. Even though the Chinese e-commerce players like Alibaba are waiting in the wings to swoop down on prized assets in India, there's a chance that they could choose to wait out this stage of the company s evolution why buy and restructure, when you can wait and buy a cleaned-up asset Hence, one of the current investors will have to lead the round and it will put serious pressure on the team to show results. Flipkart has a last chance to redeem itself and take control of its destiny, else it will become another victim of early success. It is too big to fail and the market opportunity is too large to ignore. India will have more than one large e-commerce player just the sheer potential of the market will keep it from consolidating for many years and so, Flipkart s existence is not in question. But the next few months will determine the destiny of the company. The A-team cannot afford to flounder so early in their journey. ",
'Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face: For years, there has been a limit to the success of American technology companies in China. Capture too much market share or wield too much influence, and Beijing will push back. Apple has largely been an exception to that trend. Yet the Silicon Valley company is now facing a regulatory push against its services in China that could signal its good relations in the country may be turning. Last week, Apple s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies were shut down in China, just six months after they were started there. Initially, Apple apparently had the government s approval to introduce the services. But then a regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, asserted its authority and demanded the closings, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.The about-face is startling, given Apple s record in China. Unlike many other American tech companies, Apple has succeeded in introducing several new products like its mobile payments system Apple Pay in China recently. New resistance from the Chinese government to that expansion could potentially hurt the Cupertino, Calif., company. To a degree more than many tech companies, Apple relies on the smooth operation of its software including its App Store and services like iTunes, which are tightly integrated with the iPhone and iPad to keep customers coming back to its devices. Apple, which is facing a slowdown in sales of its iPhones, is also reliant on China for growth, so further moves by Beijing to curtail services could crimp sales. The company counts China as its second-largest market after the United States. Its China numbers will be dissected on Tuesday, when it reports quarterly earnings. China s pushback against Apple shows that the company may finally be vulnerable to the heightened scrutiny that other American tech companies have faced in recent years. That scrutiny was spurred by revelations from the former United States National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden in 2013 of the use of American companies to conduct cyberespionage for Washington. China has sweeping goals in its move against Apple, said Daniel H. Rosen, founding partner of Rhodium Group, a New-York based advisory firm specializing in the Chinese economy. They are interested in protecting the content that the Chinese people see, policing its national security and favoring indigenous giants such as Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent, Mr. Rosen said. In this new era, he added, China is strongly disinclined to accept the dominance of foreign players on the Internet, not least those from the United States. Sales in China for those companies, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm, have slid as government oversight has increased. Some have grappled with raids, investigations and fines. Some have also been pressured to sell off holdings, hand over technology and work with local partners to expand their China businesses. Though Apple is one of the eight, it has had a much easier time - so far.',
'Dell s SecureWorks stumbles in first tech IPO of the year: It has been a dry year for tech IPOs. Up until today s SecureWorks offering, there had been zero in the U.S. in 2016. Zero. This compares to seven in the same period last year and 24 in that timeframe the year before. So tech investors and late-stage private companies were watching SecureWorks closely, to see if the tech IPO window would reopen. It is one of the few indications we have right now to assess public investor appetite for tech IPOs. Unfortunately, SecureWorks faltered.The unicorn-sized security company split from Dell, although the computer manufacturer remains its majority owner. SecureWorks raised $112 million in the offering, after pricing its IPO at $14 per share. But the company was expecting the initial price to be between $15.50-$17.50. SecureWorks closed the day at $13.88, beneath the $14 IPO price. The offering certainly did not assuage concerns about the current environment for tech IPOs.',
'Women s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired for $18 million: Hackbright Academy, the San Francisco-based coding school for women, has been acquired by Capella Education for $18 million as the publicly traded education company looks to expand its efforts to train more women in technical careers.Hackbright, which was started in 2012, has graduated 364 women from its 12-week full-time fellowship programs. Another 279 women have graduated from its part-time program. Capella, meanwhile, is based in Minneapolis and specializes in degree programs for working adults, three quarters of whom are women. The deal closed Friday, the companies said, with all of Hackbright s 25 employees joining Capella. Hackbright CEO Sharon Wienbar will continue to lead the team, reporting to Gilligan. Hackbright will continue to focus its efforts on in-person trainings exclusively for women, Wienbar said.',
'In Asia, Netflix trips on regulation, content, and competition: Months after its global rollout, Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) is facing problems in several major Asian markets as it struggles to provide enough strong content to attract consumers amid tough local competition, and also faces many regulatory hurdles, underlining concerns about disappointing subscriber numbers reported this week. From complaints that programming libraries offered in many countries are far smaller than in the United States to delays in offering its signature "House of Cards" series in some markets due to rights issues, the U.S. video streaming giant\'s January launch into 130 new markets worldwide, including a slew in Asia, has been bumpy. When it launched in Indonesia in January, for example, Netflix ran afoul of the film censorship board for carrying content deemed inappropriately violent or sexual. The communications ministry also demanded that Netflix set up a local office and pay Indonesian taxes.Netflix is still available in Indonesia via wifi connections and other carriers.In South Korea, where local content is popular and consumers have numerous streaming options, the Netflix site offers fewer than 20 local TV shows or movies."Korean Netflix\'s library in terms of content is pretty thin," said Jung Dong-yoon, a 29-year-old Seoul office worker and subscriber since January.Netflix had an explosive start in Australia, counting nearly 3 million Australians as viewers, OUT OF A population of 24 million, within nine months of its March 2015 launch. But growth has slowed just as dramatically, from a 55 percent leap between April and May to a rise of 4 percent between September and October, according to Roy Morgan research.',
"Tipping Is Coming to Uber, and It s Going to Be Awkward: Uber's mega settlement of as much as $100 million helps it solve a major legal liability around workforce classification, but another piece of the agreement could make for some uncomfortable situations in the near future. As part of the settlement with drivers in California and Massachusetts, Uber has agreed to notify customers more clearly that tips are not included in fares and give tacit approval for optional gratuity. Drivers can now solicit cash tips by asking passengers or posting signs in their vehicles. Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing the drivers, said riders should start seeing gratuities as a major part of an Uber driver's income. In other words, more like a cabbie. I believe that, with this information, many riders will begin tipping their drivers, which will increase drivers pay substantially, she said in a statement to the court. In the past, Uber tried to discourage tipping. During the company s early days, its website said in 2011 that tips were included. Drivers complained that Uber was making its fares seem lower than they really were by rolling in a tip. In any case, they argued that Uber shouldn t take a cut of the portion of the fare that was classified as a tip. The company eventually changed the way it described the cost of the ride. It currently says there s no need to tip.",
'Alphabet s Earnings Miss Forecasts: European regulators brought the hammer down on Google this week, and investors barely blinked. But when the company s first-quarter numbers came in a little light on Thursday afternoon, its stock immediately plummeted. Both revenue and profit rose sharply from 2015 but missed analysts forecasts. Revenue, at $20.26 billion, was about $120 million less than expected. Earnings per share, excluding certain items, were $7.50 when the consensus estimate was $7.96. The result: The stock fell about $46, or about 6 percent, in after-hours trading. Shares of Google were priced for perfection, and the first quarter was a little less than perfect. Whether that means anything substantive is more doubtful.Revenue from what the company calls Other Bets including its fiber business and the Nest thermostat was $166 million, more than double what it was in the first quarter of 2015. Losses for Other Bets rose to $802 million from $633 million. The number of employees jumped to 64,000 from 55,000 last year. The vast majority of them, the company stressed, were engineers and product managers. A question hanging over Google is its ventures in cloud computing. This is the growth market where Amazon is far ahead of everyone. Amazon Web Services is more exciting to investors than the retailer s core business. Microsoft, meanwhile, is mounting an aggressive challenge. Google is far behind at No. 3, or perhaps even No. 4 after IBM, said John R. Rymer, an analyst at Forrester Research. Last fall, Google hired Diane Greene, an industry veteran, to run all of its cloud businesses.',
'Microsoft s Cloud Business, Seen as a Salvation, Falls Short of Investors Hopes: Cloud computing is seen by many investors as Microsoft s salvation, the growing business that has convinced many there s a bright future for the company beyond the troubled PC market. But Microsoft s cloud business didn t grow quite fast enough during its last quarter to keep investors happy. The company missed Wall Street estimates, though Microsoft executives said it would have beaten them without the impact of unexpectedly high taxes. For its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, Microsoft reported net income of $3.76 billion, or 47 cents a share, down from $4.99 billion, or 61 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue fell to $20.53 billion, from $21.73 billion. Microsoft s traditional profit engines, like Windows, have weakened considerably as sales in the PC market have remained in a multiyear slump. Last week, the research firm Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter fell 9.6 percent from a year ago. Yet Microsoft has convinced many investors that it has found a way to adapt to technology changes, in part by vigorously embracing cloud computing. Shares of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., are still trading near their price in 1999, their high, even with a 5 percent drop in value Thursday evening. The optimism stems from its success in transitioning legacy software businesses like Office to a cloud business model in which customers subscribe to the applications. There are now 22.2 million subscribers to Office 365, the subscription version of its Office business, up from 12.4 million a year ago.',
'Ev Williams s Medium raised $57 million in September now it s raised another $50 million: You may have heard there s a tech funding crunch, especially for companies that have yet to generate significant revenue. Not for Medium: The publishing platform says it raised another $50 million just a few months after it raised $57 million. Update: Investors valued the company at $600 million in the current round, said a person familiar with the financing. This round was led by Spark Capital and includes previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. CEO Ev Williams, whose stake in Twitter has made him a billionaire, is also putting money into his own company',
'Amazon is shutting down its Gilt Groupe competitor MyHabit: Another unhappy ending for a flash-sale shopping site. Three months after Gilt Groupe sold for a fraction of its valuation, Amazon has decided to shut down its fashion discount competitor MyHabit, according to a person familiar with the move. Amazon launched the website five years ago near the height of the flash-sale craze, but MyHabit has struggled in recent years as the one-time popular fashion niche has become less popular and Amazon has prioritized other fashion initiatives. Women s Wear Daily reported employees have been told that the site will shutter at the end of May (subscription). In January, the CEO of MyHabit took on a new role at Amazon as general manager of its new private-label fashion business, according to his LinkedIn profile.Flash sales, on the other hand, has become an increasingly difficult business in recent years. The model exploded in popularity following the last recession, as designer brands were desperate to sell excess inventory in any way they could. But as the economy rebounded, there was less excess inventory to go around and some brands got smarter about how much inventory they produced.',
'Facebook considers letting users add a tip jar to make money from posts: Facebook is exploring new ways for individual users to profit from their posts on the network, The Verge has learned. A user survey distributed this week hints at a broad range of ways that users could make money or promote a cause, including a tip jar, branded content and taking a cut of the ad revenue Facebook earns from posts. The survey also asked users to indicate their interest in a call to action button, a way to let followers make donations and a sponsor marketplace to match users with advertisers. It s unclear whether Facebook is considering making these options available to all users; the language of the survey indicated it is targeted at verified users. The survey was spotted on the page of a verified user with a relatively small following. (Okay, it was me.) Facebook does not currently offer individual users a way to earn money by posting on Facebook. It has allowed publishers to sell advertising inside its fast-loading Instant Articles format, and recently clarified rules allowing posts sponsored by brands to be shared by verified pages. Facebook is also testing ads within the suggestions that pop up after you watch a video, sharing money with publishers. But recently, the company has taken steps to make its publishing tools more widely available. In February, the company began letting anyone publish Instant Articles.',
"Line's Plan to Outflank Facebook in Asia: Think Local: Line Corp. has an instant message for Facebook Inc.: Asia is ours. Country by country, the chat app from Japan is signing up new users by adopting a different strategy in each place. In its home market, cute bunny and bear stickers drew in everyone from schoolgirls to suit-clad businessmen. In Indonesia, Line built a classmate-connecting service after learning that alumni networks are a powerful social glue there. In Muslim countries, Line rolled out special features for people observing the Ramadan fast. All of this is aimed at getting new users hooked onto Line before they have a chance to become loyal to a rival service, such as Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp, or China's WeChat. That, along with Line's knack for making money from its app, bolsters the company's plan to hold an initial public offering as soon as this year. Line, a subsidiary of South Korean Internet company Naver Corp, now has more than 215 million monthly active users. One of Line's biggest foes in Asia is Tencent Holdings's WeChat, which boasts 697 million users. In some ways, WeChat is more than a just messaging service, with a myriad of features that let people book car rides, find dates and exchange money all from within the app. Line isn't just good at reeling in new users, it also knows how to make money off of them. A third of the company's 120.7 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in 2015 revenue came from virtual-sticker sales. Idezawa also appears to have figured out how to make advertising work inside a messaging app. Under one marketing program, companies can pay 40 million yen to give customers access to sponsored stickers for two weeks. People are more likely to pay attention to ads if they appear while chatting with friends, Idezawa says. Line is also targeting other Southeast Asian countries, the Middle East and even South America. The company now has 3,800 employees (average age, 31) supporting services in 19 languages. In order to snag local users, Idezawa dispatches teams of engineers, designers, marketers and business developers to each new country they are empowered to come up with new features and services that appeal to those markets. For example, in Latin America, Line rolled out a selfie app called B612, which now has more than 50 million users. Facebook, for its part, is keeping WhatsApp a no-frills service with 1 billion users just the way it is, even after buying the messaging app for $22 billion in 2014. At the same time, Facebook has started to add features to Messenger, the companion to its social-networking website, letting people book car rides, read news and, yes, download stickers.",
'Got a Hot Seller on Amazon Prepare for E-Tailer to Make One Too: Rain Design has been selling an aluminum laptop stand on Amazon.com Inc. for more than a decade. A best-seller in its category, the $43 product has a 5-star rating and 2,460 customer reviews. In July, a similar stand appeared at about half the price. The brand: AmazonBasics. Since then, sales of the Rain Design original have slipped. We don t feel good about it, says Harvey Tai, the company s general manager. But there s nothing we can do because they didn t violate the patent. Rain Design s experience shows how Amazon is using insights gleaned from its vast Web store to build a private-label juggernaut that now includes more than 3,000 products -- from women s blouses and men s khakis to fire pits and camera tripods. The strategy is a digital twist on one used for years by department stores and big-box chains to edge out middlemen and go direct to consumers -- boosting loyalty and profits. At first, AmazonBasics -- launched in 2009 -- focused on batteries, recordable DVDs and such. Then for several years, the house brand slept quietly as it retained data about other sellers successes, according to the report. But in the past couple of years, AmazonBasics has stepped up the pace, rolling out a range of products that seem perfectly tailored to customer demand. In his annual shareholder letter earlier this month, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said Amazon is the best place in the world to fail. That philosophy applies to private-label products, which quickly disappear if they receive poor customer ratings. About 96 percent of AmazonBasics products had a rating of 3.5 stars or more, according to the Skubana report. The authors advice to merchants: If you have a product that is lower than 3.5 stars, that product is dead to you and your customers. Liquidate and move on. Amazon s size gives it an advantage over so-called direct-to-consumer startups such as mattress seller Casper and eyewear merchant Warby Parker because Amazon can experiment with one product rather than having to build out an entire line. If an item flops, it s no big deal. Amazon isn t only copying products made by small, little-known merchants like Rain Design. Its private-label lines are increasingly competing with name brands, and nowhere is that happening more than in apparel.',
'Review: Curb, energy monitoring for an entire home: Curb is a comprehensive household energy monitoring system. The system monitors the entire home by using sensors installed in the circuit breaker. For many consumers this means being able to monitor the energy consumed by a clothes dryer or electric range or all the outlets and lights in a bedroom. It cannot, however, easily monitor and report how much energy is consumed by a computer or espresso machine. I had the system installed in my house over a month ago. It took licensed electrician about three hours. He had to install a sensor on each breaker and configure the system through an iPad app. This is not something an average homeowner can install themselves and that s kind of the point. Curb aims to serve a homeowner with data not previously available. Other energy monitoring services either monitor the entire home or individual outlets. Curb sits in the middle of the two at the circuit break box. Each breaker gets a sensor and an app can display real-time consumption information as well as a dollar approximation of how much the energy is costing the homeowner. But what do I do with all this data That s where the system stops being useful. Obviously I can stop using my electric dryer and hang the clothes outside. Or teach my kids to turn off their lights. But I need help from there. The system should be able to display more historical data. Right now all it can do is show how much energy a particular circuit consumed but now a total amount of watts. It can show how much power a home has consumed over a set of dates and also what the average was during that period. But what about the individual circuits I want the system to let me dial down to a granule level. The web and smartphone app are basic at this point. The founder tells me the company is working towards implementing new features. The team is also playing with weekly emails that gives the consumer a breakdown of their energy usage and if anything abnormal occurred. Apparently, according to him, the system can identify when an appliance is consuming extra electricity, which could be a sign that it is nearing the end of its life. Currently, just after launch, the user experience of Curb leaves me wanting more. It is collecting so much information about my energy usage yet I feel it s not benefiting me in a major way. Of course I should use appliances less.Yet the system shows a lot of promise in surprising ways. A few weeks family and I were standing in line for the Easter Bunny. This was the day before Easter so we were in line for over an hour. And like any good parent, I spent the time putzing around on my phone. Mindlessly, I opened the Curb app and discovered the stove was drawing power though I thought I had turned if off. I texted my neighbor who went over and discovered the oven was still on.',
"Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs as PC Demand Slumps: Intel, the world s largest maker of semiconductors, said on Tuesday that it was laying off 12,000 people, about 11 percent of its work force, as it continues to reel from a long downturn in global demand for personal computers. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, lowered its revenue forecast for the year. It now expects revenue to rise in mid-single digits, down from its previous forecast of mid- to high-single digits. Intel's shares were down 2.2 percent at $30.90 in extended trading. Net revenue rose to $13.70 billion from $12.78 billion. Non-GAAP net revenue came in at $13.80 billion, compared with analysts' average estimate of $13.83 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Adjusted earnings of 54 cents per share topped Wall Street forecasts of 48 cents. Up to Tuesday's close, Intel's shares had fallen 8.4 percent this year. Yet Intel still gets 60 percent of its revenue from chips supplied to PCs, and its profit margins there are not as good as in data center chips, its other major business. The company s other businesses have small profits, or else lose money. That means PCs are still core to what Intel does. Most of the layoffs, along with things like consolidating facilities and cut projects, are expected to be inside the PC business. Employees who are affected by the restructuring will be notified in the next 60 days, the company said. The layoffs are the largest since 2006, when the company let go 10,500 employees.",
"Verizon set to make Yahoo's bidder short list, as Yahoo reports tepid earnings: Verizon Communications Inc was set on Tuesday to advance to the second stage of bidding for Yahoo Inc's core assets, as the U.S. internet company went through offers to put together a short list, people familiar with the matter said. The field had whittled down ahead of Monday's first-round bid deadline as several companies that were mulling an offer, including Comcast Corp and Time Inc, decided to opt out, the people said. Meanhile, Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, said revenue fell 11 percent to $1.09 billion, and its net loss was $99 million, or 10 cents a share, in contrast to revenue of $1.23 billion and net income of $21 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago.",
'Credit Suisse Says Instagram Is Going to Have a Huge Year: Facebook Inc.\'s purchase of Instagram Inc. continues to look smarter and smarter. After buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, analysts at Credit Suisse Group AG now expect Facebook will get more than triple that price tag in revenue from the photo sharing app this year alone. "We are now forecasting $572.5 million and [circa] $3.2 billion in revenue contribution from Instagram in [the first quarter of 2016] and 2016, respectively," analysts led by Stephen Ju said in a recent note. Instagram and premium video will be a big driver for mobile and desktop ad revenue, the team writes. "Our projection for consolidated ad revenue of $5.24 billion in [the first quarter] reflects our projection for $573 million and $260 million in contribution from Facebook\'s Instagram and premium video ad product, respectively." When Facebook acquired the startup, it had roughly 30 million users. Monthly active users have now ballooned to 400 million as of September 2015, topping that of Twitter Inc. Much of the recent expansion has been outside of the U.S.',
'Netflix s Forecast for Growth Disappoints Wall Street: On Monday, Netflix announced that it expected to add just two million members outside the United States in the second quarter this year less than the 3.5 million analysts had expected. The figure also represents a decrease from the 2.4 million members the streaming service added internationally in the same period the previous year. That cloudy forecast sent shares down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading, as Netflix has tied its future to its bold global push. The company has been pouring resources into its expanding its international footprint, telling investors that it would run at break-even profitability until the end of 2016 as it continued to roll out the service abroad and increased its investment in content. That uncertainty over the competitive landscape, as well as fears about growth prospects both inside and outside the United States, overshadowed the generally positive first-quarter financial results that Netflix announced on Monday. The company beat expectations for profit and revenue growth during the first quarter. Profits totaled $28 million, up 16 percent from the same period last year, and total revenues increased 24 percent to nearly $2 billion. Netflix added a record 6.7 million total streaming members during the first quarter, bringing its total to 81.5 million, with about 42 percent outside the United States. Netflix had forecast that it would reach nearly 80.9 million total paid members in the quarter. In the United States, Netflix surpassed its forecasts for subscriber growth during a period in which price increases went into effect for some customers. The company added 2.23 million subscribers in America during the quarter, bringing its paid membership in the country to 45.7 million. Outside the United States, Netflix also beat its expectations for growth, adding 4.5 million international streaming subscribers. The company said it was planning to spend more than $6 billion on programming in 2017, up from $5 billion this year.',
'IBM reports worst revenue in 14 years, shares slide: IBM on Monday reported a 21 percent decline in net profit from continuing operations, to $2.3 billion in the first quarter that ended March 31. Its operating earnings per share fell 19 percent, to $2.35 a share, though that was above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $2.09 a share, as complied by Thomson Reuters. The company s first-quarter revenue declined 5 percent, to $18.7 billion. But that was ahead of analysts consensus forecast of $18.29 billion. After adjusting for the impact of currency translation, revenue was down 2 percent. IBM shares fell about 5 percent in after-hours trading, a retreat from a recent uptrend for the stock. In the first three months of this year, IBM s stock price had increased 17 percent. IBM delivered a quarterly performance that shows the steady headway it is making in new businesses led by cloud computing and data-analysis software, like its Watson artificial intelligence technology. But the company s transformation remains very much a work in progress. The erosion of some of its hardware and software products continues to be a drag on growth and profits, overshadowing the gains in the new fields.',
'LinkedIn built a new app for college kids - from which Lynda is missing: In an effort to lure more young people to its professional network, LinkedIn built a standalone app specifically for college students. The app helps students quickly create a profile (if they don t already have one), find career paths and job postings that relate to their major, and connect with alumni who studied the same topic. The app is appropriately named LinkedIn Students. LinkedIn s challenge is that its product is most useful once you already have a job. Or at least know a bunch of other people who do. Oftentimes, college students have neither, which makes the idea of creating a profile seem overwhelming, said Ada Yu, a product manager at LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is trying to appeal to young people with an app that s less cumbersome than its flagship app. LinkedIn users can already do most of what the college app offers in LinkedIn s main app; it s just more simplified now. Two things worth noting: Lynda.com, the online library of classes LinkedIn bought for $1.5 billion last year, is noticeably missing from the app. It seems likely that LinkedIn will add online classes to the app at some point. LinkedIn can make money from this app. Once students scroll past the daily job and alumni recommendations, they get to an extra credit section which will include some branded content. LinkedIn will launch with branded content from J.P. Morgan. What LinkedIn will not do, however, is recommend career paths or job openings in exchange for cash. All suggested jobs will be based on LinkedIn s algorithm, Yu said.',
'China\'s Crowded Smartphone Market Heads for an Epic Shakeout: Smartphone sales in China exploded earlier this decade as incomes rose, prices for chips and displays plummeted, and carriers offered arrays of discounts. Shelves were flooded with hundreds of brands from national heavyweights Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi to the smaller Dakele, Tecno Mobile and Gionee. Shipments more than doubled in each of the three years ending 2012, according to researcher Canalys. Xiaomi\'s valuation rocketed to $45 billion, and the phone maker started selling devices in India, the world s fastest-growing major economy. Lenovo Group Ltd. spent $2.91 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility to help make it "a global player." In 2011, only four of the top 10 vendors in China were domestic. Last year, there were eight. Now that wave has crested. Smartphones no longer are novelties in China, and most domestic brands target the mid- and low-price ranges, where buyers don\'t upgrade as frequently as those for high-end Apple and Samsung phones. China\'s herd of 300 phone makers may be halved in 12 months by competition, a sales plateau and economic growth that\'s the slowest in a quarter-century, according to executives and analysts. "The mobile-phone industry changed more quickly and brutally than expected," Dakele Chief Executive Officer Ding Xiuhong said on his Weibo messaging account. "As a startup, we couldn t find more strategies and methods to break through."',
'Don t want your startup to fail Arianna Huffington tells founders to go to bed: Sleep deprivation is the undoing of startup founders, according to Arianna Huffington. There is this kind of founder myth that if you are a founder you can t afford to get enough sleep, she told me over the phone while catching a plane back to New York. The truth is three-quarters of startups fail and if founders got more sleep they d have a better chance of succeeding. Wanting to get more sleep isn t the problem for most of us. It s fitting in the recommended seven to 9 hours of sleep with work, eating, exercise, relationships and a social life and on top of that founders need to spend a lot of time growing their fledgling company. The advice is obvious no caffeine after 2 pm and keep your bedroom dark and quiet but like exercise and eating right, a lot of us probably don t do it anyway. And sacrifices will be made no tech in the bedroom and you might not get through all of those critically acclaimed Netflix dramas Arianna tells me she s only seen one episode of House of Cards because sleep is the priority. But then, maybe you ll think clearly and your startup won t fail.',
'Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic: This month, Mashable, a site that had just raised $15 million, laid off 30 people. Salon, a web publishing pioneer, announced a new round of budget cuts and layoffs. And BuzzFeed, which has been held up as a success story, was forced to bat back questions about its revenue but not before founders at other start-up media companies received calls from anxious investors. It is a very dangerous time, said Om Malik, an investor at True Ventures whose tech news site, Gigaom, collapsed suddenly in 2015, portending the flurry of contractions. The trouble, the publishers say, is twofold. The web advertising business, always unpredictable, became more treacherous. And website traffic plateaued at many large sites, in some cases falling a new and troubling experience after a decade of exuberant growth. Online publishers have faced numerous financial challenges in recent years, including automated advertising and ad-blocking tools. But now, there is a realization that something more profound has happened: The transition from an Internet of websites to an Internet of mobile apps and social platforms, and Facebook in particular, is no longer coming it is here. It is a systemic change that is leaving many publishers unsure of how they will make money. With each turn of the screw, people began to realize, viscerally, that this is what it feels like to not be in control of your destiny, said Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who left the company in 2007. Audiences drove the change, preferring to refresh their social feeds and apps instead of visiting website home pages. As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites. Sales staffs at media companies struggled to explain to clients why they should buy ads for a fragmented audience rather than go to robust social networks instead.',
'Facebook s ambitious plan to make you a VR convert: Alongside announcements about drones, bots and other plans to use its Messenger app to take over the world, Facebook also spent quite a bit of time talking about virtual reality. The company, of course, is the owner of Oculus the VR firm with the most general recognition and just released its first commercial VR headset, the Rift. The Rift is focused on gaming right now, but Facebook has been saying since it bought Oculus in 2014 that it has broader plans for making Oculus\'s technology work for more general social interaction. Sheikh laid out a world where users could play a poker game with friends over VR that is so sensitive that you can read their tells. He describes what it could mean to people who live far away from their families to be able to interact with them through a headset. And he said that eventually his team hopes to make VR social interaction "indistinguishable from real life." Of course, this will all take a lot of work. Right now, the commercial Rift doesn\'t even represent your hands in VR, though that is poised to changebefore the year is out. But Sheikh also described research that would let users put their whole bodies in a virtual world and accurately map facial expressions. The team is also trying to analyze real-world social interactions, to figure out how to let virtual interactions flow as seamlessly as in-person meetings. He also warned that all the visions he laid out in his portion of the keynote speech were far from ready for prime-time. A study released Wednesday by Greenlight VR predicted that it will take six to eight years for virtual reality to go fully mainstream. Given all the research that Sheikh said had to be completed to make social presence really work during the Facebook keynote, that sort of timeline could actually seem a little ambitious.',
'Kahoot App Brings Urgency of a Quiz Show to the Classroom: Kahoot, an online quiz system from Norway that is fast gaining market share in schools across the United States, plays out like a television game show spliced with a video game. Cast in the role of game host, teachers introduce a multiple-choice quiz on, say, plant life or English grammar. Using the Kahoot platform, they project one quiz question at a time onto a whiteboard or screen at the front of their classrooms. Players typically have 30 seconds to click an answer on their laptops, tablets or smartphones. They earn points for correct choices, and extra points for clicking faster. During the answer period, Kahoot emits a catchy countdown tune, reminiscent of retro video games like Monkey Island. A gong sounds when time is up, and the classroom board immediately tallies the class s correct and incorrect answers. Next, a leaderboard appears, ranking the top five students by points accrued. Kahoot s gamelike features and easy-to-use format have helped turn it into a classroom phenomenon. Of the 55 million elementary and secondary school students in the United States, about 20 million used Kahoot last month, the company said. It s fun. Everyone is doing it. It pulls all the children in, Tosh McGaughy, a digital learning specialist at the Birdville Independent School District in Haltom City, Tex., told me recently. They get competitive and excited. ',
'Apple Falls on Report iPhone Output Cut for Second Quarter: Apple shares fell after it was reported that the company would extend an estimated 30 percent cut in iPhone production for another three months. Slower-than-expected sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have prompted Apple to reduce its orders, the Nikkei Asian Review reported, citing unidentified suppliers. The shares dropped as much as 2.1 percent and had declined 1.7 percent to $110.22 at 2:07 p.m. in New York. Apple introduced a smaller, cheaper handset dubbed the iPhone SE last month in an effort to plump up sales ahead of rolling out a new flagship model later this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the biggest suppliers of chips to Apple, on Thursday forecast revenue below analysts estimates for the second quarter, saying that demand for smartphones that cost more than $500 is waning. Ahead of the iPhone 7 people are holding onto their phones a little longer, said Walter Piecyk, a New York-based analyst at BTIG LLC who recommends buying Apple shares. But if this is as a result of lengthening product cycles then it could be a structural change for the industry. In January, Apple said sales would decline for the first time in more than a decade. Global smartphone sales will rise by less than 10 percent this year, the smallest increase since the market s inception, researcher Gartner Inc predicted last month. Nikkei reported that Apple cut iPhone production by an estimated 30 percent in the January to March quarter and that the reduction is being extended for the subsequent three months. Apple suppliers including Broadcom, Qorvo, Knowles and NXP Semiconductors also fell following the report.',
'Tech Companies Face Greater Scrutiny for Paying Workers With Stock: For the last few years, LinkedIn, the professional social networking company, has doled out increasingly large amounts of stock to pay its workers. In 2014, LinkedIn paid employees $319 million in stock, or 14 percent of revenue; in 2015, that rose to $510 million, or 17 percent of revenue. At the time, those figures were largely met with shrugs from Wall Street. Now that attitude may be changing. As LinkedIn prepares to report its latest quarterly earnings next week, Wall Street is increasingly scrutinizing the number of stock grants that the company pays employees especially after LinkedIn projected lower growth for this year and its stock price has fallen. The Silicon Valley company s stock-based compensation provides additional reason to remain cautious on LinkedIn, Mark May, an Internet analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a research note. The issue is not limited to LinkedIn. With tech earnings season kicking off on Monday, investors are paying more attention to stock-based compensation at many tech companies. Paying employees with stock is largely unquestioned when times are good, since the move theoretically aligns the interests of the workers with company performance. The practice is technically a corporate expense, but during boom periods, Wall Street typically focuses on a company s operating results that exclude that expense. Yet public tech companies have had a rockier time in the stock market this year. That has led investors to begin looking more closely at the quality of the companies financial results. The scrutiny means examining earnings with stock-based compensation expenses included and certain financial measures, like earnings and margins, invariably look worse when that expense is factored in.',
'Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth: In January, Lyft said it raised $1 billion, which is helping fuel the spending spree and steal market share from Uber Technologies Inc. To keep costs in check, Lyft has promised investors to cap its losses at no more than $50 million a month, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.Meanwhile, Uber has been working to fulfill its own promise to shareholders and employees that it would achieve profitability in North America by the second quarter of 2016, a milestone it says it has now reached in the U.S. and Canada. In February, Uber earned an average of 19 per ride in the U.S., according to previously undisclosed financial documents. Uber takes about a 25 percent cut of a typical fare, most of which goes to antifraud efforts, credit-card processing, customer support, marketing, and software development, the documents show. Not included in Uber s profitability calculations are interest, taxes, or equity-based compensation for employees. Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick s commitment to profitability has left an opening for Lyft, and the smaller upstart s free-spending strategy is starting to pay off. Lyft says it has captured 45 percent of trips in Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles and 43 percent in San Francisco, where both companies are based. Uber says it had 55 percent of ride-hailing sales in Austin, 75 percent in Los Angeles, and 66 percent in San Francisco, citing third-party credit card data from the first two weeks of March. Uber says Lyft has shaken loose only a few percentage points. From everything I m looking at, we re gaining share in all top 20 markets, which is where 80 percent to 90 percent of rides happen, says Lyft President John Zimmer. This continues to prove what we said all along, which is once you hit a certain level of scale, it s a natural duopoly. Outside of big cities, though, it s still Uber country. Of 169 million trips booked through Uber worldwide in March, the company says 50 million of those were in the U.S. Lyft says it did 11 million U.S. rides that month, up from 7 million in October. Lyft continues to devise new and often expensive ways to expand in the U.S., the only country in which it operates. When a Lyft driver refers someone to sign up as a new driver, both get a $750 bonus in some cities. And Lyft has the capacity to keep spending. Zimmer says the company still has by far the majority of the $2 billion it s raised from investors. This allows us to control our own destiny. We do not need to raise any additional capital, and it s just a fantastic position to be in. Whether Lyft s gains will stick remains to be seen. Uber says customers lured away by subsidies are the most likely to return if Lyft s prices go up. It s easy enough to buy trips with heavy subsidies for drivers and discounts for riders, Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Uber, wrote in an e-mail. But to build a successful, long-term business, you need a path to profitability which Uber has always had. ',
'Rocket Internet Drops in Frankfurt Amid $222 Million Loss: Rocket Internet SE, Europe s biggest startup factory, fell the most in more than two months in Frankfurt trading after reporting a loss of 197.8 million euros ($222 million) for last year. While Rocket-backed companies continued to increase sales, operating losses widened at several of them, including at food delivery startup HelloFresh and e-commerce site Lazada, which drew an investment from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. this week. Rocket had net income of about 429 million euros the previous year, according to the Berlin-based company s statement Thursday. The shares fell 10 percent to 26.09 euros at 11:42 a.m. local time after dropping as much as 12 percent, the biggest intraday decline since Jan. 15.',
'Whatever Happened to Facebook s Slack Competitor Facebook at Work Do you remember Facebook at Work The version of Facebook specifically built for your office The one that would send Slack and Yammer and email running for the hills We almost forgot, too. But hidden among the Internet-beaming drones and 360-degree video cameras Facebook showed off this week at its annual developer conference in San Francisco was a Facebook at Work booth, a small, unheralded reminder that the future of workplace communications is also on Facebook s radar. Add it to the list. When we last spoke to Facebook about Work, the company was gearing up to launch a freemium version of the software to the masses before the end of 2015. It s now mid-April 2016, and Facebook at Work is still in a closed beta. So what happened Is Facebook at Work still part of the game plan So things are still moving. Just slowly. And that matters because Facebook s top competition, tech startup Slack, is growing quickly in the interim. Facebook said it has 450 companies using the pilot, up from 100 in August, including some big companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has more than 100,000 employees. More importantly, though, Facebook says it has 60,000 businesses that have signed up for its waiting list. That s a lot of interested customers, but it s unclear how many of them would actually pay for Work or use the free model. Slack, for comparison, has more than two million users and more than 675,000 users who pay (or have employers who pay for them). That s more than 100,000 new paid users since December, the same time we thought Facebook would be out on the open market. Facebook has a tendency to turn small numbers into big numbers very quickly, so it s not as though a few months delay means Facebook at Work can t ultimately be a hit. But at a conference dedicated to Facebook s future, Facebook at Work was a side note. And side notes can be hard to remember.',
'GoPro s developer program aims to connect its cameras to cars, toys and apps: GoPro on Thursday very quietly took the wraps off its new developer program, by which it hopes to get its action cameras hooked into as many third-party devices, vehicles and services as possible. The program was announced at a private event in San Francisco, where it showed off the fruits of various partnerships. The Periscope integration announced earlier this year is an example of what the company is hoping to achieve. There was also a snap-on time-code system that you can use to sync your footage (announced last week, but still new), a mount for kids toys from Fisher-Price and add-ons for tracking your route and vital statistics when parasailing, skiing and other extreme activities you get the general idea. Partnerships with BMW and Toyota also suggest more automotive applications in the future. Perhaps the coolest item, shown off at the end of this highlight video, was a gesture-based camera control system for when your motorcycle gloves or [insert extreme garment here] prevent you from operating the app.',
'Regulators plan to revoke Theranos federal license and ban founder Elizabeth Holmes: Theranos might find itself homeless soon. A federal agency plans to force founder Elizabeth Holmes out of her blood analysis startup for two years and take away the California lab s federal license. First reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a letter dated March 18 proposing sanctions barring Holmes and company president Sunny Balwani from owning or running operations in labs for at least two years including in both California and Arizona and taking away federal licensing for Theranos California facilities in Newark and Palo Alto after Theranos continued failure to correct major problems with accuracy and competence. These actions would be a major financial blow to the startup valued at $9 billion. Theranos has the runway to keep working with approximately $700 million in the bank but the two labs make a good portion of the money for Theranos operations and a loss of the founder and president would strangle any hope of recovery.',
'Artificial Intelligence for Everyday Use: How four programmers with almost no knowledge of Japanese designed software to read handwriting. Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That\'s how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games. "Just a few years ago, you had to be a genius to do this," said David Malkin, who has a Ph.D. in machine learning but can barely string two Japanese sentences together. "Now you can be a reasonably smart guy and make useful stuff. Going forward, it will be more about using imagination to apply this to real business situations." While handwriting recognition might be considered deep-learning 101, Japanese is a whole other ballgame. That\'s because the language includes symbolic characters such as kanji, which is composed of elements that can be read independently, making it difficult to know where one ends and another begins. There are also more than 2,000 common pictograms made up of dozens of strokes. The trick is to tackle one squiggle at a time. Reactive s algorithm queries the neural network for a match, adds another stroke and repeats, all the while refining the probability of an accurate hit. The startup trained its model on about 1.8 million characters. Unlike a typical program built around rigid rules, deep-learning AI is modeled on how humans process information. Given enough data as inputs and a set of desired outputs, neural networks figure out what goes in the middle. This allows them to find solutions that have bedeviled traditional approaches, like interpreting speech or tagging images. And once built, a neural network doesn t have to be limited to language applications. In their spare time, the four Reactive engineers showed the program 5,000 dresses downloaded from Google Images, then gave it a picture of a woman in a revealing outfit. "Sexy clothes," the software responded.',
'Some Online Bargains May Only Look Like One: Amazon has some unbelievable bargains on its virtual shelves. A cat litter pan with a list price of $2,159 can be yours for a mere $28. A bag of doggy treats, normally $822, is only $8. A windshield wiper blade, which the unwary pay $1,504 for, has been knocked down 99 percent. You say you don t believe that a plastic cat pan could ever have been sold to anyone for a couple of thousand bucks Or that a six-ounce bag of Zuke s Lil Links pork and apple sausage bits ever cost more than dinner at a five-star restaurant It s all part of the bizarre world of Internet discounts, which let retailers and brands assert that you are getting a stupendous deal because someone somewhere else exactly where is never explained is being charged much more. Boomerang Commerce, a retail analytics firm, compared the list prices of dozens of pet items on Amazon and the specialist pet site Chewy.com. In only a handful of cases did the retailers even agree on what the list price was. So a 22-pound bag of Blue Buffalo Basics Limited Ingredient Grain-Free Duck and Potato dog food had a list price of $131 on Amazon and $84 on Chewy. Yet the retail price at both sites was the same: $49.49. A perceived deeper discount creates a higher conversion event in other words, more buyers, said Boomerang s chief executive, Guru Hariharan, who previously worked at Amazon. Another consultant, Ripen eCommerce, analyzed 746,000 product searches on Amazon. Ripen s goal was to help third-party clients who sell on the giant retailer jockey for a better position say, on the first page of results rather than further back. A little over 44 percent of the products some sold directly by Amazon, others by third parties were billed as discounted, Ripen said. It s less than I expected, actually, said Dave Rekuc, Ripen s director of marketing. Considering you can basically name your own list price. ',
'Verizon bets on Armstrong, M&A savvy in Yahoo bid: Verizon is the clear favorite in the upcoming bidding for Yahoo\'s core Internet business, according to Wall Street analysts, in large part because the telecommunications company\'s efforts to become a force in Internet content have gone relatively well under the leadership of AOL Inc Chief Executive Tim Armstrong. Verizon acquired AOL last June for $4.4 billion - its first big foray into the advertising-supported Internet business - and it is not yet clear how well the unit is performing financially. Subsequent moves, including the takeover of much of Microsoft Corp\'s advertising technology business, a deal to buy Millennial Media for about $250 million and the recent launch of the mobile video service go90, are also too recent to assess. Yet analysts have given the big phone company high marks for allowing AOL to operate independently and folding in other recent acquisitions without much drama. And they said Armstrong seems to be driving Verizon\'s recent moves in go90 and recent acquisitions. Verizon showed interest in Yahoo\'s core business as early as December, when Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said the company would "see if there is a strategic fit" for Yahoo\'s holdings, which include mail, news, sports and advertising technology. Yahoo, under pressure from activist investors, launched an auction of its core business in February after it shelved plans to spin off its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The first round of bidding is slated for next week, and Verizon plans to make a bid, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters. Verizon is already working on increasing revenue through its ad-supported mobile video service go90, targeted at millennials and built on video streaming technology acquired from Intel in 2014. The app, which launched in October, offers videos from Comedy Central and Vice, among others, as well as basketball and football games. However, analysts cautioned that even a combined Yahoo-AOL would lack the unique data, such as user interests and tastes, that powers its rivals in online ads, chiefly Google and Facebook. Armstrong, who made his name leading sales at Google, is highly regarded in the advertising community - in contrast to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, another former Google high-flyer, who has been struggling to revive Yahoo. Mayer would likely leave after a Verizon-Yahoo deal, analysts sa',
'',
'More Startups Are Getting Lower Valuations Than Joining the Billion-Dollar Club: According to a new report from KPMG International and CB Insights, 2016 has seen a larger number of startups taking new lower valuations than those earning the billion-dollar badge. The first quarter of 2016 has borne witness to high-profile unicorn company issues, layoffs, down rounds and mutual fund valuation markdowns, according to the report. Only five venture capital backed companies entered the $1 billion club in the same period, less than half the number from any quarter since the first quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, CB Insights Downround Tracker shows there were 19 "down events" or companies raising new money or being acquired at a lower valuation during that same time frame, including big names such as Foursquare Labs Inc., Gilt Groupe Inc., and Jawbone Inc. Those downgrades may also cause other startups to wait to raise new money if they anticipate having to take cuts themselves.',
'Facebook Bets on a Bot Resurgence, Chattier Than Ever: On Tuesday, Facebook underlined the rise of bots at its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. Facebook said it was opening up Messenger, its own messaging app, so that any outside company from Applebee s to Zara could create a bot capable of interacting with people through the chat program. With the move, Facebook is aiming to usher in a new era of customer service by bringing together the 900 million regular monthly users of Messenger with the more than 15 million businesses that have an official brand page on Facebook. Facebook is kicking off the project with partners like Spring, 1-800-Flowers, a weather and travel app called Poncho and news partners like CNN. Facebook is also testing advertising on chatbots as a potential source of revenue. We re conversational creatures, David A. Marcus, vice president of messaging at Facebook, said of chat. That s the way our brain functions. That s the way we re wired. As a result, it s probably the most natural interface there is. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook s chief executive, also sketched out his grand vision at the conference for the company s future over the next five, 10 and 15 years. Under his plan, people would accompany Facebook as it builds out a comprehensive global system of communications, virtual reality and shopping. We all have a desire to be understood and relate to each other, Mr. Zuckerberg said. We re always trying to get closer to capturing the purest form. Facebook s push into chatbots, which is part of that vision, follows other recent signs of bot life. Late last month, Microsoft released a bot called Tay that was designed to have discussions with people on Twitter only to curtail the effort when people taught the software to repeat racist and other offensive remarks. Still, Microsoft s chief executive, Satya Nadella,trumpeted bots days later at a developer conference, saying the software could be used to produce new methods of interaction.',
'Facebook built a 360-degree video camera, and it s giving away the plans: Facebook finally shipped its new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, a niche product that will likely be as cool as the games and videos you re able to use with it. That means that Facebook has extra incentive (pressure ) to get people making great content for VR. At its F8 developer conference on Tuesday Facebook plans to unveil part of its plan to do just that: A new camera specifically for filming 360-degree videos, the kind of video that lets you pan or rotate within a scene so you can get a full 360-degree perspective. On top of the hardware, Facebook built a software program to stitch all the video together to create seamless 360-degree views of anything the filmmaker shoots. There s just one catch: You can t actually buy this camera anywhere. That s because Facebook isn t mass producing or selling the camera to the public. Instead, it s open sourcing the camera s specs and design, meaning the info needed to build the camera will be available to the public so that anyone with the time and money could build it on their own. So why would Facebook build a fancy 360-degree video camera and hand over the blueprints Because Facebook has no interest in mass producing another piece of hardware. It wants 360-degree video content, but it doesn t need to manufacture a camera to get it. It just needs to show others how to make the camera instead. Oculus did something similar with the first version of its VR headset. Facebook is into all kinds of video content, not just 360-degree video. It s also making a big push into live video,paying celebrities and media companies to use it new live video feature and putting the tool front and center in its main Facebook app in hopes more people will use it. The idea behind all of this is that getting more people to watch videos on Facebook will help the company sell video ads, which are more lucrative than static or banner ads.It isn t the only company interested in 360-degree video either. Google partnered with GoPro a year ago for its own 360-degree camera, and it has been delayed by almost six months. Perhaps not coincidentally, Facebook s 17-lens camera is one lens larger than Google s 16-lens camera. Apparently size matters, even if you re handing out the blueprints for free.',
"Vietnam's young tech talent pulls foreign funds to booming startup scene: Vietnam's tech startups are emerging as a force to be reckoned with as foreign private equity funds bet the country's talented young brains will yield more successes like the international hit game Flappy Bird. Just last month, financial powerhouses Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered PLC raised their investment in the operator of e-wallet MoMo by $28 million, while Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist 500 Startups announced a $10 million Vietnam-focused fund. One of 500 Startups' shoestring investments is in automated marketing service Beeketing, founded by college drop-out Truong Manh Quan, 26, who estimates revenue this year of $2 million predominantly from customers in the United States. The startup boom is the latest chapter of Vietnam's growing presence in the global tech industry. In the three years since Hanoi-based .GEARS released Flappy Bird, Vietnam emerged from relative obscurity to become the Southeast Asian production hub of South Korean giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. Meanwhile, global tech firms that have long had factories in Vietnam - such as LG Electronics Inc, Panasonic Corp, and Toshiba Corp - have also been expanding into research and development. Part of Vietnam's appeal is a cheaper workforce than in China, as well as membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bloc and free trade deals with the European Union, plus incentives aimed at luring investment away from neighbors. Of particular interest to venture capitalists, however, is Vietnam's tech-savvy population with a median age of just 30.",
'Alibaba Expands in Southeast Asia With $1 Billion Lazada Deal: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is making its largest overseas investment with a $1 billion deal for control of Lazada Group SA, taking the Chinese e-commerce giant to Southeast Asia and closer to a goal of shedding its home-market reliance. China s largest online emporium will pay $500 million for new shares in the closely held company and purchase an equal amount from existing investors, Alibaba said in a statement. Investors selling include Germany s Rocket Internet SE, British supermarket chain Tesco Plc and Investment AB Kinnevik. The Chinese company is buying its way into a region on the cusp of an online shopping boom, as fast-growing mobile and Internet usage propels consumer spending. Billionaire Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has set a goal of getting at least half the company s revenue from overseas, with the Lazada deal adding sales of clothing and electronics in six Southeast Asian markets. While the deal is Alibaba s biggest deal abroad to date, the e-commerce giant is no stranger to mega-acquisitions. It agreed to pay about $5 billion to take full control of Chinese video service Youku Tudou Inc. in 2015. Alibaba shares were little changed in U.S. trading at $77.86 and have dropped 4.2 percent this year. The agreement values Lazada at $1.5 billion, Rocket said in a separate statement. It s selling a 9.1 percent stake in Lazada and keeping an 8.8 percent slice. Alibaba s deal values its entire stake in the company at about 15 times its total invested capital of 18 million euros ($21 million), the German technology company incubator said.',
'Apple Watch verdict a year later: Half of those surveyed think it s a dud: More than half of those surveyed by the advertising technology company Fluent said they considered the Apple Watch a flop. That sentiment expressed by the majority of the 2,578 adults in the U.S. who responded last week to an online survey reflects how the device is perceived by the tech press and industry insiders, many of whom have been pessimistic about the Apple Watch from the start. Asked whether they considered the Watch a successful product for Apple, 53 percent responded no. But Fluent s survey also offers a more nuanced picture of Apple s first wearable device,which launched on April 24, 2015. A significant majority of Apple Watch owners 77 percent consider the smartwatch a success and about two-thirds said they plan to upgrade when the next version comes out. Those owners surveyed said they take advantage of a range of the smartwatch s features, including monitoring their activity and receiving notifications (79 percent), listening to music (75 percent) and checking email or chat (66 percent). This survey supports the more comprehensive findings of Wristly s Pulse on Wristware, released earlier this year. The research group, which surveys some 2,500 smartwatch and fitness band owners every week, says that despite some views of the Apple Watch as a mediocre novelty, it enjoys astoundingly high customer satisfaction ratings. ',
'Israel to Levy New Taxes on Google, Facebook in Policy Shift: Israel has expanded its definition of who must pay taxes on commerce, targeting digital multinationals such as Facebook Inc. and Google that critics say get a free ride. Because much of today s trade is carried out on the Internet, a foreign firm may now be considered a permanent establishment and subject to tax even if most of its presence is virtual, the Israel Tax Authority said in an e-mailed statement. The authority said Internet multinationals will be required to pay value-added tax, which is 17 percent for Israelis. The new taxes, which take effect immediately, will eventually add hundreds of millions of shekels a year to state revenue, the authority said. A Google representative in Israel couldn t immediately be reached for comment. Facebook pays taxes according to the law in every country it operates, including Israel, a spokeswoman said via e-mail. Although Israel s relatively small population of 8.5 million means the new taxes won t clobber the international giants, they build on broader efforts worldwide to level the playing field between foreign Internet companies and local commerce. Russia is pushing to raise taxes on U.S. Internet companies to help its local industry and governments across Europe and beyond are trying to extract more revenue from Google, Apple Inc. and other multinationals with increasingly complex billing and ownership structures.',
'Cloud-based video production platform 90 Seconds lands $7.5M Series A led by Sequoia India: Despite the increasing ubiquity of online videos, making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. 90 Seconds wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of the video production process in one place. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Sequoia India. Other investors in this round include pay television provider SKY TV New Zealand, Airtree Ventures, Beenext and Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of stock image agency Fotolia.com. Now based in Singapore, 90 Seconds was launched in Auckland in 2010 by CEO Tim Norton after he struggled to find an online video production service for shoots in different places. 90 Seconds started with online production tools before launching its marketplace, which now lists 5,000 video professionals from 70 countries. The company plans to continue adding to the mobile version of its software until clients can manage every part of the production process from commissioning a video to reviewing footage and uploading to YouTube and social media platforms on their tablets or smartphones. Timeliness is important for 90 Seconds users, who have included Visa, Samsung and Microsoft, because they need to take advantage of trending topics and search terms. More companies are also using the platform to handle longer shoots, like TV spots. Hooking up companies with creators and giving them all the software tools they need to produce a video is how 90 Seconds differentiates from other video production sites (which include Visually, Userfarm and SmartShoot) and also what it hopes will future-proof its business model from new competitors as demand for online videos grows.',
"Dell's SecureWorks valued at $1.42 billion in year's first tech IPO: Dell's cyber security unit, SecureWorks Corp, could be valued at up to $1.42 billion in its initial public offering, the first major U.S. listing of a technology company this year. Atlanta, Georgia-based SecureWorks said on Monday its offering was expected to be priced at $15.50-$17.50 per Class A share, raising as much as $157.5 million. The share issue market worldwide plunged to a seven-year low in the first quarter, more than halving from a year earlier to $106.6 billion, as worries over slowing economic growth kept investors wary, according to Thomson Reuters data. In the past few years, several cyber security firms such as FireEye, Rapid7 and Mimecast have gone public to take advantage of growing investor interest in them after a spate of hacking attacks on companies including major banks and retailers. However, shares of Rapid7 and FireEye, which popped 70-80 percent in their debut, are now trading way below their IPO prices. Mimecast, which jumped 20 percent on its listing day, has also slipped below its offering price. Ritter warned against premium pricing for stocks of cyber security firms, saying that these companies were fighting for market share, which would keep their profit growth muted.",
'Elon Musk s SpaceX nails landing at sea: After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football field-sized floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk s SpaceX finally pulled off the dramatic feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year. The landing, the first ever of a rocket s first stage at sea, was heralded as a breakthrough for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry, and its leader, SpaceX. The companies efforts to recover their rockets is part of what Bezos calls the Holy Grail quest of lowering the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments. Typically, the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a second stage, or a capsule, to space. But if the commercial sector can build innovative rockets that can be reused, many think that would dramatically reduce the costs, a key step toward making space travel more routine. SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform. The first stage was hurtling toward space when it started a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning itself around and heading back toward Earth. As it approached the platform, the booster was tilted into the wind but was able to right itself just before touching down, about nine minutes after liftoff. Crews were expected to board the ship and secure the rocket to the platform.',
'Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing s Giants Take In Billions: Imagine building an enormous beach resort, maybe the best in the world. Instead of renting the rooms, you charge guests based on the grains of sand they touch. You charge very little per grain, but if they lie on enough of them, it adds up. That is one way to think about what is going on at the world s biggest cloud-computing companies. Instead of grains of sand, think about computing cycles, the activity that goes on in a computer server that is running software. For a price, think about one line of software code for two one-millionths of a penny. When tolls that tiny are paid often enough, they can make a billion-dollar business. At Amazon Web Services, which pioneered this method late last year, there is no charge for the first million times a customer runs code. Thereafter, A.W.S. charges by the million times, or for the hundreds of milliseconds the computer is used. The scale at which we operate allows us to do innovative things, said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy at A.W.S. When we get better economies of scale, we ll use that to our advantage. This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often. In other words, you have to be really big to worry about making money off things that are really tiny.',
'China\'s $6 Billion Tech Funding Boom Signals Flight to Quality: If the startup funding party is finally breaking up, somebody forgot to tell China. The second-largest economy is avoiding the pitfalls affecting venture capital elsewhere, as investors around the world rein things in after an unprecedented technology financing boom. Ride-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. s finance affiliate and online property service Homelink are close to raising at least $6 billion, people familiar with the separate deals say. The operator of Alipay, Alibaba s affiliate, is targeting more than $3.5 billion alone, which would mark the technology industry s largest single round of financing. All those numbers emerged over the space of just three days last week. In China, larger startups like them are attracting major backers and garnering the lion s share of the money even as smaller operators are left to struggle. The frenetic pace is remarkable at a time venture investment globally is plateauing: there were fewer U.S. deals in the first three months than at any time in the past four years, according to research firm PitchBook Data. China s VC market is becoming very polarized," said Jarod Ji, an analyst at Beijing-based research firm Zero2IPO. There s not a lack of money in the market, but investors do feel that there s a lack of good projects and that s why companies like Didi are getting so much money. The top 20 percent of Chinese startups could get 80 percent of the funding, he added.',
'SAP quarterly results fall short as U.S. market slows: Europe\'s largest software company, SAP (SAPG.DE), warned late on Friday that first-quarter results would be weaker than expected due to slower sales of software licenses to corporate customers, particularly in Brazil and the United States. Software license revenues fell 13 percent while the company\'s newer, but lower-margin cloud software business grew 33 percent. Business customers are shifting to cloud-based software delivered over the Internet instead of relying on older software packages they install and run on in-house computers. "America was a little more lumpy in terms of the signing of contracts," Chief Executive Bill McDermott told reporters on a conference call, noting that U.S. revenue from its classic on-premise software business grew more slowly than expected. First-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose 5 percent to 1.10 billion euros ($1.25 billion). Analysts, on average, had been looking for a first-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, of 1.15 billion euros, with 12 estimates ranging from 1.09 billion to 1.25 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. The company also reported revenue of 4.73 billion euros, shy of the I/B/E/S average forecast of 4.83 billion euros.',
'Amazon May Violate India s New Rules on Foreign E-Commerce: For Amazon, no country is more important to its global growth ambitions than India, the second-most-populous nation in the world behind China, where online shopping is in its infancy and growing explosively. But Amazon s India plans just ran into a hitch. Late last month, the Indian government issued additional rules governing foreign ownership of e-commerce companies operating in the country. The government added regulations related to pricing and the sourcing of sales on sites that Amazon and several rivals appear to violate. What is more, the new policy was effective immediately, giving Amazon and others no time to comply.India essentially bars companies with substantial foreign ownership from operating retail outlets that sell from their own inventories of goods. Although American multinationals like Amazon, Walmart and Apple have sought to overturn or soften those restrictions, the government has made few changes. To work around the restrictions, Amazon and competitors billed themselves as e-commerce marketplaces, eBay-like websites that matched buyers with independent sellers. Amazon owns no inventory of its own in India, though it handles the warehousing and delivery of goods for many of its independent sellers, a model it also employs in the United States. Last week, Indian regulators confirmed that online marketplaces, which had operated in a gray era, are legal. But they added a rule saying that no single seller can account for more than 25 percent of sales on such an e-commerce marketplace. It also limited the influence that online marketplaces can exert over the prices set by their sellers. The new regulations appear to make Amazon s dependence on one large seller on its site, Cloudtail, illegal, according to industry officials and analysts. While Amazon says it has more than 80,000 sellers on its India site, Cloudtail is estimated to account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the site s sales, according to Mr. Meena of Forrester. The parent company of Cloudtail is a partnership between Catamaran Ventures, the investment firm of the Indian business magnate, N.R. Narayana Murthy, and Amazon, which owns 49 percent. India s leading e-commerce company, Flipkart, also works closely with an affiliated large seller and faces a similar problem.',
"US Startup Funding Deals Fall to Lowest Level in Four Years - Different Story in India and China: Venture capitalists made fewer bets in the U.S. last quarter, while putting a larger proportion of their money into the most mature private companies, according to research firm PitchBook Data. The findings show that venture investors are trying to play it safe by backing proven businesses, making it more difficult for newer startups to find capital. Last quarter had the fewest number of venture deals in four years. Funding rounds dropped 12 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2015, when startup funding began to slow. Investments totaled $17.7 billion in the first quarter of 2016, about flat with the prior period. More than half of that went to late-stage companies. Private investors are expressing skepticism as startup valuations have skyrocketed. Mutual fund companies have written down the value of their stakes in numerous technology companies since last year. Startups are staying private longer, leaving fewer options for shareholders to cash out. No tech company went public last quarter, and many of those that did in 2015 have gotten off to a rocky start. In other countries, there's plenty of money to go around. Venture capital investments in China and India surged in the first quarter, jumping about 50 percent.",
'Alibaba Gives Shelter in Debt Storm as China Internet Bonds Gain: China s Internet giants are providing a haven for bond investors fleeing mounting default risks among the nation s state-owned enterprises. Investors are snapping up bonds from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., a bright spot in an economy growing at the slowest pace in a quarter-century. The rising demand also reflects a broader shift in China s economy away from smokestack industries toward private-sector services such as e-commerce, online finance and entertainment. Creditors have grown wary of state-backed firms after Moody s Investors Service cut its outlook on 38 of them along with the government in March. Dollar bonds from Internet firms have returned 4.2 percent this year, the nation s best-performing sector, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. Alibaba s securities due 2034 have gained 9 percent since Dec. 31, while 2025 notes of Baidu and Tencent both returned more than 6 percent. Alibaba, China s biggest e-commerce company, has cashed in by raising $4 billion from loan bankers and Tencent, operator of China s most popular messaging services, borrowed $2.45 billion in December.',
'Morgan Stanley Paints Bleak Outlook for Twitter on Few New Users: Morgan Stanley analysts came down hard on Twitter Inc., lowering their forecasts for the social media company s stock price, on projected slower growth in new users, revenue and earnings. Engagement and new user trends remain troubling, the analysts, led by Brian Nowak, said in a note to clients Thursday. Morgan Stanley cut its price target on Twitter to $16 from $18 and reduced its projection for 2017 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization by 13 percent to $769 million. The firm reduced its 2017 revenue forecast by 6 percent to to $3.23 billion.',
'Mashable Fires News Staff, Replaces Executives as Part of Pivot to Video Infotainment: Last week, the digital publication Mashable said that it had raised $15 million in a funding round led by Turner and that it would be using the money to co-develop content for TBS and TNT. Today, the other shoe dropped. The company announced that it is replacing its chief content and revenue officers Jim Roberts and Seth Rogin and firing a large portion of its editorial staff. Additionally, Mashable is pivoting from hard news coverage; it will focus on producing lots more video about digital culture. According to Politico and a Mashable editor, 30 people were laid off.',
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'After 10 Years, Amazon s Cloud Service Is a $10 Billion Business: Amazon s cloud computing business is bigger after 10 years of operation than Amazon itself at the same milestone, and is on its way to being a $10 billion annual business this year, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders today. Amazon Web Services is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate, and most noteworthy in my view the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, Bezos wrote, adding that the unit added 722 new features in 2015, which amounted to a 40 percent increase over the prior year. Last month AWS observed its 10th year of operations, and was the bright spot in an otherwise disappointing fourth-quarter report in January. The unit clocked $7.9 billion in revenue in 2015, amounting to more than 7 percent of Amazon s overall sales, with an operating margin of 24 percent. Many characterized AWS as a bold and unusual bet when we started, Bezos wrote. We could have stuck to the knitting. I m glad we didn t. ',
'Yahoo Paints Grim Financial Picture as Deadline for Bids Nears: As Yahoo asks potential bidders to submit first-round offers for its core business next week, it is also warning them about a troubling decline in revenue and profit while obscuring the costs and cash flow of various business units. Yahoo is projecting revenue of $4.4 billion this year, down from $5 billion last year, according to two people close to the bidding who have seen the confidential data the company has shared with potential bidders. That figure is on the low end of the revenue estimate the company shared publicly with investors in February. Even that revenue is coming at a cost, with Yahoo expecting to pay other sites about $1 billion this year for sending traffic to its advertising services. The company s cash flow is also declining. Yahoo has reaffirmed to bidders its February projection that adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization would be about $750 million this year, down from $952 million in 2015. Initial bids are due at the end of next week, but that deadline might be pushed back. Starboard Value, an activist hedge fund that is seeking to replace Yahoo s entire board of directors at the next shareholders meeting this summer, has repeatedly accused the company of running a halfhearted sales process. That sentiment has been echoed by some potential bidders. For example, Yahoo has told private equity firms and other financial players considering a bid that it considers them to be second-tier bidders, compared with so-called strategic bidders like Verizon and AT&T that would integrate Yahoo into their existing businesses.',
"Twitter is basically a cable company now: Twitter is basically becoming a cable company. The social network's paid deal with the NFL to show Thursday night football games gives Twitter exclusive rights to stream the matches over the Internet. What this means for sports fans is access to another channel to watch the most popular professional sport in the country, presumably so long as they're willing to see a slew of promoted tweets on Twitter's website. It's akin to what the television industry has done for decades: Provide live events in hopes of growing an audience while making tons of money in advertising doing it. Twitter isn't about to stop there. It's considering expanding from live sports coverage into political news and other types of video content, the company's chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, told Bloomberg News. If that happens, Twitter will have built a bundle that isn't much different in style from what you get from Comcast, Verizon or many of the heavyweight TV distributors that currently dominate America's entertainment ecosystem. It might be a skinnier one, but it's a bundle nonetheless.",
'The surprising thing that got the biggest share of online shopping dollars in 2015: In a new report from the online metrics firm ComScore, researchers aimed to capture the ways our online shopping habits did (and did not) change in 2015, and the results contain some surprises. ComScore analyzed which shopping categories drew the biggest online sales in 2015. Computer hardware a category that includes personal computers and tablets has been the leader for at least a decade. But last year, for the first time, spending on apparel and accessories took the e-commerce crown. In three of out of four quarters in 2015, apparel and accessories pulled down the most dollars. For the year, clothing generated $51.5 billion in online sales, slightly edging out $51.1 billion spent on personal computers and tablets. In some ways, this might seem logical: Tablets sales growth has slowed overall as shoppers instead opt for smartphones with bigger screens. But recall, too, that 2015 wasn t exactly a banner year for the apparel industry: Retailers from Macy s to Gap reported gloomy sales results as shoppers chose to spend their money on things like travel and dining out. So the fact that online clothing sales surpassed computer hardware sales is likely telling us something bigger about customers online shopping patterns. For starters, it probably reflects retailers efforts to make it feel less risky to shop for clothes online. In other words, people are getting more used to the idea that if a pair of jeans doesn t fit them quite as expected, or a sweater is not quite the same color blue it looked to be on a website, it can be returned with little hassle and often at no cost. Apparel also is among the categories that is seeing particular benefit from the explosive growth in shopping on smartphones. Lipsman said that many of the categories that registered particularly strong increases in online spending last year were ones in which the purchases are not highly considered, meaning that customers don t spend much time researching before buying. These purchases are especially conducive to being made on a small screen, and so with the lion s share of online shopping growth coming from mobile devices, they are getting a particular tailwind from this change in shopping habits.',
'Samsung Beats Estimates as Early Debut of S7 Boosts Sales: Samsung Electronics Co. posted a better-than expected first-quarter profit after the early release of Galaxy S7 smartphones gave it a head-start on Apple Inc. and Chinese rivals and helped counter an industry downturn. Operating income rose to 6.6 trillion won ($5.7 billion) in the three months ended March, the world s largest maker of phones and memory chips said in preliminary results released Thursday. That compares with the 5.53 trillion-won average of analysts estimates compiled by Bloomberg.Samsung debuted its high-end smartphones in March, about a month earlier than last year s, with sales of the S7 line-up estimated to have hit 9 million units during their first month -- triple those of the S6 in the same time-frame. Production of curved displays for its Edge version also went more smoothly this time, avoiding the hiccups that plagued last year s wraparound-screen line. The biggest reason for the sharply improved profitability is largely due to much lower marketing spending for the mobile business, said Yoo Eui Hyung, an analyst at Dongbu Securities Co. in Seoul. The big disparity between the earlier profit estimates and the latest revisions stems entirely from the mobile business. The faster release surely helped but it s dubious whether the S7 can continue to surprise the market in the longer run. ',
'Daimler confirms HERE in talks with Amazon, Microsoft: Amazon.com and Microsoft are in talks about taking a minority stake in HERE, a digital mapping business controlled by Germany\'s luxury carmakers to help develop self-driving cars, Daimler said on Wednesday. Germany\'s luxury carmakers including Daimler\'s Mercedes, Volkswagen\'s (VOWG_p.DE) Audi division and BMW bought HERE for 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) from Nokia last year to create an alternative digital mapping business to Google.The consortium needs cloud computing providers to manage the mass of data collected from sensors on board thousands of Mercedes, BMW and Audi cars. The data about traffic and road conditions is then fed into digital maps. "We need a cloud provider to handle the huge amounts of data created by HERE and its users. We haven t taken any decisions yet," Weber told the Wall Street Journal. Intelligent mapping systems supply information to control self-driving cars, which are equipped with street-scanning sensors to measure traffic and road conditions. This location data can in turn be shared with other map users. ',
'Yik Yak s CTO drops out as the hyped anonymous app stagnates: Is Yik Yak a thing anymore Not so much, according to download stats, traffic charts, surveys and a source that says the college app s monthly user count has been declining. That source with intimate knowledge of the company also tipped me off that Yik Yak s original CTOTom Chernetsky has bailed, which the startup now confirms. He s not the only one who thinks the supposed rocket ship won t fly as high as some expected when Sequoia led a mammoth $62 million at $400 million valuation in November 2014. Since late last year, Yik Yak s VP of Product, Director of Engineering, Lead Product Designer and other senior employees have departed. Months after Sequoia pumped a ton of cash into the Atlanta startup, download rates and traffic began to drop, according to App Annie and comScore charts dug up by GigaOm. Things have gotten worse since, as Google Play dropped it from its charts last March, likely due to hate speech in the app. These stats all mesh with what my source says, which is that Yik Yak has had zero significant growth in over a year, and consistently misses its growth targets. They cite 4 million monthly active users as the count in January, noting the number has declined since then, though I can t confirm that exact number. The problem with anonymous apps is that over time they start to feel exhausting. The crude stories, played-out jokes stolen from Reddit and cringe-worthy bullying wear on people. While they might have a few juicy quips of their own to share, blowing off steam can eventually feel pointless. That s why my Secret and Yik Yak usage dried up. Yik Yak s product has continued to plod along, despite some colleges attempts to ban the app for facilitating cyberbullying. But nothing has made it feel fresh again.',
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'WhatsApp completes end-to-end encryption rollout: It s a security project that s taken around a year and a half to complete, but messaging giant WhatsApp has now fully implemented strong end-to-end encryption on its platform and across all mobile platforms for which it offers apps. This means users of the latest versions of the messaging app will have their comms and media end-to-end encrypted by default. And there are a lot of WhatsApp users; earlier this year the Facebook owned company announced it had passed a billion active users. Securing cross-platform video comms was the last piece of the puzzle, according to a WhatsApp spokesman. End-to-end encryption means the content of communications are not stored in plaintext on WhatsApp s servers. Nor is the company able to decrypt users messages to access them since it does not hold the encryption keys. So WhatsApp will be unable to be compelled to hand over messaging data even if served with a warrant by authorities demanding access.',
'Virtual Reality Check: Rating the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift: JUST a week after Facebook released the Oculus Rift, the first high-powered virtual reality device for consumers, a less publicized contender has arrived: the HTC Vive. Similar to the Rift, the Vive a joint development by the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and the video game distribution company Valve is a virtual reality headset that connects to a powerful computer. The Vive is even more expensive than the Rift it costs $799 for the headset and $1,000 to $2,000 for a compatible computer. Facebook sOculus sells the Rift headset for $599, or $1,500 when the system is bundled with a computer. The main advantage of the HTC Vive headset is that it comes with motion controllers, which let you effectively reach out and grab objects in virtual reality. This kind of interaction feels much more natural for virtual reality than the game controller included with the Rift. Also, the Vive s motion-sensing base stations capture richer movements, enabling people to walk around in a larger space or crouch and grab something while using virtual reality; the Rift s camera can detect movements, too, but the Rift was primarily designed to be used while standing or sitting. Another benefit of the Vive is that the headset fits better. With the Rift, I could always see a small gap in the space beneath the nose. The Vive headset completely blocks the outside world. HTC also includes a piece of foam that can be inserted into the Vive for a better fit for a narrower face. But a major downside of the Vive is the setup, which is more demanding than the Rift s. HTC recommends that you drill mounts into the ceiling to install the motion-sensing base stations to ensure that the sensors have a clear line of sight with the headset and your body. In other words, to take full advantage of the Vive, you probably need to dedicate a room to virtual reality; to use the Rift, you can get away with clearing out a bit of standing space. The other obvious downside of the Vive is the higher cost. With a computer and accessories included in the total price, the Vive will cost roughly $300 more than the Rift. Then again, if you are willing to spend more than $1,000 for virtual reality, that extra $300 might not matter much. This is Year 1 of powerful and capable virtual reality systems coming to the mainstream. Over time, the content that will become available for these devices will define their worth. There isn t much to do with either system yet, and consumers would be wise to wait to see if any killer virtual reality apps or games emerge for the systems.',
'After a Pause, Nutanix Signals IPO Plans Are Back on Track: Nutanix, a supplier of storage products for data centers, just updated its paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling that its plans for an initial public offering may no longer be on hold. The new filing shows that Nutanix, based in San Jose, Calif., nearly doubled its revenue in the six-month period ended Jan. 31, to $190 million from $102 million in the year-ago period. It ran a net loss of nearly $72 million, which increased from $56 million a year ago. Operating expenses rose to $190 million from $112 million previously. The company first filed for an IPO in December, but was reported to have put those plans on hold in February after markets turned south. After the Dell-owned security company SecureWorks, which is expected to offer about 20 percent of its shares in an IPO later this month, Nutanix would appear to be on track to be the second tech IPO of 2016.',
'Amazon Acquires Image Analysis Startup Orbeus: The acquisition took place in the fall of 2015, said the person who asked not to be identified because Amazon hasn t announced the deal. Orbeus developed photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of AI called neural networks and made this available as a consumer application, as well as a service for other companies and developers called ReKognition. It automatically categorized and identified the contents of photos. Orbeus s app, PhotoTime, came out before Google launched its successful AI-based Photos app. "ReKognition API is no longer taking new customers," Orbeus says on its website. "But we re up to new/exciting things." Other startups applying neural networks to image-recognition and related computer-vision tasks include New York-based Clarifai Inc. and Palo Alto-based MetaMind. Big technology companies are interested in this field, and other areas of AI. Salesforce.com Inc. said Monday it acquired MetaMind, while Apple Inc. said in January it purchased Emotient Inc., which specialized in facial-recognition technology.',
'Medium Chases Revenue With Promoted Stories; Adds Subscriptions: Medium, the 4-year-old online publishing platform from Twitter Inc. co-founder Ev Williams, now has a plan to pay the bills. The company will make money in much the same way Twitter and Facebook Inc. do -- by allowing brands to post stories and pay for them to be promoted to a wider audience through prominent placement in the news feed. Alphabet Inc. s Nest and Intel Corp. are among the first advertisers taking this approach to reach Medium s 25 million unique readers. The blogging site also plans to extend its tools for media publishers, so they can host their entire website within Medium, helping the companies save money on technology costs. The Awl and Pacific Standard are among new publications coming to Medium starting Tuesday. Publishers can also choose to put some stories behind a members-only paywall. On Medium, people can publish and annotate long-form articles and follow networks of authors. The company, backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Google Ventures, last raised $57 million in September at a $400 million valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter.',
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'Twitter Built a New Button So You ll Send More Private Messages: Reply. Retweet. Like. And now Send. Twitter is adding a new button to the bottom of each tweet so that it s simpler to send that tweet to another user within a private message. The new icon, a small envelope right next to the heart-shaped Like button, automatically attaches the tweet to a private message which you can then address to another user. But the fact that Twitter is putting a new button onto each tweet is a pretty good indication of how important direct messaging is to the company. Twitter was late to building out its messaging service and as a result has always lagged behind other messaging apps like Facebook s Messenger or Snapchat. But Twitter DMs are increasing in popularity Twitter claims that 60 percent more messages were sent in 2015 than 2014. Adding a new button to encourage more private messages should bump that number even higher. It should also make it easier for users to send tweets to brands or retailers, a customer service use case Twitter is starting to build features for. It s one of the reasons the company removed the 140-character text limit for direct messages last summer; it s hard to have a conversation with a customer service agent when you can t send more then two sentences at a time. The customer service use case was also one of the reasons Twitter has considered spinning DMs into its own app. It ultimately decided against the idea.',
'Amazon Plans Big Push to Expand Prime Now Fast Delivery: Amazon.com Inc. plans to broaden the reach of its fast delivery service Prime Now, and is selling major brands promotional deals connected to the expansion, a sign the world s largest Internet retailer is satisfied with early results from the nascent offering. The service -- now only available through the Prime Now app on smartphones -- will be run on Amazon s website starting in May, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Getting Prime Now on the Web puts the service in front of a larger audience, many of whom may not have downloaded the app on their phones. While shopping on mobile devices is expected to reach $96.2 billion in the U.S. this year, that represents a quarter of all e-commerce, according to the research firm EMarketer. Amazon is trying to sell advertising space to major brands for the Web launch, promising them visibility with tens of millions of Amazon shoppers. The premium "Launch Hero Package" would cost $500,000 for about two weeks of placement on Amazon s website associated with the rollout. That price includes e-mail promotions sent to Amazon customers, which Amazon said have a stand-alone value of $100,000, according to the documents reviewed by Bloomberg.',
'Salesforce.com Acquires Deep Learning Startup MetaMind: Cloud business software company Salesforce.com has acquired MetaMind, a startup focused on artificial learning that had been funded by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. Terms were not disclosed, but it has all the markings of an acqhire sort of deal. Founder and CTO Richard Socher announced the deal in a post on the MetaMind website. Socher says on his personal website that his new title is Chief Scientist at Salesforce. MetaMind s area of expertise is deep learning, the subset of artificial intelligence focused on data processing that is en vogue with Google, Facebook and other tech companies. The startup s specialty is natural language processing allowing computers to analyze relationships between words. Some of its capabilities disclosed in published researchdescribe advancements in the field that outrank those of some of the larger tech giants. Socher, a Stanford PhD, has said MetaMind s plan was to sell this technology as a service to other companies. At MetaMind, he led a tiny group of researchers who gained a reputation for some rapid breakthroughs in the area of artificial intelligence. A Re/codereport from 2014 described how after only four months, the team came in only slightly behind Google in the ImageNet competition, in which companies compete to build systems that can recognize images.',
'Toyota expands Microsoft partnership in connected vehicle services: Toyota Motor Corp is expanding a five-year-old partnership with Microsoft Corp to develop new internet-connected vehicle services for owners and dealers, Toyota said on Monday. The automaker has established Toyota Connected at its U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas, to consolidate its existing connectivity services and serve as the company\'s "data science" hub. Microsoft has a 5 percent stake in the venture. Among the services to be developed or expanded under Toyota Connected are insurance coverage and rates based on owners\' actual driving patterns; connected vehicle networks that can share information on traffic and weather conditions, such as icy roads; and information services tailored to a driver\'s habits and preferences, including monitoring heart rate, glucose level and other personal health data. The new wireless services will use Microsoft\'s cloud-based Azure platform. Toyota launched its initial partnership with Microsoft in 2011. Ford Motor Co introduced a similar program with Microsoft a year ago, and BMW AG and Nissan Motor Co announced Azure-based services earlier this year. Toyota Connected will use Microsoft\'s cloud technology to develop "predictive, contextual and intuitive services" to "humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background," Toyota said. Toyota Connected also will consolidate the automaker\'s current initiatives in data analytics, data management and data services for dealers and fleet customers. In addition, the new organization will provide support for Toyota\'s ongoing research in robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as development of self-driving cars.',
'Microsoft s mobile problem may not be a problem at all: When Microsoft announced its Windows 10 strategy last year, the thinking was that the unified platform would drive Windows Mobile and finally bring the Windows phone out of the doldrums where it s been virtually forever. The idea was you could develop once for Windows 10 desktop and easily share that code on any device, making it impossibly attractive for developers, which would finally drive Windows Mobile popularity in a beautiful virtuous development cycle. Unfortunately, it hasn t worked out that way, and Microsoft finds itself in an unusual position, developing software for iOS and Android because it simply doesn t have a viable Windows mobile ecosystem. The question remains; can Microsoft succeed without a strong Windows mobile position From the looks of things, they don t seem to have much choice. Nadella appears to be staking his position in the cloud, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it, while opening up his company s tools to iOS and Android in the absence of any meaningful Windows phone adoption. When you look at the beauty of the mobile-cloud connection, it s understandable Microsoft would want to be there with Windows, but perhaps Nadella is beginning to understand that Windows is not necessarily the future of the company Azure and Office 365 are and that could explain why the company stayed firmly focused on these two areas at Build. When you combine that with the idea of bots created by Microsoft, including Cortana (Microsoft s talking virtual assistant), that can run in Microsoft s tools or external platforms like Slack and LINE, you start to see a vision where Microsoft thrives even without an in-house mobile platform. As the world moves swiftly to that mobile-cloud intersection, perhaps the underlying OS becomes less important. If that s the case if Microsoft can have a piece of the underlying cloud-mobile plumbing and have apps and bots created in its ecosystem, run anywhere on any device it renders the Windows phone gap irrelevant.',
'Tesla says Model 3 orders top $10 billion in first 36 hours: Tesla Motors said orders for its new Model 3 electric sedan topped 253,000 in the first 36 hours -- a fast start for the company\'s first mass-market vehicle, which may not begin to reach customers for another 18 months or more. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that the Model 3, which is slated to go into production in late 2017, will sell at an average price of $42,000, including the price of options and additional features, which would give the initial flurry of orders an estimated retail value of $10.6 billion. That intense interest, fanned in part by a steady stream of tweets by Musk, could help boost Tesla\'s stock price, which closed Friday at $237.59, up 3.4 percent. The stock has soared more than 60 percent since hitting a 12-month low in February. The car\'s average selling price projected by Musk is well above the $35,000 base price. Analysts earlier had estimated the first Model 3s off the factory line in Fremont, California, could be loaded with extra equipment and sell for $50,000 to$60,000. Tesla has undertaken a costly expansion of the Fremont plant, aiming to boost annual capacity to 500,000 by 2020, with production of the Model 3, the company\'s first mass-market car, ramping up slowly through 2019. Some analysts said the company could have trouble filling all the initial Model 3 orders, which are accompanied by a refundable $1,000 deposit, until 2020. Barclays analyst Brian Johnson on Friday said the heavy influx of Model 3 orders "sets the stage for an equity offering" later this year by Tesla, much of which would go toward factory construction and product development.',
'China s Companies Poised to Take Leap in Developing a Driverless Car: some argue that conditions in China are actually more favorable for quick adoption of driverless cars, in part because of more aggressive support from the national and local governments. And, unlike in the United States, China never fully developed a romance with the open road and car ownership. Car ownership has spiked in China, of course. And in recent years, it has become a middle-class status symbol to own a car. For the ultrawealthy, there are clubs dedicated to Ferraris and Maseratis. But enormous traffic jams in China s largest cities can make driving a less-than-romantic experience. Why not let a machine built with artificial intelligence inside do the work for you It s not that people are more willing to use the cars in Beijing or Shanghai, it s that the economic value is much higher in China than in the U.S., Mr. Mosquet said, adding that air pollution could be as much a catalyst as bad traffic. Even as American companies like Google and Tesla work on autonomous vehicles, a number of Chinese companies are working on driverless car technology. The Internet company Leshi Internet Information & Technology (better known as Letv) has a driverless car tech unit, and the Chinese carmaker Great Wall Motors has opened a research center in Silicon Valley. The assumed leader in the field in China is the search engine company Baidu, which has been at work on autonomous vehicles since 2013.',
'Jeff Bezos just live-tweeted his space company s latest rocket launch: Opening the doors to his space company to the media for the first time last month, Jeff Bezos said he had kept the company so quiet and secretive for a simple reason: We ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about. Now Bezos is talking and tweeting. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com (and owner of The Washington Post) not only announced ahead of time that his space company would launch a rocket on Saturday, but he live-tweeted it, giving his followers a play-by-play of the event, and a few inside glimpses. Saturday s liftoff from Blue Origin s launch site in West Texas was the third consecutive time the company has launched and landed its reusable New Shepard suborbital vehicle, which consists of a rocket and a capsule designed to take astronauts just past the edge of space. While the company has yet to fly any humans Bezos said that test flights with humans are probably a year away it has now demonstrated that its rocket can fly repeatedly. Bezos, and others, believe that is a key step toward lowering the cost of spaceflight, and therefore making it more accessible. Typically the first stages of rockets are discarded after each use. But Bezos and SpaceX s Elon Musk are developing technologies to land the first stages vertically, using the engine thrust to slow them down. The United Launch Alliance is also working to recover the engines of its new rocket. But in his live-tweeting Saturday, Bezos not only chronicled the launch and landing, but also showed how the company paints a turtle on the capsule to commemorate each successful launch. He even tweeted a picture of a pair of new cowboy boots with the company s motto printed on them. That motto is Gradatim Ferociter, loosely translated to Step by Step, Ferociously, which captures the ethos of the company to move methodically toward its goals. That s also why it uses the symbol of a tortoise, which moved slowly but still crossed the finish line ahead of the hare.',
"Apple's Push to Flood India With Used iPhones Ignites Backlash: Apple Inc. s latest attempt to crack the Indian smartphone market -- by selling used phones -- is meeting a wall of resistance. The iPhone maker is seeking permission to become the first company allowed to import and sell used phones into the country, its second attempt in as many years. This time, the stakes are higher and a growing number of industry executives are fighting the move, warning government officials in private that it ll open the floodgates to electronic waste, jeopardize local players, and make a farce of Prime Minister Narendra Modi s Make in India program to encourage local manufacturing. Make in India could turn into Dump in India, said Sudhir Hasija, chairman of Karbonn Mobiles, who said it sells about 1.7 million phones a month. Apple s application in 2015 was rejected by the environment ministry without much fanfare. But things have changed since: India, as the world s second largest mobile population, now represents a vast untapped opportunity for Apple just as China and the U.S. are slowing. Apple has publicly talked up its prospects in India and is on course to get the green light to open its first retail stores. Apple now has less than 2 percent of an Indian market in which four-fifths of phones cost less than $150. Branded smartphones are available for as little as $35 in India. Western multinationals from car-makers to soda vendors use India only prices and cut-rate India edition products to woo customers. Apple can t employ those strategies without tarnishing its marquee phone s premium aura.",
'Where\'s the lane Self-driving cars confused by shabby U.S. roadways, Volvo CEO is not amused: Volvo\'s North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker\'s semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. "It can\'t find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!" Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings "crazy," complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars. In other developed countries, greater standardization of road signs and markings makes it easier for robot cars to navigate. In the U.S., however, traffic lights can be aligned vertically, horizontally or "dog-house" style in two columns. Pavement markings use paint with different degrees of reflectivity - or don\'t exist at all. "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose," said Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails." To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost. Mercedes says the "drive pilot" system found in its recently unveiled luxury E Class 2017 sedans works even with no lane markings. The system - which incorporates 23 sensors - takes into account guard rails, barriers, and other cars to keep cars in their lanes up to 84 miles (135km) per hour, under "suitable circumstances." Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add $4,000 to a car\'s price.',
'Facebook s Live Video Effort Entices Media Companies: When severe weather passed through the Atlanta area early this month, Brad Nitz, a meteorologist for a local television station, WSB-TV, fed viewers live video updates on the station s website, as he has done for years. But then he did something new: He turned away from the television camera and addressed an iPhone that was streaming him live on Facebook. And the station s social media manager, Jonathan Anker, watched this new Facebook audience swell. At its peak, the stream reached 8,800 viewers at once, and the segment has been played more than 77,000 times in total, far more than the station s typical online audience. The numbers, Mr. Anker said, were seriously out of whack, in a delightful way. Experiences like this have media companies swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago. For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos How do you reach people on their mobile devices And how do you get more out of Facebook s 1.6 billion users Now, they hope, they have found a key for all three. Yet it is also raising some questions inside the companies about if and when they will see any meaningful money come from the push. The feature, called Facebook Live, has largely lived under the radar so far. But it is one of the company s highest-priority projects, according to three people directly involved with the initiative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Internally, Facebook Live is seen as a way to move beyond hosting conversations about television and live events to becoming a venue for both. Mark Zuckerberg, the company s chief executive, has made Facebook Live one of his pet projects, two of the people said, devoting significant resources and effort to the initiative. Facebook plans to announce a suite of new features and partners in early April and at F8, Facebook s developer conference in San Francisco later in the month. Facebook, though, has prioritized getting live video in front of as many users as possible. The company has been eager to talk with media companies about getting started with streaming, but remains vague in conversations about revenue sharing or subscription models. It is pushing a build-first, make-money-later philosophy, one that can be frustrating to media partners, particularly those struggling to navigate broader changes in the online media industry. But whatever the frustrations, they are outweighed by the prospect of reaching Facebook s huge audience.',
'LinkedIn Buddies Up Closer to Lynda.com, Adds Course Recommendations Based on Your Career: LinkedIn is finding more ways to pair its professional network with Lynda.com, the online video library it bought for $1.5 billion last April. The most recent integration: LinkedIn is using data around which jobs are most popular among its users to suggest collections of videos that can help train someone interested in that career. If you were interested in becoming a Web designer, for example, Lynda.com could now recommend a collection of classes to help you learn the skills necessary for that job. Some extra revenue would be great news for the company, and would also help justify the $1.5 billion it paid for the video library last year. It s one of the reasons LinkedIn is also putting Lynda.com courses on Virgin America flights. LinkedIn stock has fallen by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year, and just this week Barclay s analyst Paul Vogel downgraded the stock over fear of slowing revenue growth. It s unclear whether a shopping list of videos will actually open any wallets, but it certainly can t hurt.',
'Government report details Theranos quality control issues: A government report released late Thursday accuses Theranos of producing inaccurate test results, of failing to meet its own lab standards and hiring unqualified personnel. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service visited Theranos main facilities in Newark, California last November and found the one drop blood test startup s machines produced wildly inaccurate test results including one for cancer detection, according to a redacted version of the report put out by the Wall Street Journal. The newly released 121-page report, obtained in full by the WSJ details quality control issues including the failure to meet Theranos own standards. According to the report, erratic test results were frequent when tested in July 2014, and from February to June of 2015 on Theranos proprietary blood test machine Edison. One example a test to measure a hormone affecting testosterone levels failed 87 percent of the time when run on Edison. It is unfathomable Theranos would be allowed to run test results for the public during this time. and these new details provide an inside look at some very real issues surrounding Theranos as a company, particularly around its code-named Edison technology the supporting reason for the company s $9 billion valuation.',
'Amazon Expands Buttons for Reordering Essentials -- Like Doritos: Amazon.com Inc. is expanding the number of products available for instant re-ordering through its wireless Dash Buttons, citing high customer demand. After last year rolling out the WiFi-connected plastic tabs that can be mounted to the fridge, washing machine or kitchen cupboard, the online retailing giant is increasing the number of brands that can be re-ordered by pushing a button to more than 100, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. Now Amazon Prime customers who suddenly find themselves low on supplies -- from Trojan condoms to Doritos chips, Energizer batteries, Purina dog food and more -- can hit the button to reorder the product and get it delivered for free. The buttons cost $4.99 each, with the cost reimbursed after the first order through Dash. When the buttons were first introduced in March 2015 they were met with some skepticism as to whether people would want or use them. But Amazon said orders placed through Dash have grown by more than 75 percent in the last three months alone and now take place more than once a minute. ',
'Inside the Little-Known Japan Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones: The little-known Japanese company at the center of a legal tussle between Apple Inc. and the U.S. government over the hacking of an iPhone built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the mobile phone security business almost by accident. Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd. worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected in a terrorist attack, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. Neither Cellebrite nor the FBI have confirmed the link, and a spokesman from parent Sun Corp. on Thursday said the company isn t able to comment on specific criminal cases. Sun, based in a small town of 100,000 southwest of Tokyo, has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan s pachinko parlors since the 1970s but has often displayed bigger tech ambitions. The Konan, Aichi-based company developed personal computers in the late 1970s, computer games and more recently, iPhone mahjong apps. In 2007, as sales slumped, Sun acquired Petah Tikva, Israel-based Cellebrite. Cellebrite hadn t ventured into forensics at the time, and the purchase was mainly to add phone-to-phone data transfer to Sun s fledgling telecommunications business, said the Japanese company s spokesman Hidefumi Sugaya. When Cellebrite later took on investigative agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation as clients, the business took off, he said in a telephone interview. Today, the bulk of Sun s mobile data solutions business comes from Cellebrite, said Sugaya. "Although the FBI didn t get a legal decision that would require Apple to hack around its own security software, it created a situation where they can go to third parties to do that," said Matt Larson, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. "Companies like Cellebrite may have found a niche industry of assisting the FBI unlock personal devices in select cases moving forward." Cellebrite sells hardware and software for extracting data from hand-held devices, even if it has been encrypted or deleted. It employs more than 500 people and has offices in Israel, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Singapore and the U.K., according to its website.Founded in 1999, Cellebrite was bought by Sun Corp. for a reported $17.5 million. ',
"Huawei 2015 revenue jumps 37 percent, strongest in seven years: China's Huawei on Friday posted its strongest revenue growth since 2008 as China's adoption of fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology and strong smartphone sales worldwide boosted sales for one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers. The Shenzhen-based company said global revenue rose 37 percent to 395 billion yuan ($61.10 billion) in 2015, slightly above its forecast of 390 billion yuan. Net profit rose 32 percent to 36.9 billion yuan, from 27.9 billion yuan a year earlier, while operating margins dipped to 11.6 percent from 11.9 percent.Revenue in Huawei's carrier business, which competes with Sweden's Ericsson for the top spot globally for telecommunication equipment, increased 21.4 percent in 2015 on strong demand for 4G telecommunication equipment. In Huawei's enterprise division, which builds private networks for companies and organizations, revenue rose 43.8 percent.",
"With $340 million in revenue, Nest is underperforming, and its future at Google is at risk: Nest generated about $340 million in sales last year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. That s an impressive figure for a company in the very nascent market of Internet-connected devices. Nest currently sells three products: The flagship smart thermostat; Protect, its smoke detector; and Nest Cam, the home-monitoring video predecessor to Dropcam. But it s below the initial expectations Google had set for Nest when it bought the startup in 2014 for a whopping $3.2 billion. The company s sales performance may face even deeper scrutiny inside Google s new parent company, Alphabet, where Nest now sits, as the hardware maker faces its most critical year ever. Alphabet, whose execs have spoken regularly about controlling costs at the non-Google companies, may become less charitable. And in the meanwhile, Nest's CEO got slammed in a column in TechCrunch for the culture there: though the company currently manufactures three products its thermostat, a smoke alarm, and its Nest cam (via its Dropcam acquisition) it has repeatedly delayed product releases and disappointed its customers, particularly given the billing that Nest s products receive. In one of the more visible cases of customer dissatisfaction, a New York Times reporter said in January that a software bug drained his Nest thermostat s battery, a discovery he made only when his infant began crying from his chilly bedroom in the middle of the night. Nest s smart smoke alarm has also been plagued by software glitches. In the meantime, says The Information, Google has moved forward on similar efforts, including its OnHub wireless router and a stealth project to create a competitor to Amazon s Echo. That Google has done so without Nest s involvement must be demoralizing to Nest s current employees, who were presumably drawn to the challenge of helping Nest become one of the world s great hardware companies. But there s reason for even more concern going forward: Fadell has created a culture that s increasingly unlikely to attract the world s best engineers, which has always been the top priority for its parent company. (Google, in stark contrast, is consistently ranked as one of thebest places to work.) If Alphabet wants to maintain its feel-good reputation, it may be time to part ways with Fadell, or at least to demote him. He s now had more than two years to prove himself. What Fadell has shown instead is that he s unable to get out of his own way or Nest s.",
'Car-Pooling Helps Uber Go the Extra Mile: One day not long ago, an Uber driver picked up a passenger in San Francisco s gritty Tenderloin district. Let s call our passenger Abby, because her real name has been lost to database anonymization, an effort to keep her identity private. Abby needed to go to Noe Valley, a 25-minute drive that might ordinarily have cost about $15. But she had chosen UberPool, the ride-hailing company s 18-month-old car-pooling program. In the process she had unwittingly initiated one of the service s more epic recent trips. Unlike a standard Uber ride, in which a single rider starts a one-time trip, UberPool works like a party line for cars. Travis Kalanick, Uber s co-founder and chief executive, describes it as the future of his company and thus the future of transportation in America. Call up the app, specify your destination, and in exchange for a significant discount, UberPool matches you with other riders going the same way. The service might create a ride just for you, but just as often, it puts you in a ride that began long ago one that has spanned several drop-offs and pickups, a kind of instant bus line created from collective urban demand. In total, Uber collected about $48 for the ride, of which the driver kept $35. The company had collapsed five separate rides into a single trip, saving about six miles of travel and removing several cars from the road. For riders, the discounts amounted to savings of at least half of a standard Uber trip. For the driver, an hourlong trip with no idle time resulted in steady earnings (Uber drivers make money only when riders are in the car). And though Uber made less from the single ride than it would have from multiple rides, the company benefited by installing itself as a fixture in people s lives. UberPool may push us to re-evaluate how we think about Uber and its impact on the world.',
'People Are Spending Lots of Time, Not Money, on Their Phones: Shopping on mobile phones is growing at its fastest rate ever. But there s still a huge gap between how much time shoppers spend on mobile websites and apps, and the percentage of total e-commerce sales that happen on these mobile sites. One big reason for this 44 percent gap: Entering in credit card and shipping details on a phone can be a pain, both on mobile websites and in apps. Services like Apple Pay and Android Pay have eliminated a lot of that work in partnering apps, by filling in those details automatically. And as Re/code reported, Apple Pay will be coming to mobile websites soon, too. If the gap between time spent and dollars spent on mobile sites is going to close, these services are going to be a big reason why.',
"Elon Musk has a lot riding on his new Tesla: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is poised to reveal his newest creation, the Model 3, at an event on Thursday. Starting at $35,000, the car represents Tesla's first electric vehicle aimed at price-conscious, mainstream consumers. And how it fares is going to have a major impact on Tesla's long-term future as a company and the future of electric cars more broadly. That's why this unveiling is an incredibly important moment. Back in 2006, Musk laid out this vision in a blog post on Tesla's website: The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model. In other words, this is the endgame. Although the company had focused first on high-end cars the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, and the Model X the ultimate goal was to bring the electric car to the masses. So for Tesla to have reached this point is going to be, naturally, a very big deal in the company's history. But that's not the only reason the Model 3 is significant. Tesla's new car is important in a very immediate sense because it offers Tesla a big chance at reversing some of the headwinds facing the company. You may recall that in October, Consumer Reports dinged the Model S for reliability problems, even though the same publication had otherwise issued aglowing review of the vehicle. Meanwhile, Tesla sales may have been affected by low oil prices that could be suppressing demand for electric vehicles, even as internal production issues hindered the company's supply. Not all of that is Tesla's fault, but it has prompted analysts to sour on Tesla's stock. Over the latter half of 2015, shares of Tesla fell roughly 15 percent from about $280 a share to $240. (It's now hovering at $230.) The Model 3 could be Tesla's opportunity to regain momentum.",
'Amazon Assembly, Installation Services Bolster Big-Product Sales: Amazon.com Inc. wants to sell bigger things. To do so, the Web retailer has put together an army of workers who can handle everything from mounting flat TVs on walls to assembling treadmills. In the year since it rolled out Amazon Home Services, which also offers professional jobs such as painting, plumbing and yoga instruction, the online store has expanded the service to 30 cities from an initial four. Amazon now offers more than 1,200 services, the Seattle-based company said on Wednesday. It s part of a push by Amazon to expand beyond products, and also a way to make it easier for consumers to buy big items that require an extra pair of hands to set up. Amazon has also increased its warehouse capacity for large items like furniture and flat-screen televisions. A new shipping hub in Kansas announced last week will be among about a dozen Amazon warehouses specifically designed for big products. Others are in Connecticut and California. Amazon now sells more than 1 million items that give shoppers the option of requesting assembly, installation or other related services, which is boosting the sale of home-improvement products, said Erika Takeuchi, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The most popular services requested are mounting flat-screen televisions to walls and assembling treadmills, she said. Amazon s home services also include a wide range of offerings that don t require purchases from the online store. Housecleaning is the third most popular job requested, according to Amazon. Other services include landscaping, gutter cleaning, pet grooming and yoga instruction. But most service requests are tied to a purchase.',
"Foxconn unit Hon Hai's Quarterly Profit Slides as Smartphone Demand Wilts: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. s quarterly profit dropped for the first time in more than three years after the main assembler of Apple s devices fell prey to slowing iPhone sales and intensifying competition in contract manufacturing. The largest member of billionaire Terry Gou s Foxconn Technology Group reported a 7 percent slide in fourth-quarter net income to NT$52.9 billion ($1.6 billion), compared with the NT$59.1 billion average of analysts estimates. The fall in profit was Hon Hai s first since the second quarter of 2012 on a comparable basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Hon Hai s 2015 profit exceeded expectations but it s grappling with a slowdown in smartphone demand. The Taiwanese company gets half its revenue from Apple, whichwarned in January of its first quarterly sales decline in over a decade as China decelerates. The iPhone maker has since launched a smaller and cheaper version of its marquee device, which investors are counting on to rejuvenate the business. Gou is seeking to broaden Foxconn s remit, transforming the contract manufacturer into a company that also makes key electronics components and devices. Hon Hai and several other Foxconn affiliates on Wednesday announced a deal to take control of Sharp Corp. for about $3.5 billion, adding the Japanese supplier of displays for smartphones to Gou s corporate empire. Researchers at IDC predicted in December that global smartphone growth will dip below 10 percent this year for the first time. ",
'Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China: China s government said on Monday that it would take steps to more strictly manage websites in the country, its latest push to set boundaries in the wider Internet. A draft law posted by one of China s technology regulators said that websites in the country would have to register domain names with local service providers and with the authorities. It was not clear whether the rule would apply to all websites or only to those hosted on servers in China. Chinese laws can be haphazardly enforced and are usually vague, and because the new rule is only a draft, analysts said they expected the regulator, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, to specify later to whom the law would apply. If the rule applies to all websites, it will have major implications and will effectively cut China out of the global Internet. By creating a domestic registry for websites, the rule would create a system of censorship in which only websites that have specifically registered with the Chinese government would be reachable from within the country. If the law applies only to sites hosted in China, it would still represent a consolidation of power by Beijing. Forcing registration with Chinese entities is likely to create a new boom in domain-name service registrars. At the moment, Alibaba operates China s primary domain-name service provider, called Wan Wang. The new rule would also enable the Chinese government to keep closer tabs on the real identities of website operators. It would also help Beijing assemble a registry of important websites if China wants to break away from the global registry that unifies the Internet, Mr. Creemers said. The new rules are the latest in a string of measures taken by the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping to assert control over the Internet. This year, regulators created rules to block foreign companies from publishing online content in China without the government s consent. Regulators also shut down the social media accounts of the sharp-tongued tycoon Ren Zhiqiang.',
'Google Fiber is officially adding phone service for $10 a month: Many people can already buy TV and Internet service from Google Fiber. Now, the company that brought gigabit speeds to Austin and Kansas City is moving deeper into the telecom industry by offering its own bundled telephone service. For $10 a month, Google Fiber customers soon will be able to buy an add-on known as Fiber Phone a service that, according to a company blog post, appears to mimic much of the functionality of Google Voice. Voicemail on Fiber Phone can be automatically transcribed and sent to your email. You\'ll get unlimited domestic calling, as well as international calls at Google Voice\'s rates. And you\'ll have access to one phone number that can be set up to ring all of your phones whether landline or mobile. A series of leaked emails in January first uncovered Google Fiber\'s plans to move into phone service. But now the decision is official: Fiber Phone will roll out gradually across all of the company\'s existing markets. The company declined to name the initial launch markets, saying those details will come later. The service comes with a little black box that sits beside your home phone. It has both ethernet and phone jacks, and will work with most handsets except for old rotary phones, according to Kelly Mason, a company spokesperson. Google Fiber\'s effort to draw in phone customers highlights how the company is becoming more like traditional service providers even as many telecom companies are looking to become more like Internet content firms. Even providers of cellphone service have been shifting their focus away from voice and toward the more lucrative provision of mobile data. Reports this week suggest T-Mobile may soon unveil new phone plan options that eliminate voice service entirely to give you a bigger bucket of data. Fiber Phone fits within these trends in that it would help customers add some cloud-based functionality to their home phones. But it\'s not immediately clear why consumers would pick Fiber Phone over Google Voice. The two services share many of the same features, but Fiber Phone carries a subscription cost and requires an at-home installation that you don\'t need with Google Voice. In this respect, Google Voice might be considered a "better" service.',
'Instagram s New Algorithm Means the Free Ride May Be Over for Brands: Instagram is testing a new algorithm, which means the company is (or soon will be) choosing which posts users see in their feed and in what order. That could be a good thing for users. It means that, if the algorithm works, you should see the best photos and videos every time you open the app. For brands, though, especially those that rely on the app to reach their customers for free, the algorithm news is less than stellar. Influencers are getting nervous too. That s because an algorithm gives Instagram control over what you see, but also what you don t see. The fear among some brands is that the new Instagram algorithm will relegate their posts to the sidelines. What happened with Facebook is this: It originally encouraged brands and businesses to build followings for their Pages, and even offered ad units specifically intended to acquire more fans. The idea was that more followers meant more people would see the company s posts in their feed, so brands paid willingly to acquire them. Then Facebook slowly pulled the rug. Little by little it changed its algorithm until posts from brand Pages were seen by just a fraction of users who followed the Page. In 2012, Facebook announced organic posts only reached 16 percent of a Page s fans, and encouraged brands to pay to sponsor their posts instead. Brands are bracing for a similar change with Instagram.',
'No One Wants to Be the Next Square Anymore: Makers of once-prominent credit card readers are retrenching or outright folding after Square s disappointing IPO. A year ago, being known as the Square of Canada was a badge of honor. Payfirma Corp. s smartphone-compatible credit card readers were in high demand, and local investors supplied the Vancouver startup with $13 million in funding. Like Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer of Square Inc. (and Twitter Inc.), Payfirma CEO Michael Gokturk said he was aiming for hypergrowth. Gokturk doubled his staff to 80, including a chief operating officer formerly of Intuit Inc., and started talking about an initial public offering. But by November, being the Square of anywhere suddenly wasn t such a hot title. That month, Square sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at about $2.9 billion, less than half its private valuation from a year earlier. In the runup to the IPO, analysts began questioning whether the card-reader maker should really be priced like a high-flying tech company. Its stock price is hovering around $13, right where it was after its first day of trading. Now that they started going through the rigors of a public market, you can see that their market is actually quite limited, said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. It s going to be much harder going forward for companies that try to emulate their model to raise capital. ',
'Snapchat Adds Voice, Video Calling to Mobile Messaging App: Snapchat, operator of a popular social-messaging app, released an update that steps up competition with Facebook Inc., owner of rival mobile communication services Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Los Angeles-based Snapchat bolstered its chat function with multimedia features including voice and video calling and digital stickers. Called Chat 2.0, the feature emulates "face-to-face communication," while making it easier to switch between video chatting, texting and calling, Snapchat said Tuesday in a blog post. WhatsApp introduced voice calls last year, but users are still waiting for video calling. Facebook s Messenger communications app added this video capability in April. Last week, Fortune reported Snapchat acquired Bitstrips, a Toronto-based maker of personalized avatars or "bitmojis." Snapchat declined to comment on the acquisition, which Fortune said was worth about $100 million. The deal suggests Snapchat will make its stickers more customizable in the future.',
'Spotify Expected to Sign $1 Billion Financing Deal: Spotify is about to close on a $1 billion deal that would double the amount of financing the music-streaming company has raised since its founding a decade ago, people briefed on the matter said Tuesday. The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which allows Spotify s investors to change their securities into equity at a future date, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet public. By using convertible debt, Spotify obtains the funds, without needing to change its valuation. The terms of the debt, however, may put pressure on the company to go public sooner. The company had an equity value of $8.4 billion last year. Funds associated with the private equity firm TPG as well as the investment firm Dragoneer put in $750 million of the $1 billion, with the rest coming from other institutional investors, the people said. The transaction, which was placed by Goldman Sachs, is expected to close on Friday, they said. The terms give the investors the ability to convert to equity at a discount to an initial public offering price, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The discount increases if Spotify waits longer than a year to do so, they said. The coupon payment on the debt would also continue to rise over time, the people said. The deal is similar to the one that Goldman Sachs arranged for Uber in January 2015. The ride-hailing company raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt. Should the company not go public within a certain time, the interest rate on those securities would climb. TPG Special Situations Partners, an $18 billion fund within TPG that does transactions other than leveraged buyouts, participated in the deal, as did TPG Growth, which has invested in other start-ups like Uber and Airbnb. Spotify may use the funds for acquisitions, investments and international expansion, the people said.',
'U.S. Says It Has Unlocked iPhone Without Apple: The Justice Department said on Monday that it had found a way to unlock an iPhone without help from Apple, allowing the agency to withdraw its legal effort to compel the tech company to assist in a mass-shooting investigation. The decision to drop the case which involved demanding Apple s help to open an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the Decembershooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people ends a legal standoff between the government and the world s most valuable public company. The case had become increasingly contentious as Apple refused to help the authorities, inciting a debate about whether privacy or security was more important. Yet law enforcement s ability to now unlock an iPhone through an alternative method raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of security in Apple devices. The development also creates potential for new conflicts between the government and Apple about the method used to open the device and whether that technique will be disclosed. Lawyers for Apple have previously said the company would want to know the procedure used to crack open the smartphone, yet the government might classify the method. A second law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reporters in a conference call said that a company outside the government provided the F.B.I. with the means to get into the phone used by Mr. Farook, which is an iPhone 5C running Apple s iOS 9 mobile operating system. The official would not name the company or discuss how it was accomplished, nor would officials say whether the process would ultimately be shared with Apple.',
'Oculus Rift Review: A Clunky Portal to a Promising Virtual Reality: Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion two years ago, released its much-hyped Oculus Rift system on Monday. With a headset, camera and game controller, the system, which costs $1,500 when bundled with a powerful computer, is the first virtual reality product of its kind to reach consumers, before similar ones coming this year from HTC and Sony. Over the last week, I tested the Rift and many pieces of content for the system to see how true Mr. Zuckerberg s words might ring. I can report that while the Rift is a well-built hardware system brimming with potential, the first wave of apps and games available for it narrows the device s likely users to hard-core gamers. It is also rougher to set up and get accustomed to than products like smartphones and tablets. The Setup: The Rift works with technology that some might find anachronistic: a Windows PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse. With many people shifting away from desktop computers toward laptops, tablets and smartphones, finding a place to install the Rift and those other components may be a challenge. If you purchase the Rift, you had better have thick skin. The aesthetic of the headgear it looks like a pair of black ski goggles with air traffic controller headphones built into the sides is not designed to get you a date. And since wearing the Rift makes users less aware of the outside world, videos and photos of them donning the contraption and taken without their knowledge may end up on Instagram or Facebook. I became a subject of ridicule when my partner was watching TV and I crouched in the middle of the living room while playing the dead space pilot game. The Rift has other consequences for the mind and body. I felt mentally drained after 20-minute sessions. My eyes felt strained after half an hour, and over a week I developed a nervous eye twitch. Oculus recommends Rift owners ease into the headset: Use it a few minutes at a time initially, then gradually increase the amount of time. All Rift users should take short breaks after every 30 minutes of use, the company said. The headset may also leave lasting impressions, or what I call nerd paint, on your face. After a long session, the Rift left two sets of parallel horizontal lines under my eyes. When it comes down to it, I don t disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is just the beginning of virtual reality. With about 30 games and a few apps available at Rift s introduction, there isn t much to do with the system yet. Oculus will eventually need a larger, more diverse set of content to transcend its initial audience of gamer geeks.',
'Pandora Media\'s founder returns as CEO; shares fall: Online music streaming service Pandora Media Inc (P.N) appointed founder Tim Westergren as its chief executive to replace Brian McAndrews, who left the company on Monday, sending its shares down 10 percent. Pandora, whose shares had fallen 32.5 percent in the last 12 months, faces stiff competition from Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. "I\'m sure the stock performance was a factor in McAndrews\' departure," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told Reuters. Pandora last month reported disappointing fourth-quarter results with active listeners of 81.1 million at the end of December, a slight fall from a year earlier. The company had said it planned to invest $345 million in 2016 to expand its paid subscription service and enter new markets, with an aim to achieve $4 billion in revenue by 2020. It reported revenue of $1.16 billion for 2015. "McAndrews was pretty ambitious, and my guess is that Westergren will be a bit more deliberate, so we will likely see a slower roll out of their international expansion," Pachter said.',
'In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage: It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it s buying back shares Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them. Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more. But a company s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage. Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average. But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually. Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years. Yahoo is not alone. Mr. Colby conducted a cost-benefit analysis of 26 companies buying back stock versus using that money to invest in a business. He found that McDonald s was another problematic example. Since 2008, McDonald s has allocated almost $18 billion to buybacks. This has helped produce 4.4 percent increases in annual earnings per share over the period. To equal that growth in overall earnings, the company would have had to generate just a 2.3 percent return on the money it spent buying back stock, Mr. Colby estimated. Last November, Moody s Investors Service downgraded McDonald s unsecured debt rating, citing its plans to increase its borrowings in part to fund future buybacks.',
'Microsoft Apologizes After Twitter Chat Bot Experiment Goes Awry: Microsoft apologized after Twitter users exploited its artificial-intelligence chat bot Tay, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks in what the company called a coordinated attack that took advantage of a critical oversight. The company will bring Tay back online once it s confident it can better anticipate malicious activities, he said. A coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack, Lee said, without elaborating. The company introduced Tay Wednesday to chat with humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. Some users quickly tried to see how far they could push Tay. In less than a day, Twitter s denizens realized Tay didn t really know what it was talking about and that it was easy to get the bot to make inappropriate comments on any taboo subject. People got Tay to deny the Holocaust, call for genocide and lynching, equate feminism to cancer and stump for Adolf Hitler. The worst tweets quickly disappeared from Twitter, and Tay itself also went offline to absorb it all. Some Twitter users appeared to think that Microsoft had also manually banned people from interacting with the bot. Others are asking why the company didn t build filters to prevent Tay from discussing certain topics, such as the Holocaust. The bot was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and meant to entertain and engage people through casual and playful conversation, according to Microsoft swebsite. Tay was built with public data and content from improvisational comedians. It s supposed to improve with more interactions, so should be able to better understand context and nuances over time. The bot s developers at Microsoft also collect the nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status of anyone who chats with Tay.',
'Uber profits elsewhere support \'sustainable\' spending in China: CEO: Ride hailing app company Uber Technologies Inc is generating more than $1 billion in profit a year in its top 30 cities globally, and partly using that money to bankroll its expansion in China, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in an interview. The company said in February it was losing more than $1 billion a year in China\'s red-hot ride hailing market, where it is battling large local incumbents to win customers. Kalanick said China was the company\'s most intense market, but also a crucible for new ideas that it has exported to other markets, and that its investment here was sustainable. "If you took our top 30 cities today, today they\'re generating over $1 billion in profit a year, just our top 30 cities. And that profit multiplies every year because we\'re growing," he said on the sidelines of the Boao Forum in the Chinese island province of Hainan. Other cities among the 400 where Uber operates were also profitable, he added.',
'Snapchat Is Buying Bitstrips, the Company That Turns You Into an Emoji: Snapchat is buying Bitstrips, the company behind the Bitmoji app that lets you create an avatar of yourself to share on social media and over text, according to a source familiar with the deal. Fortune s Dan Primack, who first reported the news, said Snapchat is paying in the ballpark of $100 million for the company, which was founded in 2012. It quickly became popular on Facebook, as users created and shared cartoon versions of themselves in a bunch of different settings. It s not entirely clear why Snapchat wants Bitmoji, but it feels like a good fit for the company, which has a number of other fun features to help users spruce up their photos and videos. Snapchat allows users to put emojis on photos and videos they send, and has generated a lot of buzz for facial filters that let people distort their faces into different animals or characters. (Facebook just bought a similar company two weeks ago.) Personal emojis are a logical fit in that regard.',
'The Uber Model, It Turns Out, Doesn t Translate: Other than Uber, the hypersuccessful granddaddy of on-demand apps, many of these companies have come under stress. Across a variety of on-demand apps, prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down. Here is what we are witnessing: the end of the on-demand dream. That dream was about price and convenience. Many of these companies marketed themselves as clever hacks of the existing order. They weren t just less headache than old-world services, but because they were using phones to eliminate inefficiencies, they argued that they could be cheaper, too so cheap that as they grew, they could offer luxury-level service at mass-market prices. So do a lot of other apps offering services across a number of industries. They are super convenient, but the convenience comes at a premium, which seems here to stay. Some of these services could make for fine businesses, but it is hard to call them groundbreaking. After all, paying extra for convenience isn t really innovative it is pretty much how the world has always worked. Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used its growth to keep cutting its prices and expand its service. Uber shifted from a convenient alternative to luxury cars to an alternative to taxis to, now, a credible alternative to owning a car. But Uber s success was in many ways unique. For one thing, it was attacking a vulnerable market. In many cities, the taxi business was a customer-unfriendly protectionist racket that artificially inflated prices and cared little about customer service. The opportunity for Uber to become a regular part of people s lives was huge. Many people take cars every day, so hook them once and you have repeat customers. Finally, cars are the second-most-expensive things people buy, and the most frequent thing we do with them is park. That monumental inefficiency left Uber ample room to extract a profit even after undercutting what we now pay for cars. But how many other markets are there like that Not many. Some services were used frequently by consumers, but weren t that valuable things related to food, for instance, offered low margins. Other businesses funded in low-frequency and low-value areas were a trap, Mr. Walk said.',
'Why you should be skeptical that any video is real: Be careful about believing what your eyes are telling you. Researchers have shown how a video of a person talking can be altered in real time to change what a speaker appears to be saying. In a new video, the scientists show how they edited YouTube clips to change mouth movements. The system uses a webcam to track one person s facial expressions, and then applies them to the face of the person in the target video. The software creates a 3D representation of a subject s face, which can then be swapped with the 3D representation of another face. The process works even if one subject has facial hair or a different skin tone. But it won t work if a person s long hair blocks his or her mouth. Currently the researchers are considering commercializing the technology for use in TV shows that are re-released in a different language. Editing actors facial movements to match the audio should make the dubbed programs seem more natural, even if what s onscreen is actually fake.',
'Square Teams Up With Facebook to Offer Ads That Can Be Gauged: On Wednesday, Square announced a new integration with Facebook. Under the integration, small businesses that use Square to process payments can buy and target Facebook advertising using Square s software. Square will make subscription fees off the new product. Small businesses can benefit from the move because Facebook ads bought through Square s platform are directly connected to sales activity and data, Square said. That will allow business owners to understand whether their Facebook ads are working to attract new and repeat customers. The Facebook ad integration is just the most recent new line of business for Square, which went public in November. When the company began in 2009, it focused on providing a square credit card reader that easily attached to smartphones and tablets, giving small, cash-only businesses the ability to accept credit cards. Square takes a small percentage of each transaction, a fee it splits with credit card companies and other financial intermediaries. But as Square has grown, the company has diversified from that payments processing core, which some analysts and investors have criticized for having overly thin margins. Square now offers cash advances to merchants through Square Capital, scheduling with Square Appointments and food delivery with Caviar. The company has also begun offering other subscription-based products to businesses, like an email marketing service linked to sales history. The new Facebook advertising integration was spurred by an acquisition of talent and technology from a start-up called LocBox a few months ago. Square hired Mr. Mehta and his colleagues from LocBox, which specialized in online marketing for small and local businesses, to work on similar advertising technology at Square. The new lines of business still account for far less revenue than Square earns by processing payments. But Square believes that as more small businesses begin adopting its full array of products, these nascent revenue streams will grow. Two weeks ago, Square reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, posting a 49 percent revenue increase to $374 million for the fourth quarter from a year ago, with sales from its software and data products more than tripling.',
'Why I m skeptical about Apple s future: Facebook is set to release its virtual reality headset, Oculus, next week. It will be big and clunky, expensive, and cause nausea and other problems for its users. Within a few months, we will declare our disappointment with virtual reality itself while Facebook listens very carefully to its users and develops improvements in its technology. Version 3 of this, most likely in 2018 or 2019,will be amazing. It will change the way we interact with each other on social media and take us into new worlds like the holodecks we saw in the TV series Star Trek. This is the way innovation happens now. You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released. Apple hasn t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection. Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed. He ruled with an iron fist and did not tolerate dissent of any type. People in one division of Apple also did not know what others in the company were developing, that is the type of secrecy the company maintained. Jobs s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the 90s and Microsoft in the late 2000 s. Consider that its last major innovation the iPhone was released in June 2007. Since then, it has been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors as with the iPad and Apple Watch. Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features. It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well.',
'Shopify Doubles Down on Buy Buttons Despite Sluggish Start: Last year certainly wasn t the year of the Buy button that some envisioned, but Shopify is betting that 2016 could be. The e-commerce company, which makes software that small businesses use to sell products online, is expanding the number of online sales channels its customers can sell through as shopping on mobile devices booms. The new channels include product discovery app Wanelo, home design site Houzz and coupon app Ebates; Shopify said that more are on the way. This is a continued bet on distributed commerce, said Satish Kanwar, Shopify s director of product. The expansion follows Shopify s previous work to let its merchants start selling directly on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, in addition to their own sites. But shopping on Pinterest got off to a slow start last year, and e-commerce efforts on Twitter and Facebook are still in early stages.',
'Uber-Ola battle goes from the streets to court: Uber alleges Ola employees are making bookings on its platform by creating fake accounts, seeks Rs50 crore in damages; Ola denies the charges. Uber alleged that Ola is intentionally causing it to lose sales. Uber alleged in court that Ola s employees are making bookings on Uber s platform by creating fake accounts and then cancelling them. This is the equivalent of a shopping site s employee placing orders on a rival site and then returning the goods for no good reason. Uber calculated the total loss incurred by it because of such alleged practices by Ola and sought damages worthRs.496,164,780 from the latter. A total of 93,859 fake accounts have been created by Ola, which have been used to make 4,05,649 false bookings across various cities that were later cancelled, it said. Such cancellations roughly amounted to 8-10% of its total bookings, Uber added. Uber and Ola are fighting for dominance of India s cab business that, according to Ola s largest investor SoftBank Group, may be worth $7 billion by 2020. Justice Vipin Sanghi, who was hearing the matter, issued notices to both ANI Technologies Ltd (Ola) and Serendipity Infolabs (TaxiForSure, acquired by Ola) asking for replies to be filed before the next date. Ola s statement denying all allegations was also recorded. A day after Alexander s interview was published, a senior Ola official said the company s newly launched low-cost offering, Micro, will soon do more daily cab rides than all of Uber India.According to US-based Uber, the company has wiped out Ola s massive lead in a year. In January last year, we were at 5% market share. Now we are right at the edge of 50%. I would say that within the next 30 days we would beat them (Ola). We will surpass them very, very shortly, Alexander had said in an interview on 16 March.',
'Chip-Card Payment System Delays Frustrate Retailers: Avi Kaner, a co-owner of the Morton Williams supermarket chain in New York, has spent about $700,000 to update the payment terminals at his stores. Trouble is, he cannot turn them on. The new terminals can accept credit and debit cards with embedded digital chips, a security feature intended to reduce the number of fraudulent purchases. But before the payment systems can work, they must be certified, a process that Mr. Kaner and many retailers around the country are waiting to happen. In the case of Morton Williams, the holdup has lasted several months. The cost of waiting, retailers say, is piling up. Until recently, banks covered much of the cost of fraudulent purchases. Since Oct. 1, though, merchants that cannot accept chip cards have had to shoulder the cost of fraud, and banks have not been shy about passing along the bill. It s been very frustrating, Mr. Kaner said in an interview last week at his office in the Bronx, the home of his family-owned business. He bought most of the equipment he needed before Oct. 1, he said, and has been waiting months to get it certified. The delay, he said, pointing to a tall pile of paperwork, has cost him thousands of dollars in payments for fraudulent purchases. The long delays are just the latest black eye for the deployment of the new systems. Some consumers have not yet received new cards. Many merchants have not bought the updated equipment. And even when the cards and the terminals have been updated, they have generated confusion and slow lines. Many of the complications were widely predicted, but the certification system has added an unexpected wrinkle and lots of finger-pointing. Banks say that retailers waited till the last minute to update their terminals. Retailers point to financial ties between the banks and the companies that provide certification, saying there is no motivation to move faster.',
'Uber offers hackers \'treasure map\' to find computer flaws: Uber, the high-flying transportation firm, is releasing a technical map of its computer and communications systems and inviting hackers to find weaknesses in exchange for cash bounties. While so-called "bug bounties" are not new, Uber\'s move shows how mainstream companies are increasingly relying on independent computer researchers to help them bolster their systems. It also indicates growing acceptance of the idea that making computer code public can make systems more secure, a philosophy that has long been advocated by the open-source software movement. Uber\'s Treasure Map details the ride-hailing company\'s software infrastructure, identifies what sorts of data might be exposed inadvertently and suggests what types of flaws are the most likely to be found. HackerOne, a San Francisco rival called Bugcrowd and other startups have helped accelerate efforts to tap the independent security community to identify serious programming mistakes before criminals or spies do. They can serve as intermediaries between researchers and companies, and sometimes vet their findings. A decade ago, hackers pointing out problems feared arrest but they can now earn modest sums from platforms like HackerOne. Firms such as Uber, looking to bolster their defenses, don t pay as much as criminals and military contractors who are looking for tools to carry out offensive attacks, but they offer options to those who would prefer to act as "white hats." Bugcrowd Chief Executive Officer Casey Ellis said he has seen a surge in corporate clients asking for private bounty programs that are open to selected researchers. That increases the amount of trust you are giving to the researchers, Ellis said. We run trusted programs where people get prerelease versions of Internet of Things devices or access to source code.',
'Domo takes on Slack with $130 million at $2 billion+ valuation: Utah-based Domo has been a force in the enterprise space for a few years with its data management platforms, but the team is poised for growth with an additional $130 million in Series D funding from existing and new investors, including BlackRock, Credit Suisse and others. These $130 million are an addition to Domo s previously announced $200 million Series D round. The company says it is now valued at $2 billion. We didn t need the money, Domo founder and CEO Josh James said of the funding round. He called it a nice buffer, but insists that the team didn t need the cash and plans to go public within the year. Domo also today launched its app store, a mix of about 1,000 free and freemium apps, which can be customized for any company. The company is also introducing a free messaging service with threaded conversations, which James refers to as a Slack competitor. With more than 1,000 customers, including eBay and MasterCard, James said the team has achieved $100 million in bookings so far and that revenue is doubling. Domo has 800 employees and may hire another 500 in 2016. James previously founded web analytics platform Omniture, taking it public and eventually selling it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. The serial entrepreneur thinks he has what it takes to build something even bigger.',
'Apple s Modest Product Upgrades Take Back Seat to Worries on iPhone Encryption: Apple held one of its regular product showcases on Monday, but this time the products did not take center stage. Before the Silicon Valley giant unveiled modest upgrades to its device lineup, Timothy D. Cook, Apple s chief executive, defended the company s stance in its fight with the federal government over the encryption on iPhones. The case had been expected to head to a court hearing on Tuesday, but the Justice Department abruptly moved on Monday to cancel the hearing, saying it might not need Apple s help to break into the phone used by a gunman in last year s San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting. In a news conference at Apple s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, Mr. Cook stressed that the company would stand fast. We need to decide as a nation how much power the government should have over our data and over our privacy, Mr. Cook said. This is an issue that impacts all of us, and we will not shrink from this responsibility. ',
'A Smaller iPhone, Cheaper iPad and Watch at Tepid Product Event By Apple: Apple introduced a smaller iPhone, a smaller iPad Pro and new bands for the Apple Watch. The company introduced smaller versions of its flagship iPhone and iPaddevices, hoping to eke out more sales growth by filling gaps in its product lineup. The new devices, the iPhone SE and a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, represent a return to the form factors that prevailed before Apple supersized its smartphones in 2014 and added the large, business-oriented iPad Pro last year. So Apple upgraded the components of its new four-inch phone to largely match the speed and features of its flagship iPhone 6s, but at a lower price, starting at $399. The new 9.7-inch iPad Pro brings some of the features of last year s 12.9-inch iPad Pro, including a stylus, a keyboard and four speakers, to a tablet the size of the consumer-oriented 9.7-inch iPad Air 2. The new Pro will start at $599, and Apple also cut the price of the Air 2 by $100 to start at $399. Apple also reduced the price of the Apple Watch by $100, to $299, and introduced new woven nylon wristbands for the device. More than one-third of Watch owners have more than one band, Mr. Cook said. Analysts say sales have been modest for the watch, which works as a companion to the iPhone. The price cut might encourage more people to give it a try. But Apple also acknowledges that the smartwatch category is in its infancy and it may take several more generations of the device before it really catches on.',
'Apple\'s new iPhone faces challenge measuring up in China, India: Apple\'s new iPhone SE has first-rate features and a relatively low price tag, but its prospects in key markets like China and India may be limited by its diminutive size. At the product launch in Cupertino, California on Monday, Apple vice president of iPhone Product Marketing Greg Joswiak singled out China as a target market, saying four-inch displays like that on the iPhone SE were still popular with first-time smartphone buyers. Chinese buyers tend to start off with a phone with a 4-inch screen, just like the iPhone SE, he argued. China, Apple\'s second-biggest market, and India, one of the fastest-growing major markets in the world, are both seen as key for Apple, which expects overall iPhone sales to contract. The iPhone SE is seen as particularly important for India, where Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, expects the smartphones market to double to 200 million units in the next two years. But in India and China, smartphones are often the main connection to the digital world, and a big screen is highly valued, analysts said. "(In India) the majority of the low-end, $100 phones have a five-inch display. The key reason being smartphone users are becoming more mature are preferring bigger screen size as many of them don\'t own a tablet or laptop," said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research based in Mumbai.Only 10 percent of smartphones sold in India at the end of December had a four-inch screen, according to Counterpoint, and Apple accounted for only two percent of overall smartphone shipments in India last year.',
'Andy Grove, Valley Veteran Who Founded Intel, Dies at 79: Andy Grove, who escaped the ruins of postwar Europe to become one of the architects of Silicon Valley s growth into the world s center of technology creation, died Monday. He was 79. The Hungarian-born refugee was one of the founders of Santa Clara, California-based Intel, playing a key role in building the company from a startup in the 1960s to the world s largest semiconductor maker, a title it still holds. Grove, who literally wrote the book on how to foresee and overcome a corporate crisis with Only the Paranoid Survive, also broke new ground by making the component maker a household name central to the worldwide adoption of the personal computer. Arriving in the U.S. with less than $20 in his pocket, Grove was taken in by relatives in New York. He studied chemical engineering at City College and graduated at the top of his class, teaching himself English along the way.He moved to the West Coast to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1963. After graduating, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, home to a future group of semiconductor industry leaders who would give Silicon Valley its name. In 1968, he followed Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce out the door as Intel s first hire. For the founders of Intel, Grove was the perfect fit. Moore and Noyce, both inventors in their own right, were opposite personalities: one studious and low-key, the other a born salesman. In the middle was Grove, a writer of scientific textbooks who brought a fear of failure to the laid-back culture of Silicon Valley in the early 1970s. As a detail-obsessed taskmaster, he forced Intel workers, including Moore, to sign in if they arrived at work after 8 a.m. Always seeking to pass along the benefits of his experiences, Grove acted as a mentor to many of Silicon Valley s elite -- from Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg.',
"A beginner s guide to finally buying a virtual reality headset: if you are interested in being an early adopter, here's a quick guide of the basics, plus a little input from my experiences with these products. Sony Playstation VR (PS VR) Buy if: You have a PlayStation already, or are looking to make a slightly smaller investment. Oculus Rift: After a long wait, Oculus opened preorders for the Rift headset, the first of which are expected to arrive at the end of March. The Rift is due to hit store shelves in April. Buy if: You want a stellar experience over everything else. Oculus was the first really big name to come out of the VR space and has probably done the most to minimize motion sickness. Samsung Gear VR: Powered by Oculus's technology and Samsung's smartphones, the Gear VR was first released in 2015 and is getting a renewed PR push with the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. Buy if: You're really watching your budget and are happy with some smaller-scale experiences. HTC Vive: The product of a partnership between Taiwanese tech giant HTC and the video game company Valve, the HTC Vive is due to ship its first orders in April. Buy if: You really want an early version of a Star Trek-style Holodeck and have the room to make one.",
'Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source: Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet. Earlier on Friday, Germany\'s Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality. Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don\'t want to end up like Nokia\'s handset business, which was once hugely profitable...then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber. A key hurdle to driverless cars has been the question of liability in the event of an accident. Most countries are signatories to the 1968 United Nations Convention on Road Traffic which stipulates that a person, rather than a computer, must be in control of a vehicle. In February this year, U.S. vehicle safety regulators softened the rules to allow driverless cars, by saying an artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.',
'How real businesses are using machine learning: There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I ve heard that old joke Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it about 20 times in the past week alone.But from where I sit, running a company that enables a huge number of real-world machine-learning projects, it s clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. So where is it happening Here are a few behind-the-scenes applications that make life better every day. Making user-generated content valuable: The average piece of user-generated content (UGC) is awful. It s actually way worse than you think. It can be rife with misspellings, vulgarity or flat-out wrong information. But by identifying the best and worst UGC, machine-learning models can filter out the bad and bubble up the good without needing a real person to tag each piece of content. Pinterest uses machine learning to show you more interesting content. Yelp uses machine learning to sort through user-uploaded photos. NextDoor uses machine learning to sort through content on their message boards. Disqus uses machine learning to weed out spammy comments. Finding products faster: Successful e-commerce startups from Lyst to Trunk Archive employ machine learning to show high-quality content to their users. Other startups, like Rich Relevance and Edgecase, employ machine-learning strategies to give their commerce customers the benefits of machine learning when their users are browsing for products. Engaging with customers: You may have noticed contact us forms getting leaner in recent years. That s another place where machine learning has helped streamline business processes. Instead of having users self-select an issue and fill out endless form fields, machine learning can look at the substance of a request and route it to the right place. Understanding customer behavior: Machine learning also excels at sentiment analysis. And while public opinion can sometimes seem squishy to non-marketing folks, it actually drives a lot of big decisions. For example, say a movie studio puts out a trailer for a summer blockbuster. They can monitor social chatter to see what s resonating with their target audience, then tweak their ads immediately to surface what people are actually responding to - that puts people in theaters.',
'Why unicorns falter: In early February 2016, a study of financing deals reported by The Wall Street Journal found that investors are increasingly protecting themselves from IPOs that don t perform as expected. This fallout is a continuation of the demise of the so-called unicorn, a tech startup with a pre-IPO valuation of over one billion dollars. As these companies secure late-stage funding before their public market exit, smart private investors are setting terms that ensure they don t lose a dime if the IPO falls short of expectations. This comes at a great cost to the startup if the exit doesn t deliver, as was the case for many of the IPOs of 2015. The unicorn investment cycle has been consuming the growth ramp of an IPO-bound company. Unlike previous eras when a public exit occurred earlier in the company s growth, leaving the best days ahead of the company, the fastest growth for an IPO-bound startup now happens in the last funding rounds before an IPO. This leaves a 20-30 percent growth rate post-IPO, which is pretty good for a company at $100-$200 million/year revenue, but bad for anyone looking for greater than 2X ROI from an IPO investment. Addressing these issues requires a little course correction as companies work toward an IPO. To ensure ample room for future growth, a startup should be careful not to push its market cap too high by taking more funding rounds than needed during the growth-stage period before IPO. This can be a challenge because funding often generates media interest and credibility, which are certainly not things a young company wants to leave on the table. However, leaving a portion of its growth for the IPO will ensure that the company has enough runway to continue to grow and deliver for its public market investors, just as the company has done for its VCs. Otherwise, you create yet another unicorn where the late-stage investors garner all the potential gains, and even force guarantees on returns. This is bad for new investors in the open market, and worse for the employees of the company who only receive poor post-lockup stock performance as compensation for years of hard work and sacrifices.',
'Facebook\'s Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive: Facebook\'s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met China\'s propaganda tsar Liu Yunshan in Beijing on Saturday as part of a charm offensive in one of the few markets where the social network cannot be accessed. The rare meeting, reported by China\'s state news agency Xinhua, suggests warming relations between Facebook and the Chinese government, even as Beijing steps up censorship of and control over the Internet. Liu, who sits on the Communist Party\'s Politburo Standing Committee which is the apex of power in China, praised Facebook\'s technology and management methods, Xinhua said. Zuckerberg was in Beijing for the China Development Forum, a government-sponsored conference bringing together top business executives and the country\'s ruling elite. China "hopes (Facebook) can strengthen exchanges, share experiences and improve mutual understanding with China\'s Internet companies", Xinhua quoted Liu as telling Zuckerberg. On Friday, Zuckerberg posted an image of himself running through smog in Beijing\'s Tiananmen Square, past the portrait of the late Chairman Mao Zedong hanging over the Forbidden City. The 31-year-old has achieved celebrity status in China, one of the few markets where Facebook and other foreign Internet platforms, including Alphabet Inc\'s Google services and Twitter Inc, are not available due to tight government controls. He has long sought to improve his company\'s relationship with the Chinese authorities, and now sits on the advisory board of the School of Economics and Management at China\'s elite Tsinghua University.',
'Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company s plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn t respond to requests for comment. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. The deals were spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division, and brought about 300 robotics engineers into Google. Rubin left the company in October 2014. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. At the heart of Replicant s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term. Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent e-mails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them. The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, who was temporarily in charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years."',
'Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services: Alibaba has formally thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring after the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its own VR research lab, dubbed GnomeMagic Lab. The company invested in red hot augmented reality company Magic Leap earlier this year, in a deal that put Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai on the board, and it has tinkered with 360 degree panoramic video for Youku Tudou the Chinese video site it invested in and is in the process of acquiring for $3.5 billion but this is its official entry into the space. Alibaba, which claims 400 million users across its services, said that GnomeMagic Lab will work with its shopping businesses with a view to integrating VR into the shopping experience while exploring other applications, such as video with Youku Tudou and entertainment via Alibaba Pictures. In a press announcement, former Facebook engineer Zhao Haiping, who is on the Alibaba s GnomeMagic Lab team, said VR could enable customers to shop virtually on New York s Fifth Avenue from the comfort of their own home. On a more practical level, Alibaba wants to help merchants use VR to sell on its sites, it said it has already created VR visuals for hundreds of products. That s the plan for where Alibaba believes that VR is going, or could go, in the longer term. For now, the company is setting up a store dedicated to VR hardware to help companies tap into its vast audience.VR is the hot topic of the moment, and it s more a case of which tech companies aren t getting into it. Samsung has already shipped a headset. Facebook bought Occulus, which is about to launch its Rift VR and an initial 30 games. HTC s is arriving imminently and Sony s effort is also on its way. On the content side, Facebook, YouTube and today even British broadcaster Sky are opening themselves up to the virtual future.',
"Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won t give them a college degree: One of the biggest booms in the job market right now: an influx of coders graduating from three- to six-month coding crunch programs in lieu of traditional four-year Computer Science degree programs. These for-profit programs, non-accredited and operating without much regulation, have been cropping up in response to a swelling market demand for STEM workers. They vary in quality, but most bootcamps promise steady, high-paying work upon graduation, prompting aspiring coders to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 of personal money to enroll. Now, colleges and universities are teaming up with these private schools, or rolling out their own bootcamp-style programs to offer accelerated coding workshops to their students. Northeastern, UPenn, and Rutgers have announced in-house bootcamps in the couple of months, while Lynn University and Concordia University have paired with programs like General Assembly and The Software Craftsmanship Guild. It s a response to thetremendous growth in bootcamp enrollment, which increased by 138 percent from 2014 to 2015, compared to more modest growth in traditional Computer Science degrees (14 percent from 2013 to 2014). The demand is clear. But should universities be borrowing bootcamp tactics O Neill, who is Principal Architect at Monetate, agrees. He s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: full stack developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car, he said. A typical four-year CS degree will require students to study theoretical principles of programming on top of straight coding skills. Bootcamps, on the other hand, focus on programming alone, with an emphasis on in-demand languages in popular sectors like app development, functioning more like vocational school. But Anupam Joshi sees the immediate benefits of these programs. He s Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which doesn t currently have plans to incorporate bootcamp style programs into its CS department (though the university does have a training center that offers vocational services, including coding). But he appreciates the bootcamps' quick adaptability to industry fads and the wider scope of needs they fill amidst the student body. Bootcamps are good for someone who wants to get an entry level job, he said of the promotion of coding over theory. It s like every other trade. ",
"Blackstone nears $940 million deal to buy HP Enterprise stake in India's MphasiS: sources Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is nearing a deal to acquire Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) (HPE.N) controlling stake worth about $940 million in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS Ltd (MBFL.NS), according to three sources directly involved in the deal. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and the U.S.-based parent had been looking to exit from the Indian venture to shore up its capital. Bids for buying the MphasiS stake were submitted earlier this month and the U.S. private equity firm has emerged as the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter, the sources said. Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS' stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company's total market value is about $1.6 billion.",
"Flipkart and Amazon may have explored sale talks, say sources: Flipkart reportedly considered selling itself to Amazon, upending the notion that India s largest online retailer would go full distance as an independent Internet giant. half-a-dozen sources told ET of the discussions between Flipkart and Amazon, and emphasised there is no reason to believe that a deal will be struck or that talks are still ongoing between the two. The talks were held until as recently as the last quarter of 2015, one of the sources said. ET was not able to determine the exact timeline of these talks or if they were initiated by one of Flipkart's investors. Flipkart itself denied that it is up for sale, or that it is in the market for capital. Three of the sources, who are top-level executives in venture capital and private equity firms, said Amazon made a preliminary offer of up to $8 billion to acquire Flipkart, nearly half of its previous stated valuation of $15.2 billion. A mutual fund managed by Morgan Stanley slashed the value of its Flipkart shares by 27% last month to about $11 billion, increasing speculation that new investors will back the company at a lower valuation. Flipkart-Amazon talks went cold after the offer was perceived to be too low, but the sources said the situation can change given Alibaba's interest in Flipkart.",
'What AlphaGo s sly move says about machine creativity: AlphaGo, the computer system Google engineers trained to master the ancient game of Go, needed only one move to make it abundantly clear that it has left humans in its dust. The move came Thursday, in the second game of AlphaGo s 4-1 landmark victory over South Korean Lee Sedol, one of the world s best Go players. About an hour into the match, AlphaGo placed one of its stones in a nontraditional spot on the board that surprised those watching. I don t really know if it s a good or bad move, said Michael Redmond, a commentator on a live English broadcast. It s a very strange move. Redmond, one of the Western world s best Go players, could only crack a smile. I thought it was a mistake, his broadcast partner, Chris Garlock, said with a laugh. Sedol, however, was more serious. He stared at the board, then got up from the table and left the room. As Sedol returned after a few minutes and pondered his next move, it became clear that AlphaGo s move was no mistake. It might be strange, but it definitely wasn t bad. It was brilliant. Sedol would take almost 16 minutes to make his next move. He would never recover, losing the match. Almost no human pro would ve thought of it, I think, Redmond said after the match. Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm, saw a parallel between AlphaGo s style and how chess prodigy Bobby Fischer was feared because his early moves were considered too foolish to even be made. But as Fischer s matches wore on, the ill-advised moves suddenly looked genius. If that s not creative, then what is Domingos asked. He sees machines delivering creative results, and they re just getting started. Domingos believes a computer eventually will write a best-selling book. And he thinks there s a 50-50 chance that a computer writes a hit pop song in the next decade, given advances in artificial intelligence techniques and computing power.Domingos said such advances shouldn t come as a surprise, as machines increasingly demonstrate that creativity isn t magical and distinctly human.',
'Apple looks to Google s Cloud Platform as it diversifies its infrastructure: Rumors are flying today that Apple is moving part of its cloud business from AWS to Google s Cloud Platform. We did some asking around and yes, it does appear that Apple has made some moves to diversify its iCloud storage, tapping Google for some of that business. This is another huge win for Google and a at the very least perceived loss of ground for AWS, which has watched as Dropbox moved large parts of its US storage business in-house and Spotify moved at least part of its business to Google, too. If you re keeping score, it s been a good month for Google and especially the new head of its cloud business Diane Greene. High profile clients like Spotify and Apple would certainly make it more attractive to other enterprise customers. Google s Cloud Platform may have the power of Google s data center technology behind it, but that hasn t yet helped the company in competing against AWS and Microsoft s Azure platform. AWS has the advantage of an early start and Azure profits from Microsoft s existing sales channels and it s focus on hybrid cloud technologies. And even with the power of Microsoft behind it, though, Azure remains a distant second in the cloud business. One industry insider who chose not to be identified, however, told TechCrunch that Apple was definitely exploring its options around public cloud vendors, looking at Microsoft Azure and Google, but it had not made any firm decisions yet. It s worth noting that Apple already uses Azure (and AWS) for iCloud services and media serving. Whether Apple will continue moving off of AWS and onto other platforms is anyone s guess. But at the moment it appears that this is a matter of diversifying its portfolio of cloud suppliers. Another wrinkle here is that Apple is currently expanding its data center in Prineville, Oregon, and is also expected to invest heavily in new data centers in both the U.S. and Europe. If that s the case, moving from AWS to Google, then Google to Prineville wouldn t seem to make sense. Why not just wait until the data center construction is complete If Apple is indeed simply looking to diversify its infrastructure, though, then adding Google (on top of Azure, AWS and its own data centers) would be a fairly logical move. It s also possible that Apple is only looking at some very specific services on the Google cloud, with theBigQuery data analytics platform being the prime suspect here.',
'Morgan Stanley Downgrades LinkedIn, Slashes Price Target by 34 Percent: Why we were wrong" isn\'t a phrase one might want to include when sending out a note to clients, but it\'s what Morgan Stanley analysts were forced to deploy on Wednesday morning as they downgraded LinkedIn Corp. The shift from "overweight\' to "equalweight," is the latest in a series of cuts for LinkedIn after it reported lackluster earnings last month that sent shares tumbling by more than 40 percent the following day. "With its current product offering, LinkedIn isn\'t likely to be as big of a platform as we previously thought," the team, led by Brian Nowak, said. "We are reducing our price target to $125 [per] share (from $190) as well, driven by our lower long-term cash flow forecasts and increased execution uncertainty." Two key factors that had kept Morgan Stanley bullish are now abating. The first was growth in LinkedIn\'s Talent Solutions segment, which includes such things as subscription revenue. Nowak and his team now believe that growth has slowed both domestically and internationally for this segment and that the increased focus on small- and medium-sized businesses betokens that LinkedIn is hitting a peak when it comes to larger companies. The second was the monetization potential in new segments, known as Lynda and Sales Navigator. Recent events have caused the team to grow skeptical.',
'Oracle Increases Buyback Program by $10 Billion: Oracle reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit and increased its stock buyback program by $10 billion. Oracle, like other established tech companies, is moving its business to the cloud by providing services remotely through data centers versus selling installed software. Total cloud revenue rose 39.5 percent to $735 million, accounting for about 8 percent of Oracle s total revenue. Net income fell to $2.14 billion, or 50 cents a share, in the third quarter, from $2.50 billion, or 56 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company reported a profit of 64 cents a share. Revenue fell 3.4 percent to $9.01 billion. Shares rose more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.',
'Beyond Swipe Right: The Pickup Line Gets a Makeover: Thanks to the popular dating app Tinder, a one-size-fits-all gesture of approval, swipe right, has in theory replaced awkward fumbles at an opening conversational gambit. But in fact, the migration of courtship online has resulted in a refinement of pickup lines far beyond 70s singles-bar relics like Hey baby, what s your sign and Are those space pants Because your butt is out of this world. The simple Hi and its variations are the surest ways to end a conversation; they re too generic and, lately, indistinguishable from the way bots initiate contact. Only those with the most flattering profile pictures can get away with generic questions like How was your weekend A more common approach in Tinder-land is to quickly skim the other person s profile and find something to comment on a detail from a photo, or a line of profile text. Statements tend to work better than questions as conversation starters; they re less personal and invite reactions and commentary rather than disclosure. With the help of a friend, Brent Bailey, 24, a programmer in New York, came up with a successful opener to someone who mentioned her life being a bit messy in her profile. I could make your life a whole lot messier, he responded. Mr. Bailey said he was more successful with crowd-sourced pickup lines. As a rule, my friends are way less concerned about my dignity, so they usually come up with something way more interesting than I would, he said. On the dating service Bumble, where women must initiate all conversations, Ms. Smothers decided to try what she called a dumb troll-y gimmick asking every match if he was a feminist. Men loved it, and she got a high response rate she has yet to match.',
'LivingSocial is laying off more than half of its workers: LivingSocial will cut more than half of its workforce, according to anannouncement from the company saying it has completed its "initial phase of turnaround." The move is the latest sign of the decline of "daily deal" sites once thought of as the next big thing for online shopping. The sites typically offered users heavily discounted vouchers at local businesses in exchange for a cut of deal sales. But some business complained that the model wasn\'t actually a good deal for them -- and consumers seemed to tire of the flood of emails sent by the services. The latest job cuts are part of a series of layoffs. The local company cut 400 jobs in 2014 and another 200 in October of last year. Competitor Groupon has also struggled: In September it announced it would lay off 1,100 people -- roughly 10 percent of its workforce -- and close operations in six countries. LivingSocial plans to move away from the voucher business, but hopes to expand "card-linked" discounts, according to the press release. The company is trying out a program called Restaurant Plus in handful of cities that works by letting customers reserve a deal with payment card information on file, but not charging them for it until it\'s actually used.',
"Sony PlayStation VR to launch globally in October, cost $399: Sony Corp announced on Tuesday that its virtual reality headset for PlayStation will launch globally in October for $399, a move that undercuts its biggest competitor by hundreds of dollars. Andrew House, head of Sony's gaming division, made the announcement during a press event at the Video Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where virtual reality gaming counterpart Oculus Rift announced its headset a day earlier. The headset, a visor-style frame with a 5.7 inch (14.5 centimeters) screen, includes 360 degree head tracking, a 100 degree field of vision and latency of 18 milliseconds between the time a user's head moves and the time they see the correct image. At $399,the package is notably less than the $599 price announced Monday by Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus Rift. Oculus will also sell bundles that include an Oculus Ready PC and a Rift for preorder in February starting at $1,499. The company said more than 230 developers are building content for the PlayStation VR device and 50 games are expected to be ready by the launch date. Users can download the Playroom VR at the PlayStation store and play six free games. The company has also teamed up with development company EA Sports and Lucasfilm for a Star Wars Battlefront game that will be released as a PlayStation VR exclusive.",
"Uber Could Give Us a Lesson in Productivity: In Los Angeles, traditional taxi drivers have a passenger in the car for 40.7 percent of the miles they drive. By contrast, Uber drivers have a passenger in the car for 64.2 percent of their miles, or a 58 percent higher capacity utilization rate. In Seattle, the other city surveyed with mileage data, Uber drivers were 41 percent more productive. When measured by time, Uber drivers in Boston, San Francisco and New York on average have a passenger in their car about half the time their smartphone app is turned on. That compares to a range of 32 percent of the shift for taxi drivers in Boston to 49.5 percent for cabbies in New York. The service's use of internet-based mobile technology to connect passengers and drivers certainly contributes to its efficiency, according to the report. It makes sense: tapping your smartphone screen a few minutes before you need a ride is often easier than waiting on a street corner and hoping an empty cab drives past. Meanwhile Uber allows drivers to set their own shifts, and when combined with their use of so-called surge pricing that increases fares during times of increased ridership, supply and demand are more smoothly matched. Uber drivers are also exempt from regulations that prevent taxi drivers who drop off a passenger in a jurisdiction outside the one that granted their occupational license from picking up another customer in the same location. Given their 38 percent advantage, Uber drivers could charge 28 percent less than traditional taxis and still earn the same amount per hour under certain assumptions, including ignoring fixed costs, according to Cramer and Krueger. That may be one reason investors last year valued the company at $62.5 billion, more than Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., and 80 percent of companies in the S&P 500.",
'Instagram is switching its feed from chronological to best posts first: The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram announced it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Instagram will order posts based on the likelihood you ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. The testing will start out slowly; at least at first all the posts will still be there, just in a different order. But eventually, low-quality posts might be filtered out entirely. The changes mean if you don t check your feed until the next morning but a friend whose photos you usually Like posted something awesome the night before, it could appear at the top of your feed even if it is hours old. This is essentially how Facebook s feed works, and how Twitter recently reconfigured its feed to work. On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Instagram feed will make sure you don t miss great content even if you don t neurotically check it all the time. You ll be able to follow more accounts without worrying about them drowning out your favorites. And it will be easier to keep up with international friends who might normally post while you re asleep. At the same time, remixing the feed will make Instagram less useful as a real-time content feed because the most recent posts won t necessarily be at the top. Users will have to worry about making their posts good enough to be chosen by the algorithm or their posts could be de-prioritized. And brands might lose the reach of a previously reliable marketing channel, the same way they did with Facebook Pages. Filtered feeds tend to score more attention from users, as there are few boring posts that push them to close the app and do something else. And at this point, Instagram is so ingrained in people s lives that they re unlikely to ditch it over this change. But with Instagram and Twitter both moving to algorithmically sorted feeds, getting seen on social media will become more of a competition than ever.',
'LinkedIn s Lynda.com Videos Are Now Free on Some Commercial Flights: Here s a tip for helping your video content stand out online: Make sure people see it when they don t have many other options. That s exactly what LinkedIn is doing to promote Lynda.com, the library of online classes it bought last year for a whopping $1.5 billion. LinkedIn announced Tuesday that it s partnering with Virgin America to offer those classes for free to in-flight passengers. Beginning in April, a handful of classes will be free on all Virgin flights, and the entire Lynda.com library will be free for flights with higher quality Wi-Fi technology. No money is changing hands as part of the partnership, according to a LinkedIn spokesperson, but the potential benefits to LinkedIn are simple enough to understand. You ll still need a Lynda.com account to watch videos, so it may help LinkedIn sign up more users. Plus, the competition for eyeballs on an airplane is usually pretty weak. The chance to learn a new skill or brush up on stress management may seem more appealing than random episodes of Deadliest Catch or Cupcake Wars, especially to business travelers. It s basically a free opportunity to introduce its video library to potential new users in the hope they will like the videos enough to pay for them sometime later down the road. If not, it still doesn t cost LinkedIn anything in the process. It has offered free Lynda.com courses before. But this move does show how serious the company is about generating attention for Lynda.com. It paid a lot of money for the online classroom, and now it s working to make it all back.',
'Uber India Is Working on Offering Ride-Booking on Snapdeal: Uber s India arm is in talks to partner with Indian e-commerce platform Snapdeal, multiple sources told Re/code. If a deal is reached, Snapdeal shoppers in India would be able to hail an Uber from within the newest iteration of Snapdeal s app, these people said. As of March 9, Snapdeal had only released its new app to a select group of its customers, but indicated in a company blog post it would soon roll out to a larger group of users. The newest version of the Snapdeal app already includes integrations with travel booking service Cleartrip, food-delivery service Zomato and bus-booking service Redbus. As Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl told Re/code last April, the company believes it can differentiate from e-commerce competitors Flipkart and Amazon by broadening its focus beyond selling physical retail products. Last year, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge, a recharge service for prepaid phones, and RupeePower, a comparison site for credit cards and loans. What s the delta between retail and consumption Bahl asked rhetorically. It s things like financial services, education, utilities, health care. But today, all everyone is doing is products. ',
'India Opens Market for Solar Battery Makers Such as Tesla: India plans for the first time to include energy storage as a requirement when a solar project is tendered this month, opening what could become a significant new market to battery makers such as Tesla Motors Inc., Samsung SDI Co. and Panasonic Corp. The state-owned Solar Energy Corp. of India, which is responsible for implementing the government s green targets, will ask bidders to include a storage component in 100 megawatts of the 750 megawatts of solar capacity tendered in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, Managing Director Ashvini Kumar said in an interview. The intention of the pilot program is to reduce fluctuations in electricity supply in order to make possible the transfer of clean energy between states. India s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a goal of 175 gigawatts of clean energy by 2022. The Andhra Pradesh project include 15 minutes of storage each for two solar installations. Warehousing power is considered a crucial component of India s green targets. The requirement, if more broadly adopted, has the potential to invigorate the storage market because of India s outsized ambitions for the industry. It would give manufacturers the scale they need to help bring down costs of battery storage that are holding back wider adoption.',
'Wall Street Tours the Tesla Factory and Loves What It Sees: Wall Street analysts have been touring Tesla s massive factory in Fremont, Calif., and they\'re returning with the same conclusion: Elon Musk\'s electric-vehicle company is getting ready for something big. In a sign of this enthusiasm, Robert W. Baird & Co. upgraded its Tesla rating on Monday morning following a factory tour. Last week, Stifel analysts returned from their fourth visit in four years to Tesla s flagship factory in Fremont. In roughly one year since our last visit, wrote analyst James Albertine, the progress witnessed is truly stunning." Tesla shares have jumped 45 percent in the past month as Musk, the chief executive, sought to reassure investors that the company is still on track after the challenging and much-delayed launch of the Model X luxury SUV. Stifel and Credit Suisse both noted Tesla\'s new aluminum stamping press, which Credit Suisse\'s Galves says has 10 to 20 times the output of Tesla\'s older machine. The bodies of the Model S and Model X are both made of aluminum, which costs twice as much as steel but weighs less. Tesla hasn\'t yet disclosed the composition of the Model 3. Keeping the weight down on electric vehicles helps achieve the maximum range on the battery, but maintaining a balance between cost and performance is crucial for a mass-market plug-in car. Tesla has built a new state-of-the-art paint shop that\'s capable of scaling up to 500,000 cars a year. That happens to be Tesla\'s production forecast for 2020, a 10-fold increase from last year\'s sales. If Tesla is to achieve that lofty goal, paint jobs won\'t be a holdup.',
'What New Delhi s free clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system: Rupandeep Kaur, 20 weeks pregnant, arrived at a medical clinic looking fatigued and ready to collapse. After being asked her name and address, she was taken to see a physician who reviewed her medical history, asked several questions, and ordered a series of tests including blood and urine. These tests revealed that her fetus was healthy but Kaur had dangerously low hemoglobin and blood pressure levels. The physician, Alka Choudhry, ordered an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital. All of this, including the medical tests, happened in 15 minutes at the Peeragarhi Relief Camp in New Delhi, India. The entire process was automated from check-in, to retrieval of medical records, to testing and analysis and ambulance dispatch. The hospital also received Kaur s medical records electronically. There was no paperwork filled out, no bills sent to the patient or insurance company, no delay of any kind. Yes, it was all free. The hospital treated Kaur for mineral and protein deficiencies and released her the same day. Had she not received timely treatment, she may have had a miscarriage or lost her life. The technology that made the instant diagnosis possible at Peeragarhi was medical device called the Swasthya Slate. This $600 device, the size of a cake tin, performs 33 common medical tests including blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, urine protein and glucose. And it tests for diseases such as malaria, dengue, hepatitis, HIV, and typhoid. Each test only takes a minute or two and the device uploads its data to a cloud-based medical-record management system that can be accessed by the patient. The Swasthya Slate was developed by Kanav Kahol, who was a biomedical engineer and researcher at Arizona State University s department of biomedical informatics until he became frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the cost of diagnostic testing. He worried that billions of people were getting no medical care or substandard care because of the medical industry s motivation in keeping prices high. In 2011, he returned home to New Delhi to develop a solution. By Jan. 2013, Kahol had built the Swasthya Slate and persuaded the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Northern India, to allow its use in six underserved districts with a population of 2.1 million people. The device is now in use at 498 clinics there. Focusing on reproductive maternal and child health, the system has been used to provide antenatal care to more than 22,000 mothers. Of these, 277 mothers were diagnosed as high risk and provided timely care. Mothers are getting care in their villages now instead of having to travel to clinics in cities. A newer version of the Slate, called HealthCube, was tested last month by nine teams of physicians and technology, operations, and marketing experts at Peru s leading hospital, Clinica Internacional. They tested its accuracy against the western equipment that they use, its durability in emergency room and clinical settings, the ability of minimally trained clinicians to use it in rural settings, and its acceptability to patients. Clinica s general manager, Alvaro Chavez Tori, told me in an email that the tests were highly successful and acceptance of the technology was amazingly high. He sees this technology as a way of helping the millions of people in Peru and Latin America who lack access to quality diagnostics.',
'Google Will Let Mobile Games Stream in Search So That Mobile Game Makers Will Buy Search Ads: Google will let you try out a mobile game right inside the search results page, before downloading it. And Google will let game developers pay for the privilege. It s part of Google s ongoing effort to squeeze more ad revenue from mobile and its business cornerstone, search. For developers, the trick offers a new avenue paid search for recruiting new users. Most money for gamers is made inside the app, so some developers may be reluctant to move away from direct downloads. But, in theory, the streaming method lets them grab devoted game players who have tried out the game, like it, and will stick around and buy stuff therein. For Google, it s another way to nab the ample flow of app promotional dollars a flow that Facebook has largely cornered. Over the past year, Google has rolled out a stream of mobile app advertising tools as the company has prioritized ways to fortify its central business. It added ads to the Play store so developers could pay to get noticed there. In November, Google started testing app streaming in organic search results with a handful of apps; it brought the feature to ads within apps a month later. Now, developers can promote their apps with streaming inside search, too. Google s share of app advertising is rising steadily, although Facebook is still out in front, according to industry sources.',
'Infibeam turns profitable; to open first IPO by an Indian e-com venture on March 21: The parent of horizontal e-commerce platform Infibeam and e-commerce enabler BuildaBazaar, is to hit the market with its initial public offer (IPO) on March 21. This would make it the first among peers, including those several times bigger, to go public. Infibeam had received a green signal from securities market regulator SEBI for its initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to Rs 450 crore last October. Founded in 2010 by a former Amazon executive, Vishal Mehta, Infibeam would also become one of the youngest firms to list on a national bourse. Having restricted itself from raising private capital, unlike its peers, it did not get too aggressive in customer acquisition to drive the B2C business and has been especially pushing the B2B e-commerce enabler platform BuildaBazaar. Infibeam would be the first pure-play e-commerce firm in the country to float an IPO in India and would test the general investors appetite for the sector. E-commerce in India has absorbed billions of dollars over the past four years, much of it from foreign private equity and venture capital firms. Infibeam happens to be an exception as it has not approached any major private investor for funds till now. It is promoted by a Gujarat-based affluent family whose business interest straddles a dealership for Toyota cars. Interestingly, Infibeam made profit in the first six months of the current financial year. It reported net revenues of Rs 171.27 crore for the April-September 2015 period with EBITDA of close to Rs 15 crore and net profit (adjusted for prior period items) of Rs 6.5 crore. It had clocked net loss of just under Rs 10 crore for 2014-15. As of December 31, 2015, it had 48,724 registered merchants on the BuildaBazaar platform. In Infibeam.com e-retail site, in addition to direct sales procured from suppliers, it had more than 5,000 registered merchants, and claimed to have more than 7.8 million active users (based on last login in the immediately preceding 12 months). To its credit, it is one of the rare horizontal e-commerce platforms to have survived without large external funding. Others like IndiaPlaza shut down as they failed to get follow-on funding, and as a consequence, investors funding got concentrated to the troika of Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues. Global e-commerce behemoth Amazon itself has built a big presence in India and is among the top three ventures in the country. Infibeam s only external equity funding has come from media house Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, which bet around Rs 33.3 crore through the ad-for-equity investment platform Brand Equity Treaties Ltd (BETL). BETL owns a 1.8 per cent stake in the firm. BETL also pitched in with Rs 2 crore of non-convertible debentures, which are outstanding.',
'Modeled After Ants, Team of Just Six Tiny Robots Can Move 2-Ton Car: Archimedes pointed out that with a lever he could move the world. He most likely would have been surprised to learn that a team of six microrobots, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, could pull a car weighing 3,900 pounds. A group of researchers at the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory at Stanford University has been exploring the limits of friction in the design of tiny robots that have the ability to pull thousands of times their weight, wander like gecko lizards on vertical surfaces or mimic bats. Now they have pushed biomimicry in a new direction. They have taken their inspiration from tiny ants that work as teams to move massive objects. In this case, they are not just taking ideas from nature the movie Big Hero 6 made a great deal of what swarms of microrobots could do, including tossing cars. The researchers approach is counterintuitive. Rather than striking powerful blows like a football player making a tackle or a jackhammer, they have focused on synchronizing the smooth application of very tiny forces. The microrobots work in concert, if slowly. The researchers observed that the ants get great cooperative force by each using three of their six legs simultaneously. Their new demonstration is the functional equivalent of a team of six humans moving a weight equivalent to that of an Eiffel Tower and three Statues of Liberty, Mr. Christensen said. The car is the one he uses for commuting to campus. Part of the magic is the use of a special adhesive that was inspired by gecko toes. ',
'India\'s Micromax, once a rising star, struggles: A year ago, Micromax vaulted past Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to become India\'s leading smartphone brand. Today, its market share has nearly halved, several top executives have resigned, and the company is looking for growth outside India. In Micromax\'s slide to second place is a tale of the promise and peril of India\'s booming but hyper-competitive smartphone industry. India is the world\'s fastest-growing smartphone market. Shipments of smartphones jumped 29 percent to 103 million units last year. Rapid growth has helped nurture a crop of local brands, led by Micromax, that outsourced production to Chinese manufacturers. Now, as Samsung rolls out more affordable phones, the same Chinese factories are entering the Indian market with their own brands, depressing prices and forcing Indian mobile makers to rethink their strategies. "What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing the same to Indian brands now, and over the next year we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers," said Tarun Pathak, analyst at Counterpoint Research in New Delhi. Micromax, which was founded in New Delhi by four partners in 2000 but only began selling mobile phones in 2008, built its market share by working with Chinese manufacturers such as Coolpad, Gionee and Oppo to offer affordable phones quickly. In 2015, it launched more than 40 new models. In 2014, the founders brought in outside managers to lead the company at a time when Micromax was challenging Samsung to become the largest mobile phone maker in India. But tensions arose soon after between founders and the newly hired executives, six former executives told Reuters. These conflicts undermined Micromax\'s attempts to raise funds for expansion, say former executives. Last May, Alibaba walked away from a mooted $1.2 billion purchase of a 20 percent stake, citing a lack of clarity on growth plans, according to one executive involved in the discussion. Former executives said the lack of fresh funding undermined a proposal by the new executives to move Micromax\'s research and design operations, which had previously been outsourced, in-house. The move was intended to help Micromax differentiate itself from generic Android clones. "We hired about 80-90 people in Bangalore to do in-house software and design, but with no money from the investors and little interest from the founders, that team fizzled away and that office has been partially shut down now," said a former executive. After Alibaba walked away, Micromax struggled to attract other investors who would have been key to Micromax\'s plan to invest in software R&D and hardware design. The company was forced to scale down the in-house R&D project, a top executive involved in the fundraising plan said. Meanwhile, Chinese handset makers, including Coolpad and Oppo, to which Micromax outsources its manufacturing, were sharpening their focus on India. Samsung, too, began to introduce more affordable models there. In 2015, Chinese brands doubled their market share to 18 percent, according to Counterpoint Research, taking away business from Indian budget phone makers such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. Indian brands\' market share fell from 48 to 43 percent last year.',
'How a simple typo helped stop a $1 billion digital bank heist: It was just a few letters off: Someone misspelled "foundation" as "fandation" on an online payment transfer request. But that simple typo helped stop hackers from getting away with a nearly $1 billion digital heist last month, Reuters reports. Hackers broke into the Bangladeshi central bank\'s computer systems, according to anonymous officials at the financial institution cited by Reuters, stealing the credentials needed to authorize payment transfers. The attackers used the stolen information to ask the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to make massive money transfers -- nearly three dozen of them -- from the Bangladeshi bank\'s account with the Fed to accounts at other financial institutions overseas. Four transfers to accounts in the Philippines, totaling abut $80 million, worked. But then a fifth request, for $20 million to be sent to an apparently fictitious Sri Lankan nonprofit, was flagged as suspicious by a routing bank due to the "fandation" error. The Bangladesh central bank was able to stop that transaction after the routing bank asked for confirmation. "The Sri Lankan bank did not disburse it immediately, and we could recover the full amount," the central bank told the Financial Times. The requests waiting to be processed -- amounting to a total of between $850 million and $870 million, according to an unnamed official cited by Reuters -- were also halted. So if it weren\'t for that typo, the attackers may have escaped with an even bigger payday. Bangladesh\'s finance minister has blamed the incident on the Federal Reserve and said his government will "file a case in the international court against" the financial institution, according to local outlet the Dhaka Tribune. A New York Fed spokesperson denied the accusation, telling The Washington Post in a statement that "there is no evidence of any attempt to penetrate Federal Reserve systems in connection with the payments in question" or that the institution\'s systems were compromised. According to the spokesperson, the payment instructions were "fully authenticated" using standard methods.',
'Top Start-Up Investors Are Betting on Growth, Not Waiting for It: For the last few years, the spotlight in start-up investing has largely shone on those who poured money into a company when it was already well along on a growth path. It turns out that spotlight may have been misdirected. While some investors are throwing giant sums into more mature start-ups like Uber and Airbnb at soaring valuations, it is the venture capitalists who identify a promising company at its infancy and bet on its growth who often come out on top. Known as early-stage investors, they dominate a list of the top 20 venture capitalists worldwide that was recently created by the research firm CB Insights. About three-quarters of the top 20 are investors who put money into start-ups during their early rounds of financing. Only a handful on the list are focused on investing at a later stage in a company s life. Early-stage investments have accounted for the lion s share of the venture industry s gains since 1994, according to Cambridge Associates, a research firm that studied the quarterly financial reports of dozens of venture firms. Since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the industry s returns have been generated by early-stage investments in any given year. But the value of investing in a company when it is still nascent has been somewhat obscured in recent years as hordes of nontraditional start-up investors including mutual funds, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds have piled into private tech companies, often when those start-ups are already proven growth stories. When Uber raised around $2.1 billion in December, for example, one of its investors was Tiger Global Management, a New York investment firm with a hedge fund component. Rebecca Lynn, a managing director and co-founder of Canvas Ventures who is on the CB Insights list, said early-stage investments generally pay off more because investors can get more of an ownership stake and you re also part of the team. Ms. Lynn, who invested early in the alternative lending platform Lending Club, which went public in 2014, added that later-stage investing is more like a stock bet. You re along for the ride. ',
'Instacart Gets Red Bull and Doritos to Pay Your Delivery Fees: Online shoppers hate paying delivery fees. So Instacart Inc. is getting Pepsi to foot the bill. The grocery delivery startup is working with General Mills Inc., Nestl SA, PepsiCo Inc., Unilever NV, and other consumer goods makers to cover the cost of delivery or provide other discounts when customers buy their products. In addition to the coupons, the companies pay Instacart to advertise on its website. Since introducing the program about six months ago, it now accounts for 15 percent of Instacart s revenue, said Apoorva Mehta, the company s chief executive officer. Shoppers can find discounts when filling up their carts with brands such as Degree, Doritos, DiGiorno, H agen-Dazs, Quaker Oats, and Stella Artois. Instacart ads promise free delivery if you spend $10 on Red Bull, or consumers can get 75 cents off any Dove soap. Mehta compares the ads to those offered on the side of Google search results. It s like AdWords for groceries, he said. In its quest to build a profitable business, Instacart is searching for new sources of revenue that won t turn off shoppers. The company, which was valued at $2 billion by investors last year, had previously made up some of its costs by selling products for more than what the grocery stores charged. Customers complained, and Instacart backtracked. The company recently cut pay for some workers, according to reports this week in Quartz and Re/code. Instacart said it costs much more to deliver an order than the $5.99 it charges shoppers, but customers are unwilling to pay more.',
'TechCrunch Sources: India s Flipkart in talks to raise up to $1b, likely in a down round: After years of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to tap into the burgeoning e-commerce market in India, one of the country s biggest tech companies is facing a markdown in its valuation as it aims to pick up yet more investment. TechCrunch has learned from sources that Flipkart is looking to raise up to $1 billion in funding to grow its business and shore up against competition from local rival Snapdeal and global giant Amazon. The funding is now delayed and should take another 3-4 months. A downround is certain, said a source. According to our sources, one potential investor is Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The company already a backer of rival Snapdeal reportedly met with Flipkart management in Hong Kong to discuss investing at less than $10 billion. Other sources say a round would not be this low, and more likely in the range of $11 billion to $14 billion. Alibaba s alleged interest in Flipkart has been reported previously. Another investor that has been eyeing up a stake in Flipkart is the Fosun Group, sometimes referred to as the Berkshire Hathaway of China. It s not clear what valuation Fosun has discussed with Flipkart.',
'Box Shares Soar as Sales Rise 36 Percent on Shrinking Losses: Shares of cloud storage and collaboration company Box rose by 11 percent in after-hours trading as the company posted fourth quarter results that were better than what analysts expected. Box shares rose $1.38 to $13.90 after posting a per-share loss of 26 cents on revenue of $87 million. Analysts had forecast a loss of 29 cents a share and sales of $81.8 million. The company also finished its fiscal year with revenue of $303 million, up 40 percent year-on-year, and an operating loss of $201 million which ballooned from a $166.6 million operating loss in 2015. The company said Q1 will come in between $88 million and $89 million with a loss of between 23 and 24 cents, both of which were in line with analysts estimates. For the year it expects revenue in the range of $390 million to $394 million, with a loss ranging from 83 to 85 cents. It also said it expects a positive free cash flow from operations a key milestone toward profitability in the fourth quarter.',
'Pre-Roll Ads For Virtual Reality Are Here: Virtual reality is in its early days ask anyone involved in the field and that s usually their chosen term. And as with the genesis of social media, there s a coming mad dash of people eager for ways to cash in. On Facebook, gaming companies figured out they could spend fistfuls advertising mobile games and get paying users in return. A handful of ad veterans who rode that social media wave are now trying to replicate the success on VR. A new startup called Immserv is launching a first-of-a-kind platform that lets developers creating VR content promote that content with ads. Their product is essentially a YouTube pre-roll ad, just inside VR devices. Immserv is starting with Google s Cardboard and Samsung s Gear VR. Say you re playing a game in your virtual headpiece (maybe this Firefly Rescue one, designed by Immserv partner Archiact Interactive). A video ad pops up at the onset or in the middle of the game, promoting another game; users are invited to download that app by using the head tracking feature in the VR device. The ads are sold on a cost-per-view basis ranging from three to five cents, said Shah. The company has been testing the ads since December and is going live with at least a dozen apps, launching in advance of the Game Developers Conference next week. Ads in VR are tricky, partly because of formatting challenges, but more critically because they risk upsetting users coming to the incipient form. You can absolutely turn off customers if you re not careful, said Eric Hine, an executive producer for Archiact Interactive. But he stressed that Immserv ads in his games won t, because they play like thrilling trailers and only run if consumers opt in. The launch also comes at the onset of a pivotal year for VR, as big tech companies hope that consumer enthusiasm for the field approaches the fervor for it inside the big tech companies. Neither Google nor Facebook, massive digital ad sellers, have announced plans to bring ads to their VR efforts. Google is testing in-app purchases and pushing the media industry to build VR content for YouTube. These may be indicators of a coming ad model, although the search giant is also pondering a subscription model across several of its products.',
'Salesforce Expands Machine-Learning Service to Microsoft Outlook: Salesforce.com Inc. is taking another step forward in its partnership with Microsoft Corp., expanding integration with the Outlook e-mail program to help sales representatives streamline tasks such as scheduling meetings and responding to messages. With the new SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook application, Salesforce is folding its predictive technology into an e-mail service that has more than 400 million users. The app will let executives work directly from within Outlook on their desktop computers, boosting productivity by automating key steps while interacting with their customers. E-mail continues to be a crucial tool used by sales representatives when they re trying to land a deal, said Steve Loughlin, chief executive officer of the SalesforceIQ unit. There are all these data sources that sales reps are trying to access -- they re drowning in the information," Loughlin said. "This is a way to pull it all together into a single place and deliver it where they are working." Salesforce is extending the reach of machine-learning technology after acquiring RelateIQ for $390 million in 2014. With Inbox, predictive tools are folded into Outlook to erase manual steps. For example, the program can juggle potential meeting times inside e-mails -- automatically adjusting open calendar spots as they fill up before e-mails are returned. The cooperation between San Francisco-based Salesforce and Microsoft broadens the companies growing partnership. About two years ago, the two agreed to make some of their business-software products work better together, signaling a thaw in relations between the longtime rivals. A large number of Salesforce s large customers are on Outlook, Loughlin said. "This is going to be a huge opportunity."',
'The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise: Many of the world s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget. At the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop. What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere. It isn t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list that you can already do on your phone. But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add Popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too. In this way, Amazon has found a surreptitious way to bypass Apple and Google the reigning monarchs in the smartphone world with a gadget that has the potential to become a dominant force in the most intimate of environments: our homes. First, it s simple to learn, and its voice-recognition capabilities are more intuitivethan those of many other vocal assistants (like Apple s Siri or Google Now). More than that, it keeps gaining new powers. More important, just like the early iPhone, Amazon has managed to turn the Echo into the center of a new ecosystem. Developers are flocking to create voice-controlled apps for the device, or skills, as Amazon calls them. There are now more than 300 skills for the Echo, from the trivial there is one to make Alexa produce rude body sounds on command to the pretty handy. It can tell you transit schedules, start a seven-minute workout, read recipes, do math and conversions, and walk you through adventure games, among other possibilities. Makers of digital home devices like Nest are also rushing to make their products compatible with the Echo. Alexa can now control your Internet-connected lights, home thermostats and a variety of other devices. Hardware makers can also add Alexa s brain into their own devices, so soon you won t need an Echo to consult with Alexa you could find it in your toaster, your refrigerator or your car.',
"Dorsey-led Square's revenue beats in first quarterly report since IPO: Mobile payments company Square Inc's revenue beat analysts' estimates in its first quarterly results since going public in November, easing pressure on CEO Jack Dorsey who is also leading turnaround efforts at Twitter. Square's shares rose as much as 7 percent after market on Wednesday, before giving up some of the gains. The stock had closed up 4.8 percent at $12.03 during the day. The company's shares have mostly stayed below the first trading close of $13.07 and even slipped below the deeply discounted IPO price of $9, hitting a low of $8.06 on Feb. 3. Since then, the stock had risen nearly 50 percent through Wednesday's close. The company's gross payment volume (GPV) the total dollar amount of all card payments processed by sellers rose 47 percent to $10.2 billion in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31. Transaction revenue earned from businesses processing payments through Square's devices grew 44.7 percent to $298.5 million. However, Square is facing rising competition in the payments market, from large companies such as PayPal Holdings Inc to smaller startups such as Stripe. Also, Dorsey's dual role as CEOs at Twitter and Square has been a sore point with investors at both companies. On his part, Dorsey has looked to play down the concerns. Square's total net revenue rose 49.2 percent to $374.4 million in the quarter, beating analysts' average estimate of $343.2 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. However, net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $80.5 million, or 34 cents per share, from $37.1 million, or 25 cents per share. The loss for this quarter included a charge of 14 cents per share due to a stock dividend for holders of one class of preferred shares in the company. Square has been investing heavily in new hardware and building out its lending business, Square Capital.",
'Master of Go Board Game Is Walloped by Google Computer Program: A Google computer program stunned one of the world s top players on Wednesday in a round of Go, which is believed to be the most complex board game ever created. The match between Google DeepMind s AlphaGo and the South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol was viewed as an important test of how far research into artificial intelligence has come in its quest to create machines smarter than humans. Go is a two-player game of strategy said to have originated in China 3,000 years ago. Players compete to win more territory by placing black and white stones on a grid measuring 19 squares by 19 squares. The play is more complex than chess, with a far greater possible sequence of moves, and requires superlative instincts and evaluation skills. Because of that, many researchers believed that mastery of the game by a computer was still a decade away. Before the match, Mr. Lee said he could win 5-0 or 4-1, predicting that computing power alone could not win a Go match. Victory takes human intuition, something AlphaGo has not yet mastered, he said. But after reading more about the program he became less upbeat, saying that AlphaGo appeared able to imitate human intuition to a certain degree and predicting that artificial intelligence would eventually surpass humans in Go. AlphaGo posed Mr. Lee a unique challenge. In a human-versus-human Go match, which typically lasts several hours, the players feel each other and evaluate styles and psychologies, he said. This time, it s like playing the game alone, Mr. Lee said on the eve of the match. There are mistakes humans make because they are humans. If that happens to me, I can lose a match. Kim Sung-ryong, a South Korean Go master who provided commentary during Wednesday s match, said that AlphaGo made a clear mistake early on, but that unlike most human players, it did not lose its cool. It didn t play Go as a human does, he said. It was a Go match with human emotional elements carved out. Mr. Lee said he knew he had lost the match after AlphaGo made a move so unexpected and unconventional that he thought it was impossible to make such a move. ',
"Facebook Buys Face Swapping App Masquerade to Challenge Snapchat's Rainbow Vomit: Facebook Inc. said it bought Masquerade, an app that puts fun filters, masks and special effects on selfies and videos like those popularized on the disappearing photo-sharing app Snapchat. The company didn t disclose how much it paid for Masquerade, but said it would keep the application running and incorporate the technology for Facebook users. Over the past year we ve focused on building out more creative tools for people on Facebook, the Menlo Park, California-based company said in an e-mail. Masquerade has great technology to help us bring even more creative tools to Facebook, and help extend this work to video. Facebook is making the move in part amid increasing competition from Snapchat Inc., where silly photo filters have been a major draw. Snapchat debuted the feature last year with one that animates a user s face so they vomit a rainbow while their eyes bulge, and more recently started using the filters as a revenue source. One of Masquerade s most popular features is face swap, which lets people to trade faces with one another in photos.",
'Shared Office Startup WeWork Raises Funds at $16 Billion Valuation for Asia Expansion: WeWork Cos., a New York-based shared-office startup, raised $430 million from Chinese investors as it prepares to expand throughout Asia. Investors valued the company at $16 billion as part of the financing round, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the terms were private. Chinese investment firms Legend Holdings and Hony Capital led the round, WeWork said. The real estate startup\'s website lists China, Hong Kong, India, and Seoul among the places where it will offer service "soon." John Zhao, the chief executive officer at Hony Capital, said in a statement that WeWork\'s "fit for the Chinese culture is unparalleled." WeWork has about 50,000 members globally, who rent desks and offices in shared spaces operated by the company in 21 cities. Memberships start at $45 a month, and the company is also exploring residential rentals. WeWork is in talks with an Australian developer about forming a global venture to lease offices and living spaces to other companies, Bloomberg reported last week. Corporate documents filed Tuesday night in Delaware show that WeWork has authorized the sale of as much as $780 million in shares as part of the round. Fortune and the Wall Street Journal reported details of the sale earlier. WeWork\'s last financing round, disclosed in June, valued it at $10 billion.',
'Apple Ransomware Attack Casts Light on a Booming Shadow Industry: The first widespread ransomware attack on Apple Inc. computers is drawing attention to a growing and lucrative corner of the hacking underworld where attackers encrypt and hold data hostage until they are paid to unlock the information. An estimated 6,500 Macs were infected with malicious software designed to make files inaccessible to owners of desktops and laptops, according to the Transmission Project, a file-sharing software provider. The decision to target Apple s OS X software, which is both harder to hack and less widespread than Microsoft Corp. s Windows, underscores how attractive the practice has become, according to Clifford Neuman, who teaches cybersecurity at the University of Southern California. Researchers at Palo Alto Networks Inc. discovered the ransomware, which they dubbed KeRanger, on March 4. Once downloaded and installed, the bug demanded that users pay one bitcoin to decrypt the data, or about $411 at Friday s prices. The researchers informed Apple, which revoked a certificate that allowed Macs to download the software, and Transmission updated its program to eliminate the infection, according to Ryan Olson, intelligence director at Palo Alto Networks. The business model is working so well on Windows that, when they had an opportunity to do so on Mac, they did it, Olson said. It s been effective to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. ',
'Lyft is catching up with Uber in New York City: Lyft is gaining momentum in a key market for the company and its more established competitor, Uber. According to figures the company provided to Re/code, Lyft has seen its driver pool grow by a factor of four and has seen six times the number of active weekly riders in New York since May 2015. In February of this year, Lyft drivers in New York performed six times the total number of rides they performed in May 2015, the company said. It s a clear indicator that New York riders and drivers have warmed up to the pink-mustachioed ride-hailing company despite Uber s first-mover advantage. The growth in riders is in part a result of the recent fare cuts Lyft implemented across 33 cities, including New York (following Uber s fare cuts in more than 80 cities), but it also follows the company s increased investment in its marketing efforts both in terms of staff as well as in promotions and ad buys.',
'Amazon Is Launching a Live QVC-Type Show as Part of Push Into Fashion: By some estimates, Amazon could be the No. 1 apparel seller in the U.S. by next year. Now, it s unveiling a live daily show on Amazon.com to help push that initiative. Called Style Code Live, the free 30-minute video show will stream live on Amazon.com each weekday at 9 pm ET. The show will feature fashion and beauty tips and a live chat that the company says will allow viewers to communicate with the hosts. The most Amazon-y piece of the experience, though, will be a product carousel showing viewers the stuff related to the show that they can purchase on Amazon.com. And you have to believe this feature is as much about awareness for Amazon s clothing-selling business as it is about making direct sales of stuff from the show. It follows last week s Amazon announcement that it would begin airing a free reality show called The Fashion Fund, which documents a competition among up-and-coming fashion designers.',
'Subleases spike in number as SF startups downsize: In January, office rents in San Francisco eclipsed those of New York to become the most expensive in the country. Two months later, there are signs the San Francisco may not maintain its dubious position for long. The biggest indicator: There s suddenly 1.7 million square feet of sublease space available in San Francisco, up more than 50 percent from 1.1 million square feet in November, according to CBRE Group, a commercial real estate services and investment firm. That kind of jump in four months time suggests ripple effects from a funding slowdown that stretch beyond a small but growing number of layoffs. If the trend isn t giving local landlords flashbacks of the late 1990s, it may soon. The Bay Area s real estate market enjoyed a historically active 2015, with San Francisco accounting for the world s highest rent growth at 14 percent, according to brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. The last time San Francisco surpassed New York in price per square footage, says CBRE, was 2000, the same year the tech market famously peaked, then abruptly imploded.',
'Snapchat Thinks It Will Generate at Least $300 Million in Revenue This Year: Investors are buying into Snapchat s massive $16 billion valuation because its business is growing significantly. Or at least expected to grow significantly in 2016. Snapchat is targeting between $300 million and $350 million in revenue in 2016, according to multiple sources familiar with the company s plans. That s six or seven times the $50 million in revenue Snapchat projected last year. Snapchat s business is still new and evolving, and advertiser interest is still very experimental. Essentially that means it can be tough to predict incoming revenue with much accuracy, as most advertisers don t have Snapchat as a staple of their advertising plans. The company hit a $100 million revenue run rate in Q4, according to one source. Advertising is cyclical, and Q4 is usually a strong advertising quarter, but it s worth noting because the run rate metric gives us a glimpse at how the business is growing. Still, boosting projected revenue like that must mean the businesses is growing at a nice clip. We don t know if the $16 billion valuation is pegged to this year s expected revenue, but if it were, that would amount to more than 50 times this year s sales. Facebook, by comparison, trades at a value of about 17 times its annual revenue.',
'Alibaba\'s Ant Financial could be valued at nearly $60 billion: source Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba arm, Ant Financial Services Group, is seeking a valuation of nearly $60 billion in its current round of funding, a person familiar with the matter said. Ant Financial, which operates the "Alipay" online payment platform, is in talks to raise funds from existing and new investors, which could include CCB International, the person said on Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Monday that Ant Financial planned to raise up to 20 billion yuan ($3.07 billion), pegging its valuation at nearly $50 billion. Ant Financial declined comment on the Journal\'s story. The latest round of funding is expected to be completed by mid-April, the Journal reported. ',
'Tech Companies, New and Old, Clamor to Entice Cloud Computing Experts: The hunt for the hard-to-find talent that can build and run the massive data centers behind cloud computing is pitting three generations of companies against one another. Old-guard companies like Oracle, tech s current giants like Amazon and its peers, as well as Bay Area start-ups are offering big salaries and big perks for cloud computing experts. On the social media site LinkedIn, for example, there are over 130 engineering positions available at Oracle Seattle. Many of them are the kind of jobs that now pay $300,000 to $1 million a year, according to Shannon Anderson, who has been recruiting engineers in Seattle and the Bay Area for 25 years. Seattle and its surrounding towns are a hot spot for this kind of tech talent because they are home to A.W.S., which runs the biggest cloud computing service, and Microsoft, which has a large cloud business called Azure.Google also has a cloud computing office in the area. So does Facebook. Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day, Ms. Anderson said. Compensation has doubled in five years. For a recruiter, who is typically paid a percentage of a star engineer s compensation, this is a very good time, she said. Cloud computing, which powers an increasing number of our devices and services, allows a vast collection of computers often spread around the world to operate like one giant machine. As other tech sectors show signs of slowing, cloud services have created unprecedented demand for highly educated engineers and mathematicians who can build and operate these flywheels of data. Instead of asking about the latest computer coding languages or how to make a web page load faster, the most important question in tech hiring has become: Can you handle petabytes That is the data in about 13 billion images, or roughly the amount of printed information that would fit in 20 million file cabinets. In the Bay Area, $125,000 a year is not an uncommon salary for someone newly out of graduate school with the expertise to do cloud computing work. With five years of experience, $300,000 along with a range of stock or job opportunities that greatly inflate the value of those paychecks have become the norm. It s an aggressive market, said Corey Sanders, director of program management at Microsoft Azure. We are all data engineers now, and we can convince people that this is the best place to learn that. ',
'Prompt debuts a command line for the real world : In a world suffering from app overload, the Y Combinator-backed startup Prompt introduces a different way to interact with services, make purchases or even control Internet of Things devices all by way of text-based interface. The application, which can be used via SMS, Slack or the web, lets you text to do things like request an Uber, change the temperature on a Nest thermostat, get directions, track flights or packages and a lot more. ',
'How Amazon Shames Warehouse Workers for Alleged Theft: While waiting to clock in each morning, workers at some Amazon.com warehouses get a steady stream of company-provided reading: the stories of co-workers fired for theft. In an effort to discourage stealing, Amazon has put up flatscreen TVs that display examples of alleged on-the-job theft, say 11 of the company s current and former warehouse workers and antitheft staff. The alleged offenders aren t identified by name. Each is represented by a black silhouette stamped with the word terminated and accompanied by details such as when they stole, what they stole, how much it was worth, and how they got caught changing an outbound package s address, for example, or stuffing merchandise in their socks. Some of the silhouettes are marked arrested. Theft is a persistent concern for Amazon, with warehouses full of small but valuable items and a workforce with high turnover and low pay. Workers interviewed for this story say the range of thefts posted on the screens is as varied as the company s sprawling catalog: DVDs, an iPad, jewelry, a lighter, makeup, a microwave, phone cases, Pop Rocks, video games. Several recall a post about an employee fired for stealing a co-worker s lunch. The digital bulletin boards also occasionally display information about firings related to workplace violence. There are cheerier announcements, too, such as updates on incentive bonuses or a message about Black History Month. In some warehouses that don t have flatscreens, workers say, tales of firings are posted on sheets of paper tacked to bulletin boards or taped to the wall. Many of the workers say the screens aren t a top concern compared with wages or workload. Only people that would have something to say about it is people that s doing wrong, says Maurice Jones, a warehouse worker who left Amazon in February. It s just letting people know that you re being watched. ',
'Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign: Apple customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware, researchers with Palo Alto Networks told Reuters on Sunday. Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data. Palo Alto Threat Intelligence Director Ryan Olson said the "KeRanger" malware, which appeared on Friday, was the first functioning ransomware attacking Apple\'s Mac computers. "This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom," Olson said in a telephone interview. Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon. ',
'FCC cracks down on Verizon Wireless for using supercookies : The Federal Communications Commission is cracking down on Verizon Wireless for using a powerful type of code to track its customers around the Internet, as the agency pushes to increase its role in protecting online privacy. The code, dubbed a "supercookie" by privacy advocates, is almost impossible to disable and could allow almost anyone to follow users around the Web. Under the terms of a settlement agreement announced Monday, Verizon must pay a $1.35 million fine and will only be able to use the tracking mechanism when users connect to Verizon\'s corporate family of services unless the company gets customers\' opt-in consent. Broader use could leave customers\' Web habits visible to outsiders. Verizon began putting a unique string of characters into customers\' web browsing in 2012 to help target its advertising program. The practice came to the public\'s attention in late 2014, when it received criticism from privacy advocates who called the code a "supercookie" because the it was almost impossible for users to avoid. The privacy advocates warned then that other companies, or even intelligence agencies, could leverage the super cookies to track wherever people went online. Verizon downplayed that concern at the time, with a spokesperson saying that the code "wouldn t be able to be used for that." But last January, researcher Jonathan Mayer revealed evidence that others could hijack the supercookie for their own purposes: An online advertising company called Turn was using the codes to help follow people around online, he said. Turn used the supercookie to "respawn" its traditional cookies -- even if users took steps to protect their privacy by removing the cookies. Turn said it would stop and Verizon started offering a way for customers to opt-out of having the supercookie attached to their web traffic. But the FCC had already launched an investigation of Verizon\'s use of supercookies in December of 2014 -- and later brought Mayer on board as the chief technologist for the agency\'s enforcement arm. While the Federal Trade Commission is often thought of as the government\'s primary privacy watch dog, the FCC\'s power to police online privacy got a major boost last year. As a quirk of how the agency moved to enforce network neutrality rules, broadband providers will be subject to new privacy scrutiny. The FCC is in the process of coming up with a version of its privacy rules that apply to broadband Internet providers, which are expected soon.',
'Amazon Introduces 2 Alexa Voice-Controlled Devices: Amazon s Alexa is gaining new powers, and a couple of new looks, too. Amazon, the Internet retailer, on Thursday announced two new siblings for the Echo, the voice-controlled household assistant that people address as Alexa and that became a surprise hit for the company last year. One new product, Amazon Tap, is a slimmer, shorter, portable version of the Echo. Rather than requiring an electrical wall connection, the Tap runs off a rechargeable battery. It connects with phones and the Internet through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The Tap acts as an ordinary wireless speaker for a phone, but it also provides Alexa on the go. People can ask about weather and traffic, ask for the news, tell it to play a song from a streaming service, or do any one of dozens of other tasks. The device, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, will sell for about $130. Amazon also announced the Echo Dot, essentially an Echo without that device s powerful speaker. The Dot, which will sell for about $90, looks like a hockey puck, and is meant to provide Alexa s voice functions for existing speaker systems. The Dot connects to those speakers either through a wire or over Bluetooth; after that, it functions as another Echo. Dot shipments also willbegin at the end of March. Sales will initially be limited to people who already own an Echo or one of Amazon s Fire TV devices a Dot buyer will have to ask Alexa to order one. The new devices suggest that Amazon has an expansive vision for the Echo, which looked like an experiment for the company when it was introduced in late 2014. The company has not provided sales data for the device, but it has said that sales exceeded its expectations and that customer reviews are rhapsodic. Amazon appears to have increased investment in the device it keeps adding new features and capabilities to Alexa, and this year it ran Super Bowl ads about the gadget.',
'EBay Banks on Bar Codes for a Comeback: Hoping to outgrow its image as a glorified garage sale and move up in Google searches, EBay is turning to technology developed 70 years ago: the bar code. The machine-readable symbol that keeps supermarket lines moving is helping EBay manage vast amounts of data associated with the 6 billion products from smartphones to video games, handbags to tires listed at the online marketplace each year. Merchants will be able to enter a full description of a sales item by using a smartphone camera to scan its Universal Product Code. EBay reads the scan and automatically lists the item s specifications. Before, every detail, including brand, model, and dimensions, was entered manually. UPCs are a central part of what EBay calls its structured data initiative, started in June, to organize items into a catalog that shoppers can easily search using filters such as price, features, and condition. The switch started with auto parts and accessories, one of EBay s fastest-growing categories. The UPC is also used to call up consumer reviews and product images, which create a degree of permanence on EBay that search engines will reward with better placement. EBay says the code provides a sufficient baseline of information because 80 percent of all products sold there are new. A key goal is to standardize the amount and type of information that merchants list. The initiative will eventually expand to most items on the site.So far, some merchants like the change. Quick Ship Electronics, which sells consumer devices on EBay, had some desktop computers and laptops languishing in its inventory. Once the company entered the UPCs on EBay s catalog, the items sold within days, CEO Jordan Insley says. ',
"HP Enterprise's revenue, profit beat estimates: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co's corporate hardware and services division, reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit, helped by strength in its hardware business. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) shares were up 6.4 percent at $14.47 in extended trading on Thursday. Revenue in HPE's enterprise group business, from which it derives more than half of its total revenue, rose about 1 percent to $7.1 billion in the first quarter ended Jan. 31, from a year earlier. The company's revenue fell to $12.72 billion from $13.05 billion. ",
'Apple supplier Broadcom to slash 1,900 jobs globally: Chipmaker Broadcom Ltd, the company created following the merger of Avago and Broadcom, said it would cut about 1,900 jobs globally across its businesses. Shares of Broadcom, which also supplies to Apple Inc, were up 8 percent at $148.20 in extended trading on Thursday. The company said it expects to take charges of about $650 million related to the job cuts through 2018. Avago completed its $37 billion deal for Broadcom last month. Revenue for the legacy Avago business fell 4 percent to $1.77 billion in the three months ended January 31.',
'Snapchat Raises $175 Million From Fidelity at Flat $16 Billion Valuation: Snapchat has raised $175 million in new venture funding from Fidelity at the same $16 billion valuation it raised at back in May, according to a source familiar with the deal. That means Snapchat has now raised around $1.4 billion in total. The Wall Street Journalfirst reported the new funding. A flat valuation isn t usually a great sign, but the raise comes at a time when lots of tech companies including Jawbone and Foursquare are raising down rounds, or taking money at a lower valuation than their last fundraising. In that vein, this investment doesn t look bad.',
'Facebook Messenger adds music, starting with Spotify song sharing: First came the Transportation hub with Uber, and now Facebook Messenger is launching its very first music integration with Spotify. Inside the Messenger More section in chat threads, all iOS and Android users will now find a Spotify option. Tap it and they ll be shuttled into Spotify s app where they can Search for something to share. Once they select a song, artist or playlist, they ll be popped back to Messenger with the option to share the photo of the cover artwork. When a friend taps that photo, they ll be bounced over to Spotify to listen.If Messenger can become a richer social layer connecting Spotify users, it could inspire deep conversations about music, boosting its engagement. That generates platform lock-in and potential monetization opportunities for Facebook. And for Spotify, Messenger will provide virality that could help it fend off Apple Music and convince more non-streamers of its value.',
'With Bet on Japan, Sharp Stumbles: When flat-screen televisions began replacing boxy analog sets in the world s living rooms more than a decade ago, few companies bet bigger on the new technology than Sharp of Japan. The century-old manufacturer, which got its start making belt buckles andmechanical pencils before World War I, defied corporate orthodoxy by building an advanced new display factory in its homeland, while rivals outsourced to cheaper countries. The gamble paid off for a while. Made-in-Japan Kameyama model TVs, named for the factory, became a hit, and Sharp reaped big profits. We were winners then, said Yukihiko Nakata, an engineer who worked for 33 years at Sharp. Those days are over. Sharp is now mired in losses and its future is in doubt. Sharp s plight is a story of missteps by executives who failed to anticipate major shifts in the global electronics industry. China, long the home of cheap manufacturing, has become increasingly sophisticated, making gadgets that can rival Japan s in quality. Rivals elsewhere are challenging Japanese companies on innovation. The industry s center of power has moved away from Japan to places like China, South Korea and Silicon Valley in the United States. Sharp s leaders were slow to adapt, employees and industry experts say. Unwilling to change strategy when business conditions turned against them, they doubled down on investments in increasingly unprofitable businesses, deepening the company s financial distress. As prices of liquid-crystal displays, or LCDs, began falling quickly in the mid-2000s, because of advances in manufacturing and a supply glut in China, Sharp scrambled to keep ahead of cheaper competitors. It developed ever-bigger TV displays and expanded into touch screens for smartphones and tablet computers. But rivals matched it more quickly than executives had anticipated, said Mr. Nakata, who left Sharp a decade ago and is now a professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Sharp had found a rescuer in a Taiwanese company called Foxconn, which makes gadgets for Apple and others and was offering a $5.5 billion lifeline. But Sharp unexpectedly told its would-be rescuer last week that it could be liable for close to $3 billion in potential costs, according to a person with knowledge of the talks. Foxconn is still examining the sudden disclosure, and it isn t clear whether the Taiwanese company will complete the deal.',
"Messaging Startup Slack Seeks Up to $4 Billion Valuation in an 'Up' Funding Round: The company is said to be in talks to raise $150 million to $300 million in financing. Slack Technologies Inc., which runs a messaging service for businesses, is seeking an investment that would value the company at $3.5 billion to $4 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Slack is looking to raise $150 million to $300 million as part of the round, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the terms aren't finalized. The talks are ongoing, and a lead investor has not been selected, the people said. If successful, Slack's fundraising round would stand out. Venture investment in startups dropped about 30 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the previous one, according to research firm CB Insights. Also during the last three months of the year, 26 percent of mature startups raised money at lower valuations than in earlier rounds, according to a study by law firm Fenwick & West LLP. Even as startup fundraising shows signs of slowing and valuations begin to tumble, a few companies are pushing ahead. Slack said it raised $160 million less than a year ago, valuing the company at $2.8 billion. It's raised more than $300 million in total and has also used its fundraising clout to create an $80 million venture fund with several of its investors to back Slack-related apps. Slack, which launched its current business about two years ago, said it has 2.3 million daily active users, up from 520,000 a year ago. The company also said it had more than $64 million in annual recurring revenue. The metric projects the value of current customers over the course of a year, and the number can differ substantially from actual revenue for fast-growing startups.",
"Tech start-ups the new gold for China's wealthy as economy slows: More wealthy Chinese are ploughing money into technology start-ups which are increasingly seen as a safe haven as the slowing economy eases hopes of extracting returns from traditional investment such as stocks, property or gold. While Chinese shares are being pummelled and the yuan is under pressure, these private investors are turning to businesses such as taxi-hailing company Didi Kuaidi, which saw its valuation rise 25 percent to about $20 billion in a $1 billion funding round launched last week. This gain sharply contrasts with the 43 percent plunge in the CSI 300 index of top-listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen since June last year, underscoring the appetite for tech firms. China's stock markets are the worst performing in the region, according to Thomson Reuters data. Even some mid-sized banks, including China Merchants Bank are investing into tech ventures. What is unique about China's venture capital and private equity industry is that a good chunk of yuan fund raising comes from wealthy individual investors. This contrasts with Western markets, where institutional investors take the lion's share of such placements. A lawyer told Reuters she had recently structured several investment deals into tech companies for wealthy clients. She declined to be named, or give details of the deals due to the confidentiality of the matter.",
'Is Verizon Buying Yahoo A Resounding Maybe. Verizon is still considering a purchase of Yahoo, but said it needs to better understand the Internet company s assets before deciding whether to make a formal bid. I don t think anybody knows what s under the hood, CFO Fran Shammo said at a Morgan Stanley investment conference on Tuesday. Shammo said the company is considering all kinds of merger and acquisition options, including both purchases and divestments. He confirmed that the company is still weighing, for example, whether to hold on to or sell its data centers. Is it better off outside of our portfolio he said. We re looking at that. ',
'Fidelity Writes Down Value of Corporate Software Startups: Fidelity Investments slashed the value of its holdings in several corporate software startups in January, while taking a more optimistic view of private consumer-technology companies such as Snapchat and Uber. The value of Dropbox Inc. shares were marked down 10 percent in January from the price in December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from public filings. Fidelity also wrote down its stake in the cloud storage company last year. The fund manager periodically readjusts the value of its private stock holdings, based on a variety of factors, and is required to disclose the new values publicly. CloudFlare Inc., maker of Web performance and cybersecurity software for businesses, took a much bigger hit. Fidelity marked down its holdings in that company by 31 percent. CloudFlare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince blamed the writedown on market conditions and said Fidelity had marked up the company\'s value twice before. "When the market recovers, we\'ll recover with it," he said. Although Prince wasn\'t happy about the decrease, he saw it as a "baby step" toward becoming a public company, when a company\'s stock price fluctuates constantly. DocuSign Inc., which makes electronic signature technology for contracts and other documents, and Nutanix Inc., a maker of software and hardware for data centers that filed to go public in December, were each written down by 17 percent. Fidelity also marked down Twilio Inc., which makes tools for app developers, by 13 percent. Consumer apps fared better in January. Fidelity did not change its valuations for Airbnb Inc., Pinterest Inc., Snapchat, and Uber, despite a rough month in the public markets and signs of a slowdown in private investments. About a quarter of mature startups raised money at lower valuations in the fourth quarter than in previous rounds, according to a study by Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP. More than half of those later-stage deals included terms that guarantee new investors get their money back before other shareholders. Fidelity\'s markdowns of corporate software startups came after a brutal month for their publicly traded peers. IBM and VMware Inc. reported disappointing earnings forecasts in January. Many technology companies said they expected a tough IT climate for 2016 and often cited a deteriorating macroeconomic environment as a factor. The Standard and Poor\'s 500 Index was down 5.1 percent in January, but several enterprise software companies were well below that. Box Inc., a Dropbox rival, plunged 23 percent. Workday Inc. fell 21 percent. Salesforce.com Inc. dropped 13 percent. Despite the dismal climate, Fidelity didn\'t write down every enterprise startup. For example, the fund manager kept the value of its shares in Cloudera Inc., a Silicon Valley Big Data company, unchanged in January.',
'Facebook executive jailed in Brazil as court seeks WhatsApp data: Brazilian police arrested a senior Facebook Inc executive on Tuesday as a dispute escalated over a court\'s demand that the company provide data from its WhatsApp messaging service to help in a secretive drug-trafficking investigation. Court officials in Sergipe state confirmed that a judge had ordered the jailing of Facebook Vice President for Latin America Diego Dzodan. Federal police in Sao Paulo state said he was being held there for questioning. Law enforcement officials withheld further information about the nature of their request to the messaging service that Facebook Inc acquired in 2014, saying that doing so could compromise an ongoing criminal investigation. The arrest, which Facebook called an "extreme and disproportionate measure," came as social media and Internet companies face mounting pressure from governments around the world to help them eavesdrop on users and filter content. Arrests of officials from social media companies are extremely rare, though not unprecedented, because the companies typically comply with local court orders, especially from countries where they have branch offices.',
'SurveyMonkey to Lay Off 100 and Retool Business Product: Cloud-based polling service SurveyMonkey informed employees today that it is letting go of about 100 people in a plan to retool its product aimed at businesses, which is not living up to expectations. The layoffs were to be disclosed at an internal meeting this afternoon. The cuts amount to about 13 percent of SurveyMonkey s workforce of about 750. The cuts were made primarily among the sales team devoted to SurveyMonkey for Business. The move comes six weeks into the tenure of SurveyMonkey s new CEO Zander Lurie, the former GoPro exec who joined in January. In an interview, Lurie told Re/code that SurveyMonkey, which is privately held, is on track to post $200 million in 2016 with an Ebitda profit margin of north of 30 percent.',
'LinkedIn Is Now Allowing Marketers to Target Ads at Specific Companies: On Tuesday, the company announced that marketers running native ads through Sponsored Updates or Sponsored InMail campaigns can target user profiles based on a list of companies they want to target specific products or other sales to. The feature, which is appropriately named LinkedIn Account Targeting, allows marketers to provide a list of as many as 30,000 companies they want to target in a campaign. LinkedIn then checks to see which of those are among the 8 million companies on the platform before targeting those pages and profiles of people at those companies based on criteria such as job duties and seniority. According to Lindsey Edwards, senior product manager for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn has traditionally focused on bringing profile data job titles, seniority level, skills and groups to advertisers and marketers for targeting purposes. But this is the first time LinkedIn is letting companies bring their own data to the platform. Previously, marketers could only target up to 100 companies, mostly only by manual selection. In some ways, LinkedIn is bucking the trend by opening its "walled garden" (a commonly used metaphor for how companies like Google and Facebook withhold data from marketers using their closed ad buying systems). Edwards said marketers can start "digging in" by bringing their own data.',
'Souq, Online Retailer in Middle East, Gets a $275 Million Boost: Souq.com, an online retailer based in the United Arab Emirates, said on Monday that it had raised $275 million from international investors. It was a vote of confidence for digital commerce in the Middle East, which has made little headway compared with elsewhere. Souq, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, was founded in 2005 on an eBay-like online auction model, but it subsequently evolved into more of an Amazon-style set-price retailer. It has been a rare success story in a region where online businesses face logistical problems, political challenges, stifling bureaucracy and regulations that vary greatly from country to country. Souq s latest round of funding included money from the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management, as well as from Standard Chartered Private Equity and the International Finance Corporation, which is an arm of the World Bank. Souq, which means market in Arabic, did not provide details on what the funding round meant for its overall valuation, and it has not released details on its annual sales or profit. The $275 million funding round was, however, the largest ever disclosed by a technology start-up in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Wamda, a research firm based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. Even after multiple fund-raising rounds, the Jabbar Internet Group which sold Maktoob, a news site, to Yahoo for more than $150 million in 2009 still holds a majority stake. Souq, now the largest online retailer in the Arab world, ships hundreds of thousands of products across the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also has operations in Egypt.',
'For the first time, Google s self-driving car takes some blame for a crash: A Google self-driving car sideswiped a bus this month, the first blemish on the otherwise spotless driving record of the company s vehicles. Google s 53 vehicles have driven more than 1.4 million miles autonomously and been in 17 crashes, but never been at fault before. The crash took place at 3:20 p.m. Feb. 14, about three miles from Google s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google s car was attempting to make a right-hand turn on red, and moved to the right side of a wide lane on El Camino Real to pass traffic stopped at the light. But as Google s car neared the intersection of Castro Street, its path was blocked by sandbags around a storm drain, according to a report Google filed with the California DMV. Google s car tried to go around the sandbags by cutting into the line of vehicles on the left side of the lane. Instead, it struck a metal piece connecting the two halves of an accordion-style bus, according to a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority spokeswoman. Google said its car was going less than 2 mph and the bus was moving at 15 mph. Both parties said there were no injuries and described the crash as minor. The 15 passengers on the bus were transferred to another bus following the accident. Google characterized the crash as a misunderstanding and a learning experience, saying its cars will learn that large vehicles are less likely to yield than other types of vehicles.',
'This Water Pitcher Orders New Filters From Amazon Using Wi-Fi. It Could Be the Future of Shopping. The future often seems silly in the present. Case in point: Brita s new smart water pitcher. The device is indeed primarily a water pitcher, designed you know to clean and hold water. But the pitcher, which goes on sale today on Amazon, does something else that helps explain why Brita is charging $45 for it, compared to $20 to $32 for other Brita pitchers that hold the same amount of water. It connects to the Internet and senses when a given filter has purified all the water it was meant to, after about 40 gallons. It then pings Amazon.com and automatically orders a new $5.99 filter for delivery. Call it programmatic commerce, and expect it to be around for a long time. The partnership between Brita and Amazon is part of a bigger initiative at Amazon dubbed the Dash Replenishment System. The goal is to allow products like water pitchers, computer printers and pet food dispensers automatically to order related, necessary items from Amazon without a human lifting a finger (after a one-time setup). At a higher level, it fits perfectly into Amazon s ongoing mission to shrink the time between wanting and buying. What started with one-click purchasing has escalated to Wi-Fi connected physical buttons to order mac and cheese, reordering items by talking to the Amazon Echo speaker and now filter-summoning pitchers.',
'Raspberry Pi 3 Launches 50% Faster, With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth And An Eye On IoT: A major new Raspberry Pi microprocessor has been announced today: the Pi 3 Model B board becomes the new top-of-the-line Pi, with a 64bit 1.2GHz quad-core chipset and 1GB RAM it s being slated to offer a 50 per cent power bump over the Pi 2. But is still priced at just $35 the original Model B Pi price-tag, four years on from its debut. Round about this time last year the Pi Foundation launched the 900Mhz quad-core Pi 2 which was 6x faster than the then top-of-the-Pi-line Model B+ board, and dubbed an affordable entry-level PC . Also priced at $35. The Foundation is touting the Pi 3 as opening up even more possibilities for IoT and embedded projects . Speaking to the BBC, Pi founder Eben Upton said: This is the first Pi you can stick behind your TV and completely forget about. The two main things that people do with their Pi are use it as a PC replacement or use it as an embedded computer, he added. The Pi 3 is doubling down on both those things rather than going looking for new things to do. The really big deal here is the inclusion of built in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. The Pi 2 had Ethernet but makers wanting the board to support wireless connectivity had to add a wi-fi or Bluetooth dongle. The Pi 3 removes the need to buy wireless add-ons, so it s being positioned for out-of-the-box IoT development and as a powerful IoT hub that can link together multiple in-home connected devices. Back in November, the Pi Foundation launched another new board: the single core 1GHz Pi Zero delivers a lot less on the processing performance front and lacks on-board connectivity options (a wi-fi dongle can be plugged into its micro-USB port) but it costs just $5 a price-point that s clearly targeting makers wanting to build individual IoT/connected devices. The more powerful and well connected Pi 3 doubles down on the growth in IoT devices the Pi Zero was seeking to encourage following on from the Pi 2, which was capable of running a version of Microsoft Windows that s designed to support IoT apps (aka Windows 10 IoT; formerly called Windows Embedded). At a launch event today the Foundation said it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full compatibility between the new Pi 3 board and Windows 10 IoT.',
'Morgan Stanley fund marks down Flipkart stake value by 27%: A mutual fund investor in Flipkart Ltd, India s largest e-commerce firm, has slashed the value of its holdings by as much as 27%, the latest indication that the investor rush of the past two years into Indian startups has led to unsustainable valuations.Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust valued its stake in Flipkart at $58.9 million as of 31 December, down from $80.6 million in June 2015. The company reported the number late Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US stock markets regulator. Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust also cut the value of its stake in other high flying startups including file storage company Dropbox Inc. and data analytics company Palantir.Flipkart was valued at $15 billion when it received $700 million from Tiger Global Management, Qatar Investment Authority and other investors in June. That was its fourth round of fund raising in a year. Its valuation shot up roughly 5 times from $2.5-3 billion in May 2014. Morgan Stanley s latest estimate implies that the mutual fund currently values Flipkart at $11 billion. Mint reported on 4 February that China s Alibaba Group is in early talks to buy a stake in Flipkart and increase its holding in Flipkart rival, Snapdeal. The talks are at a very initial stage and the likelihood of a deal is a function of Flipkart s willingness to offer a discount on its current valuation of $15 billion, Mint had reported then. There are not too many takers for India s top e-commerce firms at their current valuations, prompting both Flipkart and Snapdeal to approach Alibaba Group for cash. Early last year, Flipkart set a target of generating annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) of $8 billion by December. However, the company s current average monthly annualized GMV is roughly $5 billion, Mint reported on 17 February. This number, which includes sales at Flipkart s unit Myntra, indicates Flipkart missed its internal sales target.',
'In Strategic Refocus, Troubled Zenefits Lets 250 Employees Go: Zenefits, the troubled benefits software company that three weeks ago fired its founding CEO, said today that it has laid off 250 employees, mostly in its sales recruiting organization. In a memo to employees, CEO David Sacks said the move signals an intention to rebuild in line with our new company values. Zenefits, which sells employee health insurance plans alongside free software to administer those plans, was been rocked by disclosures that many of its employees are not properly licensed to sell insurance. The job cuts amount to about 17 percent of the Zenefits workforce. The company has until recently been considered a Silicon Valley high-flyer, having raised $500 million from investors at a valuation of $4.5 billion. From an email from new CEO David Sacks: "We are reducing our headcount by roughly 250 employees, or about 17 percent of total employees. These changes are almost entirely in the Sales organization, with about a dozen employees in Recruiting. Within the Sales organization, we are eliminating the Enterprise team (although some members will be offered other roles). We are also making a large reduction in Sales Development Representatives (SDR), the organization that prospected for the largest accounts.I want to make clear that this is a reduction in force (RIF), meaning that we are not cutting these jobs for performance reasons. We are letting go of many great people today, and it is not their fault. It is no secret that Zenefits grew too fast, stretching both our culture and our controls. This reduction enables us to refocus our strategy, rebuild in line with our new company values, and grow in a controlled way that will be strategic for our business and beneficial for our customers."',
'IHOP Is Releasing Special Snapchat Geolocation Filters, but You Have to Visit the Restaurant to Use Them - The Geo-fencing feature is all about engagement: IHOP today announced a Snapchat campaign that targets patrons inside its restaurants. To push its Double-Dipped French Toast, the all-day breakfast brand is essentially using the same custom geo-filters Snapchat introduced to the masses on Monday. But it\'s working directly with the Los Angeles social app to serve the ad just to IHOP customers. IHOP and Snapchat developed what they are calling "chain geo-filters," location-based dynamic art that can be added to photo and video snaps. When using the app at a restaurant, customers who take a snap will be able to swipe to reveal IHOP-themed creative overlays. Kirk Thompson, IHOP\'s vp of marketing, told Adweek that his team quietly released its custom Snapchat filter a few days ago, and it\'s already garnered 3 million views. On why the new promotion is only zeroing in on people already in stores, he explained, "IHOP receives Snapchats from users every day, a lot of them taken while in our restaurant. Introducing customized filters was a great way to further engage with our guests and at the same time extend our brand message when they share that content with their friends."',
'Baidu Shares Rise 14% On Revenue Beat: Baidu Inc. posted revenue that topped analysts estimates as the Chinese Internet search provider s investments in mobile begin to bear fruit and attract advertising. Sales rose 33 percent to 18.7 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) in the December quarter from a year earlier, the Beijing-based company said in a statement. That beat the average analyst estimate of 18.5 billion yuan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Mobile revenue made up 56 percent of total sales in the quarter, up from 42 percent a year earlier, Baidu said. The company s dominance in search as more users shift to using mobile devices is helping offset the impact of a Chinese economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years. Chairman Robin Li is also investing in services such as home delivery and online video to drive growth beyond advertising and help Baidu compete with Alibaba and Tencent. Baidu s American depositary receipts rose as much as 14 percent to $179.90 in extended U.S. trading after the results were released. The stock has lost 16 percent this year. Investors are keeping a close eye on Baidu s margins. Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are now vying for supremacy in an on-demand services industry primed for growth as more people turn to their smartphones or the Web to order food, schedule beauty treatments or hire helpers. Users of such services could rise 29 percent to 400 million by next year, according to Shanghai-based IResearch. The rising cost of competing in online services is spurring consolidation, including the combinations last year of fashion sites Meilishuo and Mogujie, travel-site operators Ctrip and Qunar, and group-buying startups Meituan.com and Dianping.com. Baidu has had to keep spending on its video-streaming service IQiyi and main online commerce site Nuomi to keep pace with Alibaba s and Tencent s expanding rival platforms. Chairman Li and another executive this month offered to buy Baidu s entire 80.5 percent stake in the IQiyi business, a deal that will shore up the search giant s margins while setting up a potential initial public offering for the unit. These bold steps help to reveal its core operating margins and the earning power of its monopoly-like search engine business, HSBC Securities analysts led by Chi Tsang wrote in a report. Selling IQiyi could expand Baidu s operating margins to 26 percent this year from 20 percent, even while unabated spending on on-demand services erases about 30 percentage points of profitability, they estimated.',
'Anonmyous Flyers Posted At Palantir\'s Campus Warn Employees That Stock Is Worthless - Flyers Are False: Employees of data-analysis company Palantir may have seen flyers posted on lampposts around their Silicon Valley offices this week featuring a disemboweled unicorn with rainbow blood streaming from its midsection. The posting, dated Feb. 23, warned: "Palantir workers: your common shares are worth $0.00." Palantir staff can relax a bit. The terms of recent fundraising rounds don\'t contain many of the provisions that can crush the value of common shares held by employees.Fundraising talks last year valued Palantir at $20 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said in June. While Palantir shares are trading lower on secondary markets than they were last year, the same can be said for many stocks, private and public, thanks to a global economic slowdown. Palantir common stock fetches $8.50 to $10 a share on secondary markets before fees, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing private share sales. That\'s a long way from zero. Palantir declined to comment. Several flyers have already been removed, according to Quartz. Someone posting on an online community forum under the pseudonym Palantir_Watcher claimed responsibility for creating the handouts. The person didn\'t respond to a request for comment. However, the guerilla campaign tapped into an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear about what private companies in Silicon Valley are worth after a wave ofwritedowns and cost-cutting at startups. Venture capitalists and other institutional investors typically hold preferred shares. They are worth more on secondary markets than common stock, which is what is given to employees, often representing a significant portion of their compensation. However, Palantir hasn\'t given newer investors the sort of preferential treatment awarded to shareholders of companies such as DocuSign Inc., Honest Co., and Stripe Inc., according to an analysis by the technology website the Information. The proportion of funding rounds that gave senior liquidation preferences to new investors was on the rise last year among companies with valuations of at least $1 billion, according to a study by law firm Fenwick & West. That allows those new investors to cash out before common shareholders, as well as earlier investors with preferred shares. During the fourth quarter of 2015, 42 percent of deals had such provisions, compared with 15 percent in the previous two quarters. Investors were also given the right to block an initial public offering that didn\'t meet their valuation threshold in 33 percent of deals in the fourth quarter, compared with 20 percent in the second quarter, the study said. Palantir had neither provision.',
'FoxConn Agrees To Buy Sharp, Then Pulls Back On Discovering New Liabilities: Taiwan\'s Foxconn has put its takeover of Sharp Corp on hold after discovering previously undisclosed liabilities, sources said, throwing the acquisition in doubt and sending shares of the Japanese electronics maker tumbling. Loss-making Sharp announced on Thursday that it had agreed to be bought by Foxconn, a contract manufacturing firm formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and major Apple Inc supplier. Just hours later, Foxconn said it would not sign the deal until it had clarified some "new material information" from Sharp. It did not elaborate. Shares slid 14 percent on Friday morning, adding to a drop of 14 percent a day earlier as the planned share dilution looked larger than expected. "That puts the entire deal in jeopardy," Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal said in a note to clients. "This is especially so given the dramatic back and forth that happened between Sharp and Foxconn in 2012, when Foxconn agreed to acquire a stake in Sharp but then later walked away." Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said the Japanese group had contingent liabilities that amounted to "hundreds of billions of yen." The sources did not elaborate on the nature of the liabilities or the exact amount. Reuters has not seen any documents regarding the new information. The 11th hour delay jeopardizes a deal that would have marked the conclusion to five years of courting by Foxconn founder and billionaire Terry Gou and the opening up of Japan\'s insular tech sector to foreign investment. The loss-making display maker said on Thursday that it would issue around $4.4 billion worth of new shares to give Foxconn a two-thirds stake. Foxconn\'s investment is set to total more than 650 billion yen ($5.8 billion), a separate source familiar with the matter said. If a deal does go through, it would boost Foxconn\'s position as Apple\'s main contract manufacturer and enable Sharp to start mass-producing organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens by 2018, around the time Apple is expected to adopt the next-generation displays for its iPhones. But efforts to patch up the deal could be impeded by lingering distrust over the collapse of the 2012 deal to form capital ties. That distrust was one reason Sharp officials, until recently, preferred a lower offer by the state-backed Innovation Network Corp of Japan.',
"Microsoft will pay about $400 million for software developer tools startup Xamarin, according to people with knowledge of the agreement.The deal was announced Wednesday by both companies without terms. Xamarin had sales of about $30 million for 2015 and expects to approximately double that in the current year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details of the purchase aren t public. Microsoft Is Buying a Company That Is Key to Its Cross-Platform Future: Microsoft today says it's acquiring mobile app development startup Xamarin for an undisclosed sum, giving the company a tool for building mobile apps that can work across iOS, Android, and Windows phones. Xamarin, which has 15,000 customers including large brand names like Coca-Cola and JetBlue, allows developers to code in a single programming language while designing an app to look native to each platform. Xamarin also offers a way for developers to test those apps using thousands of cloud-hosted devices. One of the four-year-old startup's main products relies on Microsoft's Visual Studio software, so this acquisition is a natural pairing.",
'Airbnb Admits It Removed 1,500 Listings in New York Before Releasing Data to Regulators: Before Airbnb Inc. shared data on its business in New York City, the home-rental website removed about 1,500 listings controlled by full-time landlords. The company disclosed the removals in a letter to New York state legislators on Wednesday as it faces criticism over becoming a platform for unregulated hotels. Airbnb said it kicked off 622 hosts as part of the effort in November. The cuts helped portray a rosier picture of its New York City operations in the data released in December. The company had not outlined the extent of its removals when it initially presented the data publicly. The deleted listings accounted for about 4 percent of those offered in the city. Josh Meltzer, the company\'s head of public policy in New York, wrote in the letter to legislators that the listings "did not reflect Airbnb\'s vision for our community." Airbnb has faced questions from city officials who have said real-estate developers are using Airbnb to rent out homes instead of selling them to permanent residents. The practice risks driving up housing prices. Airbnb defeated a proposal in San Francisco last year that would have restricted the company\'s business in its hometown. Airbnb spent $8 million to fight the effort. "In New York City, where housing prices and availability are a critical issue, we want to work with our community and policymakers to help prevent short-term rentals from impacting the availability and cost of permanent housing for city residents," Meltzer wrote in the letter. "While home sharing has been around for centuries, our people-to-people home sharing platform is new. And Airbnb is a young company. We have learned that a one-size fits all approach to cities will not work." Along with the letter to New York lawmakers, Airbnb released updated data on its operations in the city. Of hosts renting their entire homes in New York City, 38 percent of revenue came from those listing two or more homes on the website. Hosts with six or more homes on Airbnb generated 6 percent of revenue.',
"Salesforce quarterly revenue beats Wall St expectations: Salesforce.com Inc reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and raised its full-year revenue forecast, saying customers were stepping up purchases of its web-based sales and marketing software despite economic uncertainty.Shares of the world's largest maker of online sales software rose 7.2 percent to $67 in after-hours trading.The company raised its full-year revenue forecast to $8.08 billion-$8.12 billion, from $8.0 billon-$8.1 billion, and said forecast adjusted profit of 99 cents to $1.01 per share. Revenue rose 25.3 percent to $1.81 billion, above analysts' estimate of $1.79 billion. In the fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, revenue from sales cloud - a suite of software that allows companies to track leads, forecast and collaborate around sales opportunities - rose 12.3 percent to $708.9 million. The net loss narrowed to $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, from $65.8 million, or 10 cents per share, a year earlier.",
'HP Inc says to accelerate job cuts by 2016: HP Inc said it was accelerating its restructuring program and now expects about 3,000 people will exit by the end of fiscal 2016 instead of over three years as it announced in September. Then, Hewlett-Packard Co had said it expected to cut about 33,300 jobs over three years, of which up to 3,300 were to be cut in HP Inc. It said then that 1,200 people would leave the company by the end of 2016. The restructuring will result in charges and associated cash payments of about $300 million in the current year, the company said. "This move is basically HP Inc embracing the tough pricing environment and shifting their focus to building their portfolio," says Shannon Cross, an analyst for Cross Research. HP Inc (HPQ.N), which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co\'s legacy hardware business, reported a near 12 percent drop in quarterly revenue, as it struggles with weak demand for PCs and printers. Revenue in the company\'s personal systems business fell 13 percent in the first quarter ended Jan. 31, while it declined 17 percent in its printing division from a year earlier. PC sales have been falling sharply worldwide, and the launch of Windows 10 has so far failed to rekindle demand. Printer demand has been hurt as corporate customers cut printing costs and consumers shift to mobile devices.',
'Google Fiber Is Finally Coming to San Francisco: Google Fiber is coming to its own backyard. Well, in moderation. On Wednesday, the high-speed broadband and cable business, announced that it will start servicing some apartments, condos and affordable housing units in San Francisco, the urban hub north of its Silicon Valley headquarters. It s not saying how many connections, when they ll come or how much they ll cost.But it is definitely coming, unlike other cities where Fiber has said that it is exploring an arrival. That makes San Francisco among the largest metropolitan areas for Fiber, which has, so far, kept to smaller cities clamoring for its service (and where it can more quickly gain broadband market share).It s a symbolic entry landing near Silicon Valley as well as a commercial one: The city is full of tech companies and techies that have also clamored for super fast Internet.Comcast* and AT&T, two of Fiber s chief competitors, have both announced intentions to bring gigabit Internet to the city. While Fiber has primarily focused on residential lines, it could expand into enterprise services, something Comcast has made a push for.Google is accelerating its enterprise business, which includes a team dedicated to getting startups on Google services. It s not clear if that includes Fiber, which is housed under the Access subsidiary of Google s Alphabet. ',
'Wow! Facebook s New Reactions Are Here, but Still No Dislike Button. Facebook has been testing alternatives to the company s now-famous Like button for a few months, and it s ready to bring those alternatives to the masses. The company is rolling out new reactions like wow, sad and haha to U.S. users beginning Wednesday and the rest of the world shortly after, according to Tom Alison, engineering director for News Feed. It started testing these responses in countries like Spain and Ireland last fall, and while the company said at the time that it was open to adding more emotions it looks like it stuck with the same six it started with. Getting to those six was actually a lengthy process, said Alison. The company has been working on reactions for a year, and crafted the new options based on data about which stickers and user comments were most popular on Facebook. You ll quickly notice what s not included in the new list of reactions: A dislike button. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially said Facebook was building one, but it turns out that wasn t actually the case. (Angry!) I think anger and sad actually covered a lot of what we saw people trying to convey, Alison explained. Why change the Like feature at all Engagement. You may not feel comfortable Liking a sad update in your feed, so Facebook wants to give you other options. Alison said it s a little early to tell if engagement increased in countries where Facebook has been testing the new reactions, which probably means it hasn t. (Facebook would likely broadcast it if engagement were up.) The new feature will be available on iOS and Android phones beginning Wednesday as part of a free app update.',
"Uber China Rival Didi Kuaidi Raising $1 Billion at Valuation of More Than $20 Billion: Didi Kuaidi, the biggest ride-hailing company in China, has received at least $1 billion in commitments for a new fundraising round, according to a person familiar with the matter. Once the financing closes, it would value the Uber rival at more than $20 billion, said the person, who asked not to be named because the terms aren't final. The round is oversubscribed, and the company is still negotiating terms with investors, the person said. Didi Kuaidi declined to comment. Didi Kuaidi is spending heavily on adding new drivers and offering competitive fare prices as it aims to stay ahead of Uber Technologies Inc. in China. Uber spent more than $1 billion in the country last year and plans to spend a comparable amount in 2016. In the first three quarters of 2015, Uber lost $1.7 billion, much of that going toward expansion in Asia, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in January. Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick said last week that the company is profitable in the U.S., according to Canadian technology blog BetaKit. It's unclear how the metric was calculated. Didi Kuaidi raised $3 billion last year at a $16.5 billion valuation. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the Chinese company's latest fundraising round. To take on Uber, Didi Kuaidi has formed an international coalition with the likes of Lyft Inc. in the U.S. and Ola in India. Uber was last valued by investors at $62.5 billion, and the company has raised more than $10 billion in the five years since it started picking up passengers.",
'European Tech Scene Begins to Feel Silicon Valley s Woes: At the offices of Deliveroo, a food delivery start-up with headquarters in an upmarket neighborhood here, signs of activity are everywhere. The communal kitchen hums with 20-something developers. A gold-painted scooter, which the co-founder William Shu once used to make deliveries, stands in the center of the office as people bustle about. The frenetic pace belies a more cautious approach that Mr. Shu, 36, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, has recently started taking at the start-up.Over the last year, Mr. Shu has urged colleagues to be more circumspect with growth plans, forgoing rapid expansion in competitive markets like the United States to focus on places where Deliveroo already has a loyal following. And while the start-up has raised almost $200 million, employs roughly 400 people worldwide and operates in 12 countries, Mr. Shu says profitability and not just aggressive growth to beat rivals to new markets is increasingly important as the company moves beyond its British roots. The focus at Deliveroo is symptomatic of a change across many European start-ups. Just as in Silicon Valley, where a number of privately held tech companies have been stung by lower valuations and investor questions about their sustainability, that same unease has now reached Europe s tech community, in a sign that a move away from soaring boom times in start-ups is going global. Driving the pullback are some of the same forces that have caused a change in Silicon Valley s start-up scene. Tech stocks are gyrating because of fears of a global economic slowdown exacerbated in Europe by the region s migrant crisis and persistent financial problems. Valuations of some start-ups worldwide got ahead of themselves. As a result, venture capitalists in Europe and farther afield are becoming more cautious about funding local start-ups that do not have proven business ideas. When Silicon Valley sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, said Fred Destin, a partner at the London office of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. It s only a matter of time before Europe faces the same issues that we re seeing on the West Coast. In Europe, that is leading to situations like that of Powa Technologies. Last week , Powa, an e-commerce company based in London, entered into administration, a form of bankruptcy. The start-up had raised $175 million since 2013 but had failed to win enough customers for its mobile shopping technology. Deloitte, which is overseeing the sale of the company s assets, says it is now working to find buyers for the business. Truecaller, a Swedish start-up that had raised around $80 million for its caller ID smartphone application, recently laid off about 20 percent of its staff. A company spokesman declined to comment on the layoffs and said Truecaller remained committed to its business. And SwiftKey, a popular predictive typing smartphone application used by more than 300 million people worldwide, was bought by Microsoft this month for a reported $250 million, which was significantly less than what many of SwiftKey s investors had expected. You can already see more hesitance and lower valuations, Christian Reber, founder of 6Wunderkinder, a German start-up bought by Microsoft last year, said in an email. The market correction will continue, and that s not necessarily a bad thing. ',
'MasterCard will let you to take a selfie to complete purchases: MasterCard wants to use your face to help fend off fraudsters. Using a new system called MasterCard Identity Check -- or, colloquially, "selfie pay" -- the credit card company will use biometric methods like face recognition and fingerprint scans to better secure online shopping. Right now, Mastercard offers a feature that financial institutions can enable that lets customers set up a password for online payments to help prevent fraud. The new system will use the same principle, but instead of relying on a password that could be forgotten or stolen, it uses your face or fingerprint. Consumers will go through all the normal steps of filling out credit card information when making an online purchase, but this feature adds another step: The website will send a notification through an app on customers\' smartphones that asks them to verify their identity. This can be done either through a fingerprint scan or by using the phone\'s camera to take a brief, selfie-like, video. When taking the "selfie," the user will have to blink to prove that it\'s a live person and not just an old photo being used to spoof the system.',
"Lenovo aims at mature markets with new 'augmented reality' phone: China's Lenovo Group is ready to break into mature markets this summer with the launch of its new smartphone which sports 'augmented reality' features developed under Google's Tango project, its chief executive said on Tuesday. The device, which was announced at the 2016 CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in January, will launch in July, Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Declining to give additional information he said that the phone will include Google's Project Tango technology and more. Project Tango combines 3D motion tracking with depth sensors to give a mobile device the ability to know where it is and how it moves through an area, creating the potential to use augmented reality features on the phone. Augmented reality software then overlays text or graphics on the real-life image. It differs from virtual reality, which seeks to simulate real-world views.",
'Tech IPO Freeze Is Sign of Investor Reality Check: The tech IPO market is frozen. Storage vendor Nutanix is further proof. It\'s been over three months since Square and Match Group debuted, and not a single software or Internet company has followed. Seven of the past 10 technology companies to go public are trading below their offer price, and four are down by at least 20 percent, according to FactSet. Nutanix, which filed its IPO prospectus in December, is holding off on selling shares until the stock market volatility wanes, said sources familiar with the matter. The developer of data center technology that wraps together storage, servers and virtualization was set to go public in late January, but has been advised by its bankers to wait for the market to calm, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. No other high-profile tech companies are publicly on file. Last month, online lender Elevate Credit delayed its IPO due to market conditions, as January marked the worst month for the Nasdaq since 2010. The index is still down 8.5 percent to start the year even after rallying over the past week. For Silicon Valley\'s financiers, this is all troubling. Big IPOs are their lifeblood. That\'s how venture investors make outsized profits and justify the billions of dollars they pour annually into start-ups that ultimately go bust or fail to generate returns. Last year should have been a banner year for IPOs. The Nasdaq topped 5,000 for the first time since 2000, and rose for the fourth consecutive year. Investors expressed appetite for risk, bidding up Amazon.comand Netflix, the year\'s two best large-cap performers. Yet, tech companies went public at the slowest pace since 2009. Instead of IPOs, the highest growth companies were raising mega-rounds of cash in the private market at valuations and revenue multiples that exceeded what public investors were paying. Hedge funds and private equity firms distorted the IPO cycle, putting piles of cash into companies but without rewarding early investors and employees the way public offerings do. Late-stage private financing almost doubled from $8.9 billion in 2013 to $16 billion last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association, with companies including Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX and SoFi each reeling in at least $1 billion. That could mean a painfully dilutive private investment round, selling the business at a loss to some investors or going public at a price below what earlier investors paid. "People just have to get real," said Golden, a managing partner at Revolution Ventures in San Francisco and former director of JPMorgan\'s technology investment banking practice. "When markets are speaking, we may not like what they\'re saying but we have to listen."',
'Etsy Shares Spike 13% As It Reports Strong Revenue In Fourth Quarter: Etsy didn t have a good 2015, but it was still able to finish on the stronger side. Today the company reported its fourth-quarter results, coming in at $87.9 million in revenue and a loss of 4 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 1 cent per share on revenue of $86.5 million. Another important number to track here was the company s gross merchandise sales (GMS), which rose 21.3% to $741.5 million from $611.5 million in the fourth quarter last year. Shares of Etsy were up as much as 13% in extended trading following the report. Still, it s partially a recovery from the day where shares ended down around 7% before the company reported earnings. t s also a strong finish amid the fresh 2015 IPOs, which was one of the weakest years for the IPO market since 2009. Even with the strong showing, Etsy is still trading well below its IPO price but it is certainly not alone. The fourth quarter was an important one for Etsy it had to show investors that it could post a strong holiday quarter and bring in new people who would buy gifts and other products on Etsy. It looks like investors were pleased by its ability to beat on revenue and bring in some new buyers and sellers. It also had to show that it could continue to bring those buyers and sellers in through despite its brand as an artisanal marketplace that is quite different from others like eBay. Etsy is also continuing to navigate a shift to more mobile sales, with mobile visits accounting for 61% of the company s overall visits, and 44% of gross merchandise sales coming from mobile devices. This is all pretty good news for the company. In general, Etsy has not had a good year. Shortly after its IPO the stock hit around $30, but has since cratered to under $8. Today, obviously, didn t help. To be sure, a lot of companies haven t been having a good year due to a few things outside their control like global economic issues and foreign exchange problems but Etsy in particular is getting hit hard by investors.',
'A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D.: While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls. It s remarkable what they can do, said Blair Hull, a founder of an electronic trading firm who relies on Jane Street to make a market for his recently started E.T.F. If you look at who provides this kind of liquidity these days, it s fewer and fewer firms. It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion. And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm s capital. In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop. Here is a small sample of Jane Street s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon). Jane Street was founded at the beginning of the previous decade, when a couple of option traders and a computer expert left Susquehanna to start their own business. Harnessing Ph.D.-toting mathematicians to the most powerful computers money can buy has become the accepted way for hedge funds and banks to get a trading edge these days, but Jane Street takes this marriage of high tech and high intellect to a new level. Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders. Indeed, new traders must complete a monthlong OCaml boot camp before they start trading. And to the degree that the super-shy Jane Street does has have a public face, it belongs to its chief technology officer, Yaron Minsky, who givesfrequent lectures at Harvard, M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, promoting the firm s ability to manage risk by developing the best software around.',
'A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care: John Costik got the call at the office in 2012. It was his wife, Laura, with terrible news: Their 4-year-old son, Evan, was headed into the emergency room. His blood sugar reading was sky high, about 535 mg/dl, and doctors had discovered he had Type 1 diabetes. The first three days in the hospital were a blur during which the Costiks, engineers in Rochester, received a crash course in managing the basics of diabetes care.For starters, they were told to log their son s numbers on paper forms. It was their first hint that diabetes management did not occupy a place on technology s bleeding edge. The methods for guesstimating carbohydrate intake also seemed imprecise, Mr. Costik found, and the process generated a lot of wasted data. The last thing you want to do is find some form and fill it out, he said. You re really just emotionally trying to cope with it, and that data in that book isn t necessarily useful to the people with diabetes. Several months later, Mr. Costik fitted his son with a Dexcom G4 continuous glucose monitor. A hair-thin sensor under Evan s skin recorded an exact blood sugar reading at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day.But all that data left with Evan every morning when he headed off to day care. Mr. Costik wanted something better: continuous access to his son s glucose readings.So he examined the device s software code and wrote a simple program that transmitted the monitoring data to an online spreadsheet he could view on a Web browser, Android mobile phone or, eventually, his Pebble smartwatch. Now, as consumer gadgets weave themselves ever more tightly into everyday life, patients and their families are finding homespun solutions to problems medical-device manufacturers originally did not address. Industry executives say the pace of user-driven innovation was one reason the Food and Drug Administration recently reclassified remote glucose-monitoring devices, hastening approval for new models by big companies like Dexcom and Medtronics. James Wedding, a civil engineer who lives outside Dallas, saw Mr. Costik s Twitter post and used his code to set up a remote monitor system for his daughter, Carson, who is now 12. Lane Desborough, an engineer in California, got in touch with Mr. Costik after seeing his tweet, ultimately creating an open-source system based in part on Mr. Costik s code. It allows anyone to hack existing glucose monitors so they transmit readings to the cloud, where they can be read by patients and caregivers.Mr. Desborough called the project Nightscout. The Nightscout group onFacebook, known as CGM in the Cloud, provides free tech support for users trying to improve on monitoring devices.About two dozen users have even started a project called Open APS, in which they are pairing insulin pumps with glucose monitors in an effort to create an open-source artificial pancreas system. These wearable devices, which automate insulin delivery, are being tested in academic settings, but these early adopters are not waiting for the results of those continuing clinical trials.Mr. Costik now works at the Center for Clinical Innovation at the University of Rochester, where he works to improve management options for all patients; Mr. Desborough is now the chief engineer at Bigfoot Biomedical, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that plans to create an artificial pancreas.',
"Fitbit Forecasts Miss Estimates on Global Rollout of New Devices: Fitbit's current-quarter profit forecast missed Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, as the wearable fitness device maker aggressively invests in new products, sending its shares down more than 16 percent in after-hours trading. The lackluster guidance overshadowed the company's comfortable quarterly revenue and profit beat in the holiday shopping season. Fitbit has been diversifying its portfolio of colorful wristbands and clippable devices that track calories, sleeping patterns and heart rate, to better compete with rivals as well as to tap new markets and demographies.The company last month unveiled its $200 smartwatch, Blaze, to mixed reviews. Earlier this month, Fitbit announced a new wristband, Alta, to appeal to the more fashion-conscious customer. Fitbit's net income attributable to common stockholders rose to $64.2 million, or 26 cents per share, in the quarter, from $11.9 million, or 19 cents per share, a year earlier.On an adjusted basis, the company earned 35 cents per share. Revenue nearly doubled to $711.6 million from $370.2 million.Analysts on average had expected a profit of 25 cents and revenue of $647.8 million. Fitbit's revenue forecast of $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion and adjusted profit of $1.08-$1.20 per share for 2016 was largely in line with expectations.Shares of the San Francisco-based company were down 15 percent at $14.04 in after-hours trading on Monday after closing up 5.9 percent.The stock, which has lost nearly 70 percent of its value since hitting a high in August, has been trading below the June IPO price of $20 all this month.",
'Amazon Raises Minimum Order Size as It Seeks More Prime Buyers: Amazon.com Inc. is increasing the minimum order size for free shipping to $49 from $35, a step that could encourage more consumers to sign up for Prime, the online retailer s annual service that includes two-day deliveries. The benefit of getting more people to sign up for Prime services -- for $99 a year -- is that they tend to shop more frequently and spend more money, while access to other perks such as online movies, music and other content helps to keep customers within Amazon s shopping ecosystem. By encouraging non-Prime customers to spend more on a single order, Seattle-based Amazon is also aiming to reduce costs while boosting profits on each sale. The new threshold follows a 33 percent jump in fulfillment costs -- warehousing, packaging and shipping -- in the fourth quarter, which outpaced a 15 percent increase in product sales. Monday s price increase is the first since 2013, when Amazon raised the threshold to $35 from $25. Amazon s new minimum order size for free shipping brings it in line with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. s online store, which has a threshold of $50, or free pickup in stores. Target Corp. has a $25 minimum, while it s $35 at startup Jet.com Inc.',
'New Chinese Rules on Foreign Firms Online Content: China is taking another step to restrict what can be posted on the Internet in its country by issuing new rules barring foreign companies or their affiliates from engaging in publishing online content there without government approval. The rules, which were jointly released this week by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that beginning March 10, foreign companies or foreign joint ventures will be restricted from disseminating a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, animation, audio and video. The rules also apply to digitized books, art, literature and science. The new regulations would allow foreign-owned companies to cooperate with a Chinese partner to publish content on the Web in China, but they must get government approval. China already has some of the world s most restrictive policies on the dissemination of information. Chinese TV and the news media are censored; the government has censors monitoring popular social media platforms, like WeChat; and American Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been blocked in China for years. One key question is the impact such regulations would have on companies like Apple and Microsoft, which run online platforms in China that provide services and sometimes content. For example, Apple s Chinese App Store offers games and other apps in the country while Microsoft has a joint venture through which it provides a cloud version of Windows and Office software. Internet companies, like Akamai and Cloud Flare, have operations that work to speed traffic to foreign websites or host them through servers in China.',
'Apple Still Holds the Keys to Its Cloud Service, but Reluctantly: In Silicon Valley if not Washington Apple is being hailed for digging in its heels on a court order requiring it to aid the Federal Bureau of Investigation in gaining access to an an iPhone used by one of the attackers in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Timothy D. Cook, Apple s chief executive, emphasized on Tuesday in a letter to customers that helping the F.B.I. essentially hack into one of the company s own phones would be a dangerous precedent. What s more, Apple said it would have to create new software to do this. But while company executives have embraced the notion that Apple is no longer able to intervene for law enforcement when investigators want access to an iPhone, it has repeatedly cooperated with court orders for access to online services like its iCloud. That may sound like hypocrisy, but to people familiar with how Apple s products and services work, it is simply a matter of technology. ICloud is an Internet service Apple customers can use to back up information that is stored on their devices. It is helpful if your phone, tablet or computer is lost or badly damaged. And it, like other online services, is a gold mine for law enforcement as the government spying revelations by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden showed. Every few months for the last few years, tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have published transparency reports, which are lists of instances in which a company turned over data on users at the behest of a court order in the United States or other countries.In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2015, Apple received nearly 11,000 requests from government agencies around the world regarding information on roughly 60,000 devices. Apple provided some data in roughly 7,100 of those requests, the report said.Apple has stated repeatedly that it would hand over data to comply with a court order when it is technically able to do so. And as that report indicates, it has. Often.But the operative phrase to understand the difference between Apple s cooperation and its resistance is technically able. In the fall of 2014, with an update to its iOS software, Apple switched off its ability to retrieve data from its phones and tablets. By doing this, Apple tried to take itself out of the equation when law enforcement is looking for access to a phone. In essence, the company could no longer fulfill a request if it was technically unable to do so.ICloud is a different story. Apple encrypts that data on its servers and holds on to the key, which it uses to gain access to the data when it is required to do so by a court order.There are practical reasons for managing security in the cloud differently from on an iPhone. ICloud exists, in part, to save backups in the event that, say, you drop your phone in a swimming pool. Apple needs to have that key to get your data back for you.It is not so easy for a company to take away its ability to gain access to your information when that company s ability to retrieve your information is the reason you are using its service.',
'Facebook Brings 360 Dynamic Streaming To Samsung Gear VR, Forms Social VR Team: Zuck shocked everyone by appearing on stage for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event for MWC 2016. He wasn t there to push Samsung s new phones or talk about Messenger, his time onstage was all about virtual reality. Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (which, in case if you ve forgotten, is the parent company of Oculus) will be bringing its dynamic streaming technology for 360 video to Gear VR (which, in case if you ve forgotten, is powered by Oculus). This technology allows significant performance upgrades to streaming content by only playing back what s in view of the headset at any given time rather than processing the entire 360 sphere of video at once. All of this is done by seamlessly switching between dozens of variants of each 360 video taken from multiple angles. Facebook revealed more about the technology at its Video @Scale event last month. The results speak for themselves, Facebook says their efforts have quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x. Another interesting tidbit comes from a Facebook blog post today they re building a social VR team to focus entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR. ',
'Uber Driver Held in Killing Spree as Police Probe Tie to Routes: A driver for Uber may have picked up passengers in between incidents as he drove around and shot at least six people dead over the span of several hours, according to police in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While there have been other incidents of misconduct by Uber drivers, the Michigan shooting would be the first to involve a mass shooting. In order to become an Uber driver, Dalton would have undergone, and passed, a background check. Uber said it s referring inquiries regarding the routes to police given that there is an active investigation. We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence, Joe Sullivan, Uber s chief security officer, said in a statement. We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can. ',
"Yahoo launches auction process as Starboard gears up for fight: Yahoo Inc officially launched the sale of its core business on Friday, a move seen as a positive step for frustrated investors but not enough to keep an activist hedge fund from pursuing a proxy fight against the struggling Internet company.Yahoo shares jumped after the company announced its board has formed a committee of independent directors to explore strategic alternatives, and that it has hired investment banks and a law firm to run the process. The launch of the auction process, a move activist hedge fund Starboard Value and other shareholders have pushed since late last year, showed the company was moving another step closer to selling its core business, which includes search, mail and news sites, rather than spin it off as previously planned. The move follows more than three years of effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to turn around Yahoo by focusing on mobile apps and trying to boost advertising revenue. Yahoo had acknowledged during its earnings last month that it was open to exploring options for its core business. Despite the launch, Starboard's founder Jeffrey Smith is not backing down, and will continue his pursuit of nominating a group of directors for the Yahoo board, people familiar with the matter said.",
'This glove could make eating easier for those with Parkinson s disease: Eating can be difficult and embarrassing for those with tremors, but GyroGear thinks it has a solution for patients suffering from Parkinson s disease or essential tremor. The start-up has created a glove that steadies a person s hand, making it easier to complete everyday tasks such as eating. The glove s power lies in a bronze disc on the back of the hand, which weighs about as much as a roll of nickels. It spins at up to 20,000 rotations per minute, providing a steadying force. The force of the battery-powered disc is akin to putting one s hand in molasses. While moving is not as easy, the benefit is that much of the shaking is naturally filtered out. GyroGear is aiming to reduce tremors by 70 percent. In one lab test, the London-based researchers say, it reduced a tremor by 90 percent. GyroGear founder Faii Ong was inspired by a 103-year-old hospital patient who couldn t eat without spilling food. While cleaning her up, the medical student at Imperial College started to brainstorm solutions. Ong cautions that there s still work to be done. The glove hasn t been tested by outside parties, but they plan to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the year. They also hope to begin selling the product by year s end and are raising funds from investors. The idea of simple, wearable devices to treat tremor and to avoid the side effects from medications or alternatively the dangers of surgery is very appealing to patients and health care providers, said Michael S. Okun, medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation. The GyroGlove is an interesting idea, however many of these types of devices fall short of the expectations especially when faced with very severe and disabling tremor. There are other efforts to use mechanical solutions to aid those with Parkinson s disease. Lift Labs, a start-up that Google acquired in 2014, has devised a vibrating spoon and fork to counteract tremors and make eating easier. While having shown promise for mild tremors, Okun said it hasn t proven the most effective solution for more severe cases. In the long term GyroGear is interested in adapting its glove to other uses, such as for surgeons, physical therapists, photographers or anyone seeking to keep a steady hand.',
'Uber is profitable in the US, but is losing $1 billion a year to compete in China: Uber is burning through more than a billion dollars a year in China as it wages a fierce price war against local rival Didi Kuaidi, its chief executive said. The company\'s Chinese business boosted its valuation last month to more than $8 billion after raising more than $1 billion in its latest funding round, but the U.S. ride-hailing app is not yet profitable in mainland China because of the intense competition. "We\'re profitable in the USA, but we\'re losing over $1 billion a year in China," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Canadian technology platform Betakit. "We have a fierce competitor that\'s unprofitable in every city they exist in, but they\'re buying up market share. I wish the world wasn\'t that way." The $1 billion figure was confirmed by Uber officials in China in an email to Reuters on Thursday. Uber and China\'s Didi Kuaidi, backed by Chinese technology giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, have both spent heavily to subsidise fares to gain market share, betting on China\'s Internet-linked transport market becoming the world\'s biggest.',
'Facebook Plans To Put Ads In Messenger: A leaked document Facebook sent to some of its biggest advertisers reveals that Facebook will launch ads within Messenger in Q2 2016. The document, obtained by TechCrunch but kept private to protect its verified source, says businesses will be able to send ads as messages to people who previously initiated a chat thread with that company. To prepare, the document recommends that businesses get consumers to start message threads with them now so they ll be able to send them ads when the feature launches. The document also notes that Facebook has quietly launched a URL short link fb.com/msg/ that instantly opens a chat thread with a business. Facebook confirmed the existence of the URL short link. That seems to back up the validity of the leaked document. Messenger is one of Facebook s most popular and fastest-growing products, with 800 million monthly active users. Yet the social network has never monetized it directly before. Thankfully for users, Facebook isn t going to let brands send ad messages to just anyone or even people who ve liked their Pages. Only those who have voluntarily chatted with a business can be sent ads. This should somewhat limit the spam potential and annoyance. Right now, almost all messages come from one s friends, so Facebook will likely try to preserve this high signal-to-noise ratio with limits on advertising.',
'Secondary Shops Flooded With Unicorn Sellers: Until recently, shares of some of the highest-flying unicorn companies have been so hard to come by that secondary buyers have battled each other, not to mention other investors, to acquire some of the startups common shares. As the fortunes of billion-dollar companies like Evernote have fizzled, however, so has their shareholders enthusiasm. Says the cofounder of one secondary shop who asked not to be named, We aren t seeing huge discounts yet in the top 10 names, but people are trying to dump them. It s not just one person calling you about a particular company. It s four. Says another secondary investor, who also asked not to be identified for this story, We re seeing an enormous uptick in inbound selling interest. The situation is changing so quickly that several people with whom we spoke say a number of new characters are now peddling shares of so-called A List companies whose shares would have been beyond nearly anyone s reach six months ago. We re seeing a lot of sketchy people advertising these deals, says one insider. It didn t used to be like this. Just a year ago, demand for unicorn stock was at an unprecedented level, as were the number of companies establishing billion-dollar valuations for themselves. Unicorn coverage became a cottage industry unto itself, with tech outlets and even data analysis firms poring over which unicorns were the best employers, which companies were positioned to become unicorns, and which venture firms were the best at spotting unicorns early on, among other angles. Alas, by late August, China s market was in a nose-drive, and both late-and early-stage investors began applying the brakes. It wasn t long before non-traditional venture investors like Fidelity and Blackrock were slashing the valuations of some of the startups in the portfolio. A parade of well-reported WSJ pieces about what isn t quite right at high-flying Theranos seemed to cement what many had started to think: That many unicorns really weren t worth what their ambitious investors had settled on. (It didn t help when, last week, the human resources startup Zenefits asked its CEO to resign over sloppy and possibly damning business practices. Ten months ago, the company was valued at $4.5 billion by investors.) Partly, such nervousness owes to employees, some of whom are getting laid off as companies cut back on costs in order to lengthen their runway. These former staffers have to exercise their options within 90 days or else lose them, and they re calling secondary firms for help in figuring out what to do. Some sellers are venture capital firms that thought they could exit some of their investments in 2016 and are now concluding that they can t. (As some readers will know, the clock is always ticking on a venture fund. Most have 10 or 11 years, tops, to invest in startups and get some cash back to investors before losing the confidence of those backers.)',
'Why Carriers Want to Delete WhatsApp: Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the Mobile World Congress, an annual industry gathering held in Barcelona, to reassure phone companies that Facebook is their natural ally. He d just announced the $22 billion purchase of the WhatsApp messaging service and was touting an initiative called Internet.org, a low-bandwidth suite of basic services carriers would offer in conjunction with Facebook to get hundreds of millions of people online for the first time. He pledged to build what is going to be a more profitable model with more subscribers for carriers. By sticking together, the Facebook founder said, both sides could benefit handsomely.As Zuckerberg prepares to return to Barcelona for this year s MWC on Feb. 22, phone executives say his company looks more like a competitor than a partner. Last year, WhatsApp introduced free voice calls something Facebook already offered and both brands have messaging apps. These so-called over-the-top services cut into mobile carriers voice and texting revenue because they re offered over the Internet. Some phone companies say Facebook and its ilk are freeloaders that rely on carriers network infrastructure without spending any money to support it. WhatsApp is competing with us, not only with messaging but with voice, too, Telef nica Chief Operating Officer Jos Mar a lvarez-Pallete said in August at a telecommunications industry event in the Spanish coastal city of Santander. The premise should be, same services, same rules. Not all carriers are lining up against Facebook. The company has more than a dozen partnerships with phone companies from Paraguay to the Philippines. Many of them say teaming up with Facebook is beneficial, because it boosts data usage and has the potential to increase revenue. Millicom International Cellular, a carrier with more than 63 million subscribers in Africa and Latin America, has run promotions in certain markets where it offers free access to Facebook and Internet.org for a couple of months. The company reported last year that 33 percent of subscribers who take part end up upgrading to fee-paying data plans. Similarly, South Africa s No. 3 mobile company, Cell C, offers Facebook and WhatsApp for free in certain subscription packages, because they draw new users. If we don t innovate around these services and drive value to our customers, we run a higher risk of being left out of the future entirely, said Cell C Chief Executive Officer Jos Dos Santos in an e-mail. In the long run, say some industry analysts, WhatsApp and other alternatives shouldn t be seen as a threat to the voice service of phone companies. The typically superior sound quality of the voice calls in the apps uses lots of data. If carriers price their data offerings correctly, it could drive up revenues, says John Delaney, an analyst at researcher IDC. And when people graduate to video apps like Skype, data consumption grows exponentially. Says Delaney, What carriers resent is investing heavily and having others piggyback on their investments. ',
'Scientists created a three-armed cyborg to play the drums like no human can: Georgia Tech researchers have built a robotic arm that attaches to a drummer s shoulder and plays along. This allows drummers now equipped with three arms to play sequences that two-armed humans can t even attempt. It s a richer and more sophisticated rhythm because you can hit one more thing, said Gil Weinberg, director of the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech. The robotic arm is capable of hitting a drum up to 20 times per second, a rate that s impossible for humans. And it never needs a break. The computerized arm listens to the sound of the human playing and improvises to accompany the beat. Currently it can t be programmed to play specific songs. The robotic arm will generally mirror the volume and speed that the human is playing. Weinberg stopped short of saying the three-armed solution is presently better than what a drummer can do with two hands. The arm, finalized last week, hasn t been tested yet to see how it complements professional drummers. Weinberg s next step is having drummers wear a brain-scanning headband, and see whether the robotic arm can interpret their intentions and play exactly what they desire. Since 2006, he has worked to create memorable music through artificial intelligence. In one project, Weinberg built a robotic prosthesis for a drummer who lost an arm in an accident.',
'Zenefits Scandal Highlights Perils of Hypergrowth at Start-Ups: Zenefits may be among the first of several cautionary tales to highlight a sobering lesson: For a start-up, growing too quickly can produce just as spectacular a failure as growing too slowly. Zenefits is a three-year-old company that makes software for small businesses. In its short life span, it has been called both the most unsexy company in tech, and one of the most promising.Its investors have argued that Zenefits, which makes money by acting as a health-insurance brokerage firm for its customers, has the potential to cut the red tape that small businesses have to battle to provide benefits for their employees.These grand promises were bolstered by Zenefits early growth. Its annual recurring revenue an accounting measure preferred by subscription-based software companies reached $1 million by the end of 2013, the year Zenefits was founded. Recurring revenue hit $20 million by late 2014, and was projected to reach $100 million by late 2015. The exponential growth was catnip to investors. The start-up raised $500 million last year at a $4 billion valuation, one of the largest financing rounds in a year of mega-fundings. At one point, Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley s pre-eminent venture firm, had invested more in Zenefits than in any other company. In total, Zenefits has raised about $581 million. Then, last week, poof. Zenefits announced that Parker Conrad, its co-founder and chief executive, had resigned. In emails to employees, David O. Sacks, the former chief operating officer and new chief executive, explained that Mr. Conrad had overseen a company that had become derelict in its culture and ethics. Zenefits has sought to paint the executive changes as a new beginning. One person close to the company said when Mr. Sacks briefed employees on Mr. Conrad s exit last week, there were celebrations and tears of relief at the San Francisco headquarters of Zenefits. Yet the story is more complicated than the single instance of a founder s misdeeds. Zenefits recklessness seems to have been merely the worst symptom of a larger sickness that infected the company, according to investors, former employees and others who worked with the management team (and who all requested anonymity because no one in Silicon Valley wants to be seen as kicking a start-up when it s down). That sickness: Zenefits was a company consumed by impossible expectations. In return for fund-raising at a stratospheric value, Mr. Conrad promised the moon to investors. Then, to reach the moon, he began to transform a tiny start-up into a mighty rocket ship only to watch it careen out of control as it stretched to accomplish the impossible. Though many noticed trouble, neither Mr. Conrad, nor the board of directors, nor anyone else in management could afford to stop, take a breath and fix the problems. Growth was the only imperative.',
'Cybersecurity concerns - Why US Naval Academy students are learning to sail by the stars for the first time in a decade: batteries run out, systems get hacked, and even advanced technology can be balky. In a pinch or in a war sailors need something to fall back on. And stars and sextants have been working pretty well for hundreds of years. So the Naval Academy started teaching its sailors how to navigate ships by looking to the heavens again this academic year. The training was dropped altogether in 2006. I thought that we had computers and all that for navigation, Hogan, 20, a Charleston, S.C., native said this week during a class on the subject. But amid concerns about cyberattacks and new weapons that can shut off the electricity of a ship or a plane, the Naval Academy made celestial navigation a requirement for third-year students. Redundancy is the best policy, said Lt. Alex Reardon, who taught three sections of the class. Especially because, when it comes to a Navy ship on the open seas, we re typically alone in what we do. That could be a major problem in the event of a cyberattack, said Salvatore Mercogliano, an assistant professor focused on naval history at Campbell University and a former merchant mariner. During World War II, the U.S. began using land-based radio beacons known as the LORAN system to help guide ships. And the space race helped further celestial navigation s decline: The Navy sponsored the development of the first operational satellite navigation system, dubbed TRANSIT, which went into active service in 1964 providing navigation assistance for naval submarines and surface vessels. But TRANSIT was retired in the mid- 90s after the Air Force completed the modern GPS system, which uses dozens of satellites circling the globe.',
'Amazon expanding deliveries by its \'on-demand\' drivers: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is quietly inviting drivers for its new "on-demand" delivery service to handle its standard packages, as the online retailer known for low prices and razor-thin profit margins looks to speed up delivery times and tamp down its growing multi-billion dollar logistics bill.The move, which has not been announced publicly, is the latest sign that the world\'s biggest e-commerce company wants to control more of its own deliveries. Media reports have said the company plans to lease its own fleet of jets, and CEO Jeff Bezos eventually wants to use drones to get packages to customers. Amazon outlined details of its latest plan over the last few weeks in an email to contract drivers who deliver parcels for Amazon Flex, a program launched last year to handle speedy deliveries of common household goods to customers using Prime Now, a mobile app that comes with Amazon\'s popular $99-a-year Prime membership. They are not Amazon employees. If the gambit works, industry analysts said it could help Amazon contain its shipping costs, which grew more than 18 percent to $11.5 billion last year. It might also create a logistics network to compete with UPS and FedEx.',
'Blippar s New Augmented Reality App Is Supposed to Recognize Any Object You Point It At. Augmented reality app Blippar has been around since 2011, but until recently it focusedmostly on advertising and content for brands: Point your Blippar smartphone app at a bold B embossed on the pages of a magazine or a bottle of ketchup and more information would pop out on your phone s display. But it s safe to say that augmented reality is coming into a new phase: The contextual information being supplied is getting smarter, and people are gradually becoming more aware of the capabilities of AR and virtual reality (some are even excited to wear headsets, if you can believe it). So Blippar, in an effort to evolve along with the rest of the AR world, has just launched a new version of its smartphone app that is supposed to recognize literally any object you point at it whether it has been tagged with an AR code or not. Blippar co-founder and CEO Ambarish Mitra showed off the new version of the mobile app today at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif. He pointed the app at a variety of random objects a magazine, a salad and an apple to demonstrate how the app s image recognition capabilities work. This is a really big change in our business model, Mitra had said in an interview before the conference kicked off. Initially, AR was about very static image recognition. You store images of Starbucks or Coca-Cola or General Mills in our database, and the images match. But now you re able to analyze any environment in the world in real time, over a 3G connection. Mitra said over the past year and a half he has moved his technology team from the U.K. to Mountain View, Calif., to focus on machine learning, which is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now, with everyone from small upstarts to behemoths like Google trying to crack the code on how to make accurate predictions from large sets of data. (Google, actually, has an app that works similarly called Google Goggles, but it works when you point the app at a QR code or a famous landmark or something else recognizable not necessarily everyday objects.) In short, this is not an easy thing to do. In fact, ahead of the event, one of our staffers tried it out by pointing the app at his dog, and it thought the pup was a goat. Mitra has said that, right now, the technology has elementary capabilities, like the brain of a six-year-old; it can recognize car, but not Prius, or it can recognize an item of clothing, but not the label. However, with machine learning, the app should be able to get to the level of an 18-year-old pretty quickly, Mitra said, in terms of its recognition abilities. And during the onstage demo, it did properly identify a pug named Milton as a dog.',
'Virtual Reality Companies Look to Science Fiction for Their Next Play: Tech companies have spent years developing better, cheaper devices to immerse people in digital worlds. Yet they are still figuring out how to make virtual reality the kind of technology that people cannot live without. So for inspiration, they are turning to science fiction. At Oculus, a leading virtual reality company, a copy of the popular sci-fi novel Ready Player One is handed out to new hires. Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality start-up, has hired science fiction and fantasy writers. The name of Microsoft s HoloLens headset is a salute to the holodeck, a simulation room from Star Trek. Like many other people working in the tech space, I m not a creative person, said Palmer Luckey, 23, a co-founder of Oculus, which was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. It s nice that science fiction exists because these are really creative people figuring out what the ultimate use of any technology might be. They come up with a lot of incredible ideas. Those ideas are especially relevant now, as some of the biggest technology companies are nearing a major push of a new generation of virtual reality products. In the next few months, virtual reality headsets from Oculus, Sony and HTC go on sale. Venture capital money is pouring into the industry. But how people will interact with the imaginary worlds remains largely unknown territory. And that is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is shaping the language companies are using to market the technology, influencing the types of experiences made for the headsets and even defining long-term goals for developers. Science fiction, in simplest terms, sets you free, said Ralph Osterhout, chief executive of the Osterhout Design Group, which builds augmented reality glasses. Techies do not need any encouragement from their employers to read or watch science fiction, long a pillar of geek culture. The genre has influenced many corners of technology, from smartphones to robotics to space exploration. But there is something unique about the interplay between science fiction and virtual reality, a technology that is essentially an instrument for fooling people into believing they are someplace and often someone they are not. Virtual reality is a medium, like television or video games, that can borrow liberally from the virtual worlds experienced by fictional characters. Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Fla., and which counts Google as one of its big investors, has gone even further than most companies by hiring three science fiction and fantasy writers on staff. Its most famous sci-fi recruit is Neal Stephenson, who depicted the virtual world of the Metaverse in his seminal 1992 novel Snow Crash. In an interview, Mr. Stephenson whose title is chief futurist declined to say what he was working on at Magic Leap, describing it as one of several content projects underway at the company.',
"How to write emails if you want people to actually respond: Having trouble getting replies to your emails Apparently, one of the best ways to get a reply is to write as if you're 9 years old. That's according to the makers of the Boomerang mail plug-in, who found that writing at a third-grade reading level seems to be the right level of complexity for the average message, after mining their user data for information on what kind of writing actually gets replies. Here's a full list of the tips from the makers of Boomerang: Use shorter sentences with simpler words. A 3rd grade reading level works best. Include 1-3 questions in your email. Make sure you include a subject line! Aim for 3-4 words. Use a slightly positive or slightly negative tone. Both outperform a completely neutral tone. Take a stand! Opinionated messages see higher response rates than objective ones. Write enough, but not too much. Try to keep messages between 50-125 words.",
'Twitter not reliable predictor of election outcomes: study: In politics, it is said that all press is good press. But that does not necessarily apply to tweets, according to a study released this week. In fact, it is difficult to predict the outcome of an election based on the amount of Twitter buzz a candidate gets, according to the study from the Social Science Computer Review. The study, whose relevance to this year\'s U.S. election was sharply disputed by Twitter, focused on the 2013 German federal election and found that Twitter data was a more accurate measure of the level of interest in candidates rather than the level of support they will receive. The daily volume of Twitter messages referring to candidates or parties fluctuates heavily depending on the events of the day - such as televised leaders debates, high-profile interviews with candidates - or the coverage of political controversies and scandals," the study said. The data also showed that Twitter users did not necessarily reflect the demographics of the population as a whole. In the United States, social media platforms like Twitter and Yik Yak are often more popular among millennial voters. A Twitter spokesman argued the study was not relevant to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "I\'d advise passing the next time someone sends along German Twitter data from three years ago in the context of the 2016 U.S. election," said Nick Pacilio, a spokesman for the social media site\'s government and news department. Pacilio cited a Time magazine website report that showed Twitter chatter favored the winning candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, in the Iowa caucuses this month.',
'After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns The $4.5 billion benefits startup moved fast and broke things maybe even the law: In a Feb. 1 meeting at its blandly luxurious Sand Hill Road offices, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz urged the chief executive officer of one of its most prized and promising companies to resign. Zenefits makes software designed to simplify and automate such HR tasks as health insurance signups. At three years old, it s valued at $4.5 billion and is one of the fastest-growing business software companies ever. Under founding CEO Parker Conrad, it also made software that allowed its employees to skirt state regulatory requirements, the company now admits. Days after Chief Operating Officer David Sacks gave that information to Lars Dalgaard, an Andreessen partner who sits on Zenefits board, Conrad was out, say three people familiar with the matter. At Conrad s suggestion, they replaced him with Sacks, a Silicon Valley fixture who s worked at Microsoft and co-founded Yammer, the business chat company. In Zenefits early days, the people say, Conrad created a deceptive program called the Macro, which made it look like employees were watching legally mandated online training when they weren t. Workers who claimed to have completed the training may have been well short of the required 52 hours. Conrad used it himself, the people say. California regulators are investigating Zenefits use of the Macro, as well as whether its employees had licenses when they started selling insurance. On Feb. 8, Sacks announced Conrad s resignation in an internal e-mail. For us, compliance is like oxygen. Without it, we die, Sacks wrote. Many of our internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance have been inadequate, and some decisions have just been plain wrong. As a result, Parker has resigned. Conrad declined to comment. Zenefits financial issues were discussed during the Feb. 1 board meeting. Andreessen co-founder Ben Horowitz, who isn t a Zenefits director, attended. But two people close to the post-Conrad Zenefits say the Macro, not sales misses, was responsible for the CEO s resignation. At the meeting, Conrad tentatively agreed to resign, relinquish his board seat, and make Sacks CEO, say three people close to the company. People close to Conrad now say he s agitated by how Sacks s very public letters to employees have characterized his departure and blamed him for Zenefits compliance problems. The accusations that unlicensed Zenefits brokers were selling insurance became public on Nov. 25 when BuzzFeed reporter Will Alden began publishing articles on the matter. California and Washington state are investigating Zenefits sales. The company says it s cooperating with those probes and conducting its own, and it s hired PricewaterhouseCoopers for a third-party assessment. Sacks declined to comment. Two people close to Sacks say he first began to worry about the Macro s possible criminal implications in late January, after receiving new information from the internal investigation. To verify that an insurance sales applicant has completed the 52 hours of training, California requires a signature that carries a perjury charge if violated.',
'After Nearly Going Pop, Google s Project Loon Heads Into Carrier Testing This Year: Google s moonshot to deliver Internet to remote parts of the world using high-flying balloons has survived a brutal development phase, and will enter testing with carriers in Indonesia and elsewhere this year. But Project Loon almost didn t make it. Google struggled to find a balloon design that could be inexpensive and durable enough to not only float but navigate to predictably travel through the stratosphere. We busted a lot of balloons, said Astro Teller, head of Alphabet s X unit (formerly Google X), showing off some of the designs to the crowd at the annual TED conference, which kicked off Monday in Vancouver. There were shiny balloons and round balloons and balloons that looked like giant pillows. But eventually the company found a design that could be made cheaply and still navigate precisely. That balloon, Teller said, last year travelled around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we are going to keep going, Teller said, noting that what was once a slow connection has advanced enough to deliver about 15 megabits-per-second Internet access, which he pointed out is enough to deliver video such as a live broadcast of his TED talk. The next step will be seeing how it works delivering real Internet service to consumers. In addition to Indonesia, Alphabet has reached a deal with the Sri Lankan government to exchange access to needed radio frequency spectrum for a stake in the project. Alphabet is in talks with carriers around the world, Teller said, adding that the prospect is very real and that a further five billion people will have Internet access within five to 10 years. On the TED stage, Teller also talked about two moonshots that Google abandoned. The first, he said, was vertical farming, which would have used one-tenth the water and one one-hundreth of the land demanded by traditional agriculture. But although Google grew some lettuce, it never managed to grow staple crops like grain or rice. Another effort would have allowed landlocked countries to ship goods far more cheaply using a rocket-like air cargo ship that could land without a runway. The idea itself might have worked, Teller said, but just building the first unit would have cost $200 million. Even for a company with Google s riches, that proved too much to gamble. If there is an Achilles heel in one of our projects, we want to know it right now, Teller said.',
'Mattel Unveils ThingMaker, A $300 3D Printer That Lets Kids Make Their Own Toys: Autodesk was tasked with building this app which early testers, including those at Toyland, have already described as fast, easy to navigate and ridiculously intuitive. Called ThingMaker Design, the app includes a variety of built-in character templates and easy-to-use tutorials that help novices get started. But it also allows for designing characters from scratch, once kids get the hang of things. The toys can be customized with different colors and textures, and will bend and twist in the app so you can get a feel for how they ll work after they ve been printed. The creations can be saved as images to the mobile device s Camera Roll, or uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox. When a design is complete, the app lets you export the STL print files wirelessly to your at-home printer, whether Mattel s or otherwise. The idea isn t just to print an object and be done, however instead, kids will print parts that can be assembled to form larger creations, like dolls, robots, dinosaurs, scorpions, skeletons, bracelets or necklaces, for example. What s interesting here is the potential for Mattel to tie into other children s brands it already owns or licenses and bring them to life through 3D printing. That s something the company says is on the roadmap, saying it will launch additional design content, including branded options at a later date. No actual brand names were announced, however, but there were hints that brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels were already being planned. The physical parts are printed in batches then assembled through ball-and-socket joints that snap together. This process can take anywhere from 30 minutes for a small item, up to overnight (e.g. 6 6 to 8 hours) for a larger toy.Mattel says its ThingMaker 3D will use a hard PLA filament, but also hasn t yet announced the colors that will be available. According to reports from the Toy Fair, though, there were some two dozen colors on display. A spokesperson said the company may release other materials in the future.',
"India's Snapdeal raises $200 million led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan:Indian online marketplace Snapdeal has raised $200 million in a fresh funding round led by Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, the company said. The latest fund-raising follows $500 million raised last August in a round led by Alibaba, SoftBank and Foxconn.",
'SoftBank Rises the Most in Seven Years on Record Share Buyback: SoftBank climbed the most in more than seven years after the company said it will spend a record 500 billion yen ($4.4 billion) buying back stock. The stock rose as much as 15 percent to 5,040 yen as of 9:26 a.m. in Tokyo on Tuesday. SoftBank will purchase as many as 167 million shares, or 14.2 percent of its stock, using cash holdings and the proceeds of asset sales, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement Monday. The Japanese wireless carrier saw its shares drop to their lowest since buying Sprint Corp. in 2013 as Chairman Masayoshi Son struggled to persuade investors he can turn around the U.S. company. The shares were down 28 percent this year before the buyback announcement, putting SoftBank s market value well below that of its own investments in companies including Sprint and Alibaba. This is a good buyback, considering how low their valuation has fallen, said Atul Goyal, an analyst at Jefferies Group LLC. Nothing so bad happened with Sprint and Alibaba to justify the drop in SoftBank shares. ',
'Creating a Computer Voice That People Like: The challenge of creating a computer personality is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction.Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones. Voices have been added to a wide range of everyday objects like cars and toys, as well as household information appliances like the home-companion robots Pepper and Jibo, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo speaker device. A new design science is emerging in the pursuit of building what are called conversational agents, software programs that understand natural language and speech and can respond to human voice commands. However, the creation of such systems, led by researchers in a field known as human-computer interaction design, is still as much an art as it is a science. It is not yet possible to create a computerized voice that is indistinguishable from a human one for anything longer than short phrases that might be used for weather forecasts or communicating driving directions.Most software designers acknowledge that they are still faced with crossing the uncanny valley, in which voices that are almost human-sounding are actually disturbing or jarring. The phrase was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He observed that as graphical animations became more humanlike, there was a point at which they would become creepy and weird before improving to become indistinguishable from videos of humans. Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this prosody, the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language. Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results gained from employing machine-learning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech are just becoming available to speech scientists.',
'Why robots and smart thermostats keep America s spy chief up at night: Some people are already used to having their personal information exposed in massive data breaches. But the rise of artificial intelligence and connected computers in everything from toasters to implanted medical device could dramatically raise the stakes of digital security. In fact, they topped a long list of "global threats" that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper unveiled Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services committee. "The Internet of Things will connect tens of billions of new physical devices that could be exploited," Clapper wrote in his Senate testimony. "Artificial intelligence will enable computers to make autonomous decisions" that hackers could disrupt to cause chaos. For the nation\'s spy chief to place those threats so high on his list is a big deal, and it reflects how deeply concerned the intelligence community is about the potential pitfalls of these technologies. But Clapper also found a silver lining, writing in his assessment that the technology can "also create new opportunities for our own intelligence collectors." In other words, you can expect America\'s intelligence community to use driverless cars, smart thermostats and automated networks for spying purposes, too. And indeed, in the written assessment Clapper notes that "intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," in the future. Back in 2013, for example, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a company that sold web-connected cameras. The privacy watchdog alleged that faulty software packaged with the devices, which were marketed as secure, left private video feeds exposed online, eventually allowing hackers to share links to live streams from 700 customers\' homes online. More alarming is the potential for people to be able exploit devices to cause lethal results, from medical equipment to cars. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration warned hospitals not to use one kind of drug pump after researchers uncovered a flaw that "could allow an unauthorized user to control the device and change the dosage the pump delivers, which could lead to over- or under-infusion of critical patient therapies."',
'Apple May Ditch Samsung For Next iPhone Chip: Apple and Samsung have been asymmetric competitors for years, fighting to grab smartphone market share and partnering when it comes to chips. According to a recent report from The Electronic Times, TSMC (the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) will be the only company manufacturing the A10 for the next iPhone. Samsung won t be working with Apple for the next iPhone. This isn t an overnight change as Apple has already been working with TSMC in the past. The A9 chips in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are currently manufactured by both TSMC and Samsung. Before that, TSMC was the sole supplier of the A8 for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Using multiple manufacturing partners provide different advantages. First, it s a good way to make sure that you won t have any supply shortage. Given that Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones per quarter, it s unclear whether Samsung alone or TSMC alone can manufacture enough chips for all these phones. Samsung and TSMC also manufacture chips for other phones as well. Second, negotiating with multiple companies lets you get better prices. It s unclear whether Samsung is more expensive than TSMC, but Apple can drive the prices down as the A10 represents a huge contract. Finally, Apple can pick the most efficient design. TSMC s A9 was slightly better when it comes to battery life. So Apple might favor TSMC for this reason as well. According to The Electronic Times, TSMC should start production of the A10 in June ahead of the iPhone 7 release this Fall. It could feature a 10nm design. We ll have to wait for an iPhone 7 teardown to learn more about the A10. For the end customer, it doesn t change much if your iPhone chip is manufactured by TSMC or Samsung. Both companies implement Apple s own CPU design. But Samsung s chip business could take a hit from this failed contract.',
'Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself: Pandora Media, the largest Internet radio service, has held discussions about selling the company, according to people briefed on the talks. Pandora is working with Morgan Stanley to meet with potential buyers, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The talks are preliminary and may not lead to a deal, the people said. For Pandora, it would be a curious time to sell. Its shares are yielding a market value of $1.8 billion, down from more than $7 billion two years ago. The stock has fallen more than 60 percent since October. Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, and, after falling to about 78 million in the third quarter of 2015, ended the year with 81.1 million. The company is spending heavily to attract users, and its ability to make money from those users may be waning. In the third quarter, Pandora lowered its full-year financial guidance, expecting its adjusted earnings to be $51 million to $56 million, down from the $75 million to $85 million it projected in the quarter before. It has lots of users but can t grow revenue quickly enough, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. It is another stumbling pioneer. ',
'For Analysts, Loving LinkedIn Was Wrong: It s not often Wall Street says I m sorry. But after LinkedIn reported its earnings on Feb. 4, about a dozen financial analysts with varying strategies and sensibilities issued mea culpas. Some had rated LinkedIn a buy a few hours before its downgraded forecast. They watched in horror as its stock fell more than 40 percent, bottoming out below $104 on Feb. 5. Some put it more simply than others. We were wrong, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Bob Peck wrote in a Feb. 5 note downgrading the stock to neutral. (He d praised LinkedIn s odds of continued progress two weeks earlier.) Mizuho Securities lamented the company s significantly slower growth prospects, while James Cakmak at Monness Crespi Hardt said he was no longer sure even LinkedIn s slower growth would be sustainable. LinkedIn took a beating even though its earnings report was consistent with recent performance. As usual, it beat earnings expectations, then issued a lower-than-expected sales forecast for the year. It delivered a similarly disappointing projection in last year s second quarter, at which point its stock dipped 19 percent. But now Wall Street is more skeptical of the tech stocks it once assumed would grow forever. Until Feb. 5, LinkedIn looked like an ideal tech stock to own, almost like a combination of Facebook and Salesforce.com. A free network for professionals, it has the ingredients to grow virally, like a social media company. It sells services to recruiters, salespeople, and marketers, giving it several ways to snag recurring revenue. This was considered one of the preeminent names, like Facebook and Google, says Peck. Now reality is setting in, and to expand, LinkedIn has to do more difficult and expensive things, like developing and selling more product lines. When companies hit these growth walls, people just react really strongly, says Lemkin. Walls are springing up all over. On its earnings call, LinkedIn announced it had shut down Sales Accelerator, a software tool designed to connect businesses with potential customers, because of a lack of interest. Analysts had said the feature would be worth millions. LinkedIn s overall user growth slowed, it got tougher to hold on to paid users, and the company had to lean harder on its sales staff. Small factors added up, and analysts were blindsided, says Monness Crespi s Cakmak.',
'Delivery Start-Ups Face Road Bumps in Quest to Capture Untapped Market: DoorDash, one of a multitude of start-ups with a mobile app that lets people order and get food sent to their doorsteps, relies on contract drivers like Brian Navarro to make the deliveries. The problem is that workers like Mr. Navarro don t always stick around. Mr. Navarro began driving for DoorDash and another delivery start-up, Postmates, in Los Angeles about four months ago. Mr. Navarro, 40, who previously drove for the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, said he had seen plenty of contractors quit DoorDash and other delivery companies during the time he has worked with them. The issue is just one headache now troubling delivery start-ups, which have been among the hottest sectors of start-up activity in recent years. Based on a belief that the companies would succeed once they grew to enormous scale, investors poured more than $730 million into delivery firms like DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates from early 2014 through the first half of 2015, up more than 1,100 percent from the same period a year and a half ago, according to data from CB Insights, a venture capital analytics firm. But entrepreneurs and investors are beginning to find that the economics of making a delivery service work are far from easy. Good Eggs, an organic grocery delivery service, laid off more than 100 employees and shuttered its offices outside its San Francisco headquarters in August. Instacart, the grocery delivery service, recently laid off 12 recruiters, which the company said was part of an overall plan to slow down hiring after a growth spree last year. And DoorDash has been turned down by some venture capitalists as it has tried to raise new financing, according to three people familiar with the company s plans. The problems are rooted in the high operating costs of the start-ups, which typically act as middlemen between consumers and restaurants or grocery stores. The companies not only have to pay for large fleets of drivers, they also have big groups of employees who receive customer orders from the apps and who then manually make calls to the restaurants to order food. At the same time, to attract customers, many of the start-ups offer introductory prices and discounts, often making delivery free for first-time users. As DoorDash s experience with drivers shows, the start-ups costs don t necessarily decline over time. For some drivers, who are paid a fee per delivery, it can be difficult to make enough deliveries in an hour to make it financially worthwhile for them. And when drivers move on, the companies must spend again to recruit replacements.',
'Groupon Soars 23% On Favorable Earnings: Not dead yet, deal site Groupon soared 23% in initial after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings release. The company beat revenue forecasts, bringing in $917 million, instead of the anticipated $846 million, and a 9% year-over-year increase. Adjusted earnings per share was a four cents, whereas Wall Street was expecting zero. This is quite the bright spot for the company until today, the stock had been down 71% in the past year. Shares closed Thursday at $2.24, a far cry from the $20 per share the company saw when it went public in November 2011. Groupon has expanded beyond its core local deal business, acquiring services like Ideel, for fashion discounts and OrderUp, for food delivery. But perhaps until now, nothing has been able to change investor perception that the Groupon brand is tarnished. At one point, the company held acquisition conversations with Google, around a $6 billion price tag. Today, Groupon closed the day with a market cap of $1.4 billion.',
'The Difference Between Facebook and Twitter: Twitter Is Lonely for New Users: The simplest reason Facebook has built a massive gap between the two companies over the past three years is that you don t feel alone on Facebook. It s easy to find connections because everyone you ve ever met and their mother is already on the social network. (Seriously, all my friend s moms have Facebook accounts.) Posting isn t intimidating because you know who s going to see it (your approved friends), and you re almost always guaranteed some kind of feedback on what you share. It may be a pity Like from your cousin or your college roommate, but I can t recall ever seeing a Facebook post that didn t have at least one like or comment. I don t care who you are, social validation feels good. Twitter, on the other hand, is lonely, especially for new users. Unless you re a politician or a celebrity, signing up for Twitter probably means spending your first few days on the service (if not weeks or months) with close to zero followers. Tweeting into a black hole is not fun. Finding relevant conversations is not easy, and venturing into strangers conversations takes courage. It s still too hard to find people to follow when you first sign up on Twitter. The company has made it easier to follow celebrities and media organizations you might want to hear from, but finding people you might actually interact with is a massive challenge the company still hasn t figured out. I see engagement-less tweets all the time. These things hurt Twitter s growth because they push people away before they ever see benefit from the platform. That s why, as of two years ago, nearly a billion people had signed up for Twitter, most of whom never stuck around. (The numbers of deserters is probably much higher today.) The easiest way to fix this problem is to fix Twitter s feed, which does a great job funneling in a constant stream of live updates and a horrible job helping your tweets get seen. I have 11,000 followers, people I assume follow me because they want to see what I m tweeting. I tweeted 22 times last week, and my tweets were seen, on average, 3,500 times apiece. (This includes one super-popular tweet that got lots of views thanks to a retweet from an NFL player with a big following.)',
'Twitter User Growth Comes to a Halt - Stock Down After Quarterly Earnings: On Wednesday, after many quarters of slowing user growth, Twitter said its monthly visitors in the fourth quarter totaled 320 million exactly the same as the company reported in the previous quarter. While the number was up 9 percent from a year ago, when monthly active users stood at 288 million, the figures showed that Mr. Dorsey s recent moves have made little impact in attracting users. The user figures overshadowed otherwise positive fourth-quarter earnings results. Twitter reported revenue of $710 million, up 48 percent from $479 million a year ago. Net loss narrowed to $90.2 million, or 13 cents a share, from a loss of $125 million, or 20 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. But Twitter s outlook was lower than projected by Wall Street. The company estimated revenue of $595 million to $610 million in the current quarter, compared with Wall Street expectations of $628 million. Shares of Twitter have been pummeled in the last year, dropping around 67 percent. The stock declined in after-hours trading on Wednesday.',
'Facebook Disavows Marc Andreessen Comments on India, and He Apologizes: Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and board member of the social network Facebook, has long been one of its vocal supporters. On Wednesday, Facebook did not welcome that support. Hundreds of users, many of whom said they were of Indian descent, reacted negatively to Mr. Andreessen s comment and what appeared to be his pro-colonialist sentiment. The tweet has since been deleted. Facebook swiftly swatted down Mr. Andreessen s comments on Wednesday. We strongly reject the sentiments expressed by Marc Andreessen last night regarding India, Facebook said in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook s chief executive, also posted on the social network that he found Mr. Andreessen s comments deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all. He added that through his travels to India, he has gained a deeper appreciation for the need to understand India s history and culture. A spokeswoman for Mr. Andreessen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Andreessen posted new tweets in which he apologized for his previous comments, an apology he later repeated. I now withdraw from all future discussions of Indian economics and politics, and leave them to people with more knowledge and experience! he wrote.',
"Tesla expects to become profitable in 2016, shares surge: Tesla Motors Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk on Wednesday promised investors that the electric luxury car maker will start making money this year, sending the company's shares up sharply despite a wider fourth-quarter loss.Tesla shares rose more than 10 percent in after-hours trading after the company forecast a 60 to 80 percent increase in vehicle sales this year and promised it would turn a profit on an adjusted basis. It will start generating positive cash flow in March. Tesla shares are still down more than 30 percent since the beginning of the year, reflecting investor concerns about continued losses. Tesla s cash reserves dropped to $1.2 billion as of Dec. 31 from $1.9 billion a year earlier, despite a sale of shares last summer. The company s cash burn has become a concern for some analysts, given the heavy capital spending it has mapped out. The slower-than-planned launch of the company's Model X sport utility vehicle during the last quarter added $67 million in unplanned costs, Tesla said. Tesla shares rose despite a wider fourth-quarter net loss of $2.44 a share, compared with a loss of 86 cents a share a year earlier. Tesla reported an adjusted loss of 87 cents per share in the fourth quarter, while analysts expected a profit of 10 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Deliveries of Model S sedans and Model X SUVs were 17,478 vehicles in the quarter, at the low end of prior forecasts. Revenue rose nearly 27 percent to a $1.21 billion.",
"Cisco beats profit estimates, adds $15 billion to buyback: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported a bigger-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by higher demand for its routers and security products, and added $15 billion to its share buyback program. The company's shares rose 5.1 percent in after-market trading on Wednesday. The results were a bright sign for investors after several tech stocks with lofty valuations plunged in the past few days due to disappointing sales outlooks from LinkedIn Corp and Tableau Software. Cisco is shifting to high-end switches and routers and investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers. Revenue in the company's routers business rose 5 percent to $1.85 billion in the second quarter ended Jan. 23, Cisco said. Revenue in the switches business, the company's biggest, fell 4 percent to $3.48 billion. Its security business, which offers firewall protection as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems, recorded an 11 percent rise in revenue to $462 million. Cisco boosted its current share buyback plan of $97 billion, of which $16.9 billion was remaining, by $15 billion.",
"Amazon to buy back $5 billion of shares: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), the world's largest e-commerce company, said on Wednesday its board authorized a $5 billion share buyback program. The buyback replaces the $2 billion repurchase program approved in 2010. The company had $763 million remaining under the previous plan. The company's shares rose 1.5 percent to $498 in after-hours trading.",
'More Top-level churn at Flipkart: Mukesh Bansal, head of marketplace and a board member at Flipkart, and chief business officer Ankit Nagori have decided to leave the e-commerce firm barely a month after a top-level reshuffle that led to a change in the roles of the company s two founders. Separately, Flipkart announced that Nagori was also quitting the company. He had joined Flipkart about six years ago and quickly rose through the ranks. Mukesh Bansal didn t specify a date by when he would leave the company but said he would continue to be available from outside as a mentor to the team. Mukesh had joined Flipkart nearly two years ago after the e-commerce firm acquired the online apparel retailer that he had founded, Myntra. Nagori, on the other hand, plans to start his own sports venture. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal will back his new venture, said a post on Flipkart s website.',
'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.',
'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.",
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'Microsoft Plumbs Ocean s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center: Microsoft has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill. Today s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash. Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity. The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity. Such a radical idea could run into stumbling blocks, including environmental concerns and unforeseen technical issues. But the Microsoft researchers believe that by mass producing the capsules, they could shorten the deployment time of new data centers from the two years it now takes on land to just 90 days, offering a huge cost advantage. The underwater server containers could also help make web services work faster. Much of the world s population now lives in urban centers close to oceans but far away from data centers usually built in out-of-the-way places with lots of room. The ability to place computing power near users lowers the delay, or latency, people experience, which is a big issue for web users. The company recently completed a 105-day trial of a steel capsule eight feet in diameter that was placed 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean off the Central California coast near San Luis Obispo. Controlled from offices here on the Microsoft campus, the trial proved more successful than expected. The researchers had worried about hardware failures and leaks. The underwater system was outfitted with 100 different sensors to measure pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions to better understand what it is like to operate in an environment where it is impossible to send a repairman in the middle of the night. The system held up. That led the engineers to extend the time of the experiment and to even run commercial data-processing projects from Microsoft s Azure cloud computing service.',
'Tech Valuations In 2016: The End Of The Line For Sloppy Growth: What s going on in technology investing right now Is this another 2001, when tech imploded Another 2008, when the wider world crashed but tech powered through Or is it like Facebook in 2012, a valuation blip and a chance to buy High-growth companies have attracted high valuations, which allowed them to raise capital, which was then spent to generate still more growth and raise the valuation again. The result has been a self-perpetuating cycle of high burn, higher growth, still higher valuations and a strong positive feedback loop. The slop has been showing up in the numbers. The valuations of public companies already reflect this - valuations of public tech companies crashed 18 months ago. In March 2014, these high-growth companies were being valued at 12x run-rate revenues, but by mid-2014, this had declined to around 6x revenues, which is where it has remained since. The long-expected crash has, in fact, already happened almost 18 months ago. Unlike the private markets, the public markets get to rethink investment decisions every day. Over time, public investors either explicitly or implicitly realized that customer economics and the quality of growth have declined and, consequently, reduced the premium paid for excess growth. Capitalism works. The private markets, where decisions only get made once a year, have been slower to react; hence, the dearth of IPOs and the price adjustments seen as high-priced private companies come to the public markets. In 2016, any private tech company where the last percentage points of growth have only been generated at the expense of profit will no longer be able to attract capital at a high valuation. Smart companies will respond by cutting marginal investment, thus raising sales efficiency even at the expense of having a lower growth rate. We will then see the same feedback loop kick in, but in reverse. Lower valuations will result in less capital being raised, which will result in lower growth and still-lower valuations. In contrast to the rise, the decline will happen much more quickly. Bubbles build up slowly, crashes happen fast. Eventually it will bottom out as growth rates become sustainable at acceptable levels of customer economics. Sloppy growth will be out. Sustainable, smart growth will be back at least until the next time.',
'Theranos is running out of time: When Elizabeth Holmes, chief executive officer of Theranos Inc., sat down for an interview last month, she sought to address reports that sparked serious doubts about her company\'s innovative blood-testing technology. What we need to do now is focus on the technology and focus on the science and the data and put that out there, Holmes said in an interview for a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story. Because that speaks for itself. : Since then, investors, critics, and members of the medical community have been waiting. And waiting. And the news just keeps getting worse. The most recent blow comes from an inspection report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which found that Theranos\'s lab facility in Newark, Calif., is in violation of regulations on five counts. As Bloomberg News reported, the company\'s testing center inside a Walgreen\'s pharmacy in Palo Alto, Calif., has been temporarily shuttered and turned into a ghost town with a sign taped out front saying it\'s closed "until further notice." The company\'s response to this new crisis is the same as it has been all along: It says it is on top of it. How much longer it can keep saying this without losing its credibility is unclear, but it\'s safe to say that time is running out.Holmes and her story of upending the blood testing market were so powerful that Theranos was granted a $9 billion valuation through recent investment rounds and attracted a VIP roster of politically connected board members from outside the medical field, such as Henry Kissinger and William Perry. Theranos did much of its fundraising from 2003 to 2015, in the midst of an inflating Silicon Valley bubble, when billions of dollars in investor money was sloshing around. The environment has become much more difficult over the past six months, and the company may be running out of time.',
"Amazon shares plunge as record profit still misses estimates: Amazon.com Inc posted its most profitable quarter ever on Thursday but the world's No. 1 online retailer still managed to disappoint Wall Street by badly missing estimates, sending its shares down more than 13 percent in after-hours trading. The results, as well as the company's determination to invest more in new areas and its extremely low profit margins, brought back perennial questions for investors about the company's ability to consistently earn money. Amazon's net profit for the fourth quarter, which includes the holiday shopping season, rose to $482 million, or $1.00 per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31, up from $214 million, or 45 cents per share, a year earlier. Net sales rose 21.8 percent to $35.75 billion, but missed analysts' expectations of $35.93 billion. Net sales from its cloud services business, Amazon Web Services, rose 69.4 percent to $2.41 billion, compared with a growth of more than 78 percent in the third quarter. AWS continues to be the fastest growing division within Amazon. The company's total operating expenses rose more than 20 percent to $34.64 billion in the fourth quarter.",
'Microsoft beats Wall Street view on high demand for cloud products: Microsoft Corp reported quarterly revenue and profit that beat analysts\' expectations, driven by aggressive cost cutting and growing demand for its cloud products and services.Total revenue, however, fell 10.1 percent to $23.80 billion, squeezed by a strong dollar as well as a weak personal computer market that has reduced demand for Microsoft\'s Windows operating system. On an adjusted basis, revenue fell to $25.69 billion but beat analysts\' estimates. Microsoft generates more than half of its revenue from outside the United States. Microsoft\'s net income fell to $5 billion, or 62 cents per share, in its second-quarter ended Dec. 31 from $5.86 billion, or 71 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue from the "intelligent cloud" business, which includes products such as its Azure cloud infrastructure and services business along with other non-cloud products such as traditional servers, rose 5 percent to $6.3 billion. Perhaps a better indicator of its cloud strength is what the company calls its combined cloud business, on track for $9.4 billion in annual revenue, the company said. That measure, which includes Azure plus other businesses like Office 365, is up 15 percent from the $8.2 billion revenue it estimated last quarter. "They nailed the cloud," said Matt Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Ventures who monitors Microsoft closely.',
'Alibaba Falls as Sales Volume Slows, Adding to China Concern: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares fell after the Chinese online retailer reported flagging growth in sales on its marketplaces, adding to concerns about the country s economic slowdown. The shares dropped 3.8 percent to $66.92 in New York, bringing their loss for the year to 18 percent. While gross merchandise volume on Alibaba s Chinese retail marketplaces rose 22 percent to 964 billion yuan ($147 billion) in the three months ended December 31, that s less than the 28 percent increase in the prior quarter. Revenue and earnings per share beat analysts estimates in the fourth quarter because Alibaba was able to sell more ads to its merchants and better capitalize on its Tmall and Taobao platforms, he said. What s troubling is the decelerated growth in GMV, most worryingly at Tmall, where it was 37 percent this quarter, compared with 56 percent growth the previous period, Cordwell said. Plus, the boost in sales from advertising came from Alibaba catching up on monetizing its mobile platforms, a phenomenon that will end, he said. Sales of 34.5 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) rose 32%, and outpaced expectations for a 27-percent rise. The proportion of revenue Alibaba gets from outside China fell to 6 percent ',
'Facebook to Shut Down Parse, Its Platform for Mobile Developers: Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million. At one point, Facebook was willing to take those risks. When Facebook bought Parse in 2013, Facebook s stock was below its initial public offering price of $38. The company had not grown a robust mobile advertising yet, and Facebook was eager to seek out other lines of business in hopes of future profits, according to two people with knowledge of the company s plans at the time who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the company. Parse seemed like a good opportunity for expansion. At the time, Internet businesses were in the midst of a major industry change, as users were shifting away from desktop computing and increasingly relying on mobile devices. Parse, the thinking went, could provide Facebook the opportunity to be the foundation of a whole new generation of developers building mobile apps in the age of the smartphone. Things have changed. Facebook is generating record profits and its mobile advertising business is booming; 80 percent of the company s advertising revenue now comes from mobile devices. As Facebook s fortunes have turned, it has shown less interest in pursuing other lines of business outside of what it does best. Instead, the company appears intent on building things that somehow, someday, will feed Facebook s core ad-based business and those bets are going to have to get bigger and weirder Facebook also would have had to invest untold millions of dollars in capital and, more importantly, engineering talent, to get the Parse business fully off the ground to have a better chance at making a dent in competitors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.',
'Walgreens Halts Use Of Theranos California Lab: More bad news for blood analysis startup Theranos Walgreens has suspended use of the company s Newark, California lab, following news the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said that lab posed immediate jeopardy to patients. Walgreens partners with Theranos, allowing the startup to collect blood draws out of many of the drug store s Arizona locations and one in Palo Alto. The blood samples are then sent to Theranos labs. Walgreens sent a statement to explain the action: "In light of the letter dated Jan. 25 from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to Theranos, Inc., Walgreens said today that it has informed Theranos that it must immediately cease sending any clinical laboratory tests provided through Theranos Wellness Centers at Walgreens to the Theranos lab in Newark, Calif., for analysis. In addition, Walgreens is suspending Theranos laboratory services at its Palo Alto, Calif., store, effective immediately."',
"Facebook shares soar as mobile drives big jump in ad sales: Facebook smashed investors' expectations with a 52-percent jump in quarterly revenue as it sold more ads targeted at a fast-growing number of mobile users, sending its shares sharply higher after hours. Facebook shares rose almost 12 percent in after-hours trading to $105.32. The company said sales in the fourth quarter rose 52 percent from a year ago, to $5.84 billion, while profit increased to $1.56 billion, more than doubling from $701 million a year ago. For the full year, the company reported $3.69 billion in profit on $17.93 billion in revenue, an increase of 44 percent from 2014. The company has also begun monetizing some of its other units, such as photo-sharing app Instagram, which surpassed 400 million users last year and began selling ads in September. Facebook said mobile ads accounted for 80 percent of total ad revenue in the quarter, compared with about 78 percent in the third quarter and 69 percent a year earlier.The results offer a bright spot in a tumultuous climate for many American technology stocks. Shares of Twitter, Facebook s most visible social networking competitor in the United States, have tumbled more than 55 percent during the last year. Yelp, the local-review service, is down about 60 percent. LinkedIn, the professional social networking service, is off more than 15 percent. Facebook is a much larger company than many of its peers, yet it is able to keep its growth rate high. The company has notched double-digit jumps in ad revenue and in the expansion of its user base. Facebook now has 1.59 billion monthly visitors, up 14 percent from a year ago. About 1.44 billion of those people visit the site on a mobile device; 1.04 billion visit Facebook every day. ",
'EBay\'s disappointing forecast fuels stock decline: EBay forecast weaker-than-expected revenue and profit for the current quarter and full year, as the e-commerce company struggles against a strong dollar while trying to revamp its core marketplace business. Shares of the retailer fell more than 12 percent to $23.51 in extended trading on Wednesday. The online retailer, which faces intense competition from e-commerce giant Amazon.com, has also been hit by brick-and-mortar rivals like Wal-Mart Stores that are aggressively boosting their online presence. The company said its gross merchandise value, or the total value of all goods sold on its site, rose 5 percent after accounting for foreign exchange impact. In its second quarter without PayPal, eBay\'s revenue was $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, flat with a year earlier during the crucial holiday shopping season and in line with analysts\' average expectations. EBay began testing a paid shipping membership program in Germany last year, responding to shoppers\' increased demand for faster delivery. Wenig on Wednesday said there were "no plans for now" to expand the program. EBay derives nearly 60 percent of its revenue from overseas and faces headwinds from a strong dollar.',
"PayPal's revenue beats Street view on higher transactions, customers: Revenue rose about 17 percent to $2.56 billion. Payment processor PayPal Holdings Inc on Wednesday reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue, as new customer additions and payment processing volumes surged, and it announced a buyback of $2 billion of its stock. PayPal said it expects 2016 full-year earnings of $1.09 to $1.14 per share, and revenue growth of 16-19 percent on a currency neutral basis. It expects currency fluctuations to impact net revenue by 3 percentage points during the year. The company's share buyback program was a reminder of the strength of its free cash flow. PayPal ended the year with $5.7 billion in cash reserves. PayPal's net income rose to $367 million, or 30 cents per share, from $286 million, or 23 cents per share. Shares of PayPal, which completed its spin-off from eBay Inc in July, rose 6.4 percent to $33.66 in extended trade.",
"Samsung Electronics warns of difficult 2016 as smartphone market peaks: Tech giant Samsung on Thursday warned of possible weaker earnings this year compared with 2015 due to softer sales of gadgets such as smartphones, a trend that is also hurting rival Apple and major chipmakers. The South Korean firm's warning came a day after Apple shares fell more than 6.5 percent, the biggest percentage drop in two years, as the iPhone maker forecast its first quarterly sales drop in 13 years.",
"Qualcomm forecasts weak profit as demand slows for mobile chips: Qualcomm forecast current-quarter profit below analysts' expectations as demand weakens for its chips used in mobile devices in a slowing market. Revenue fell 18.7 percent to $5.78 billion. The company, whose customers include Apple, said it expected its mobile chip shipments to fall by 16-25 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. Qualcomm also expects 3G and 4G device shipments to decline by 4-14 percent, hurting its licensing revenue. The chipmaker's weak outlook comes a day after Apple forecast its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years and reported the slowest-ever rise in iPhone shipments as the critical Chinese market shows signs of weakness. Qualcomm shares fell 3 percent in extended trading on Wednesday.",
"Google ships five million Cardboard virtual reality devices: Alphabet's Google said it had shipped 5 million units of the Google Cardboard viewer, a wearable device that allows users to experience virtual reality through mobile apps. Oculus, the virtual reality company Facebook Inc (FB.O) bought in 2014, started accepting pre-orders this month for its much-awaited headset, Rift, which will ship in first quarter. Google said in November that its video-sharing site, YouTube, supported virtual reality videos. Viewers can watch virtual reality videos using a mobile device and the Google Cardboard viewer. Google said more than 350,000 hours of YouTube videos had been watched in virtual reality.",
'Theranos Lab Poses Immediate Jeopardy to Patient Health, Says U.S. Agency: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has decided that Theranos Newark, Calif., facility poses immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety. A letter sent to the company on January 25th says that the lab has been given 10 days to provide acceptable evidence of correction. Specifically, the document cites problems with the laboratory director, the technical supervisor, hematology and the lab s analytic systems. CMS has not released the laboratory inspection report that led to this letter, so the details of these infractions remain unclear. But the level assigned to these determinations Condition-level deficiencies are among the most serious that CMS can make. They mean that Theranos Newark lab was found to be in violation of accepted professional standards. CMS declined to comment on the letter.',
'Apple sees first sales dip in more than a decade as super-growth era falters: Revenue increased 1.7 percent to $75.87 billion. Apple forecast its first revenue drop in 13 years and reported the slowest-ever increase in iPhone shipments as the critical Chinese market showed signs of weakening, suggesting the technology company\'s period of exponential growth may be ending.Apple\'s guidance for the March quarter implies iPhone sales of 50 million to 52 million units in the March quarter, which would mark the company\'s first-ever decline in sales of the gadget In the same quarter last year Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones. The company reported revenue of $18.37 billion from Greater China, accounting for 24.2 percent of total revenue. Revenue from the region had nearly doubled in the fourth quarter. Apple forecast second-quarter revenue of $50 billion to $53 billion, below analysts\' average forecast of $55.5 billion. In the same quarter last year Apple reported revenue of $58 billion. While revenue in Greater China rose 14 percent in the last quarter, Apple is beginning to see a shift in the economy, particularly in Hong Kong, Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told Reuters in an interview. "As we move into the March quarter it\'s becoming more apparent that there are some signs of economic softness," Maestri said. "We are starting to see something that we have not seen before." The slowdown comes as Wall Street analysts worry the company does not have another blockbuster product to replace the iPhone. Apple does not report Watch sales, but it does not appear to have the makings of being a hit on the same level as the iPhone a year after launch. And while the company is reportedly working on a car, what it plans to do in that area and when are still unclear. The company\'s shares, which have fallen 5 percent this year, bounced around in after-hours trading and were down more than 2.6 percent. ',
'China May No Longer Be Apple s Great Firewall: The iPhone maker is feeling the effects of an economic slowdown in its most important market. China has been one of Apple\'s most reliable strongholds during its historic stretch of technology dominance. Even when sales began to level out in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, China was a buffer, promising a massive market of newly middle-class customers looking for a high-end, brand-name smartphone. Sales in Greater China grew 84 percent to $58.7 billion in 2015, making it the company\'s second-biggest market after the U.S. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook showered the region with praise at the time for its importance to the company\'s future. Apple\'s reliance on the country is now being put to the test. On a conference call with analysts after its Tuesday earnings report, Cook said the company is beginning to see "economic softness" in the region, particularly in Hong Kong. China is no longer able to offset sluggishness elsewhere or counter the broader slowdown in the global smartphone market. Even with the Chinese New Year shopping season approaching, Apple is projecting its first quarterly sales decline since 2003.',
'Apple s iPhone Grows Finally Flatlines: 0.4% Yearly With 75 Million Units Sold In Q1: Apple today reported sales of 74.8 million iPhones, 16.1 million iPads, and 5.3 million Macs in its Q1 earnings report today. Apple s first quarter includes holiday sales, as the three-month period ends December 31, 2015. As such, it was supposed to be one of Cupertino s best qrters of the year. Plus, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus both went live on September 25, meaning that Apple s next-gen flagship devices were available for the whole of this quarter. Last year at the same time, Apple sold nearly 75 million units of the iPhone, which represented 57 percent revenue growth from the year before. This quarter s sales of 74.8 million iPhones puts yearly revenue growth at just one percent for the category, and device sale growth at 0.4 percent. In terms of quarterly growth, Apple sold 56 percent more iPhones from last quarter s 48 million. Apple was expected to sell at least 75 million units of the iPhone this year, a forecast that analysts have had a very close eye on during the course of the quarter. Many fear that the iPhone may finally start declining after nearly eight solid years of growth. On the other side of the spectrum, Apple is having more difficulty cultivating the iPad line of products. The company sold 16.1 million iPads in the first quarter, down 25 percent year-over-year, but up 63 percent from last quarter. Meanwhile, the PC industry as a whole has been steadily slowing, and Apple is no exception. Apple sold 5.3 million units of the Mac, down four percent from last year.',
'Apple TV And Apple Watch (Probably) Had A Big Quarter: Apple s other category makes it difficult to assess how many Apple Watches and TVs were purchased. What we do know is that the $4.35 billion in the other category saw a big jump not just 62 percent annually, but up 43 percent since the last quarter. This means that there was a spike in sales months after the initial Apple Watch release in April. This could be because of increased holiday sales or a popular fourth generation Apple TV. Beats headphones and iPods are also included in other. Without giving specific sales numbers, CEO Tim Cook said on the earnings call that it was the best quarter by far for Apple TV sales. There are 3,600 apps available for the TV now, he said. Cook added that the company set a new quarterly record for Apple Watch sales especially strong sales in the month of December. Apple has never released specific Watch sales numbers. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu updated his Apple Watch projections "My estimate on Watch sales is about 5.5 million units during Q4. 12.4 million to date"',
"Software maker VMware to cut 800 jobs, sees weak 2016: VMware Inc forecast 2016 revenue and profit below analysts' expectations, suggesting the software maker's strong growth in new businesses was not enough to compensate for weakness in its traditional server-virtualization software. VMWare, like many technology providers, is struggling to keep pace with its customers' efforts to move key computing infrastructure to the cloud, meaning remote data centers. VMware shares fell 5 percent in extended trading on Tuesday, while EMC shares declined 1.4 percent. The company, whose flagship product helps customers cut costs by running multiple operating systems on a single server, has been hurt by slowing economic growth in markets outside the United States, which account for nearly half of its revenue. In particular, it cited weak bookings for its software in China, Russia, and Brazil. But the company noted some bright spots in newer businesses, such as NSX, which makes networking more efficient. That business is on track to generate $600 million annually, VMWare said, up from $200 million a year ago. The company's net income rose 14.4 percent to $373 million, or 88 cents per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31, helped by a 12.6 percent jump in its services revenue. Revenue increased 9.7 percent to $1.87 billion, topping the average analyst estimate of $1.85 billion.",
'A Personality Profile of Larry Page: How Larry Page s Obsessions Became Google s Business: Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him. They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun s power before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name. I m Larry Page, the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google s billionaire co-founder and chief executive. He didn t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn t be talking to me or Don t you know who you re talking to Mr. Chase said. We just talked. Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O an annual gathering where the company unveils new products is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors. But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.',
"SoftBank's Slide Leaves It Worth Less Than Stake in Alibaba: SoftBank tumbled below the value of its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. amid growing concerns about the Japanese company s other assets, including struggling U.S. wireless carrier Sprint. SoftBank s market capitalization stood at 5.89 trillion yen ($50 billion) Friday after its stock rebounded 8 percent after a four-day losing streak triggered by rising pessimism about Sprint s ability to pay down debt. That still lags the $56 billion that its stake in Alibaba is worth, according to its own website. Billionaire Masayoshi Son has struggled to turn around Sprint since buying a controlling stake in 2013 for SoftBank s biggest acquisition ever. The wireless operator lost its place as the third-largest U.S. carrier to T-Mobile US Inc. and its stock this week fell to the lowest level in more than two years. Its bonds led declines among junk-rated debt Wednesday. It s symbolic because it tells you that investors feel SoftBank has been destroying value, said Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore. Son s pride has been another major issue, which pushed him to where he is now. SoftBank lists the value of holdings in nine other public companies on its website, including Sprint and Yahoo Japan. The company calculated the total market value of those holdings as more than 8 trillion yen. ",
'Big Exec Departures at Twitter: Media Head Stanton and Product Head Weil Leaving: In a major executive upheaval, two of Twitter s top executives media head Katie Jacobs Stanton and product head Kevin Weil are departing the company, according to sources close to the situation. Neither has immediate plans to go to another company, added sources, but are expected to. Right now, the jobs of both Weil and Stanton will be filled with interim replacements. There have been rumblings of the changes for weeks now inside the San Francisco social communications company. Sources said Twitter is planning to announce the shuffle tomorrow, along with the hire of a prominent CMO.',
'Facing a Price War, Uber Bets on Volume: The U.S. operation cuts fares while promising imminent profit. It s becoming a bit of a holiday tradition for Uber: ringing in the new year by lowering fares. Amid a price war with rival Lyft, the ride-hailing leader reduced its rates by 10 percent to 45 percent in 100 cities across North America. In Detroit, Uber drivers per-mile rate is less than it takes to cover their gas and the depreciation of their cars, according to IRS figures. It s depressing, says Bill Scroggins, an Uber driver in Indianapolis. I m not even sure I want to drive anymore. It feels like I m doing it for free. This is the third year in a row Uber has discounted fares in January. It calls the cuts seasonal but says they could last indefinitely. Last year rates never rose again in almost a third of cities; only in two did they return to precut prices. Uber has instituted temporary hourly wage guarantees to limit drivers earnings declines. It s assured Scroggins and other outraged drivers they ll come out ahead by making more trips an hour thanks to increased demand. That may be what Uber is telling itself, too. A few months ago, Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick told employees that North American operations would turn a profit in the second quarter of this year. The goal sounds less realistic in light of the price cuts. Uber has to sacrifice profits for growth, says Evan Rawley, a professor at Columbia Business School. Uber is also churning through cash a lot faster than Lyft, having said it will spend billions to push its way into China, India, and Southeast Asia. In the first quarter of 2015, Uber lost $385.1 million on $287.3 million in revenue, according to leaked figures published by the Information, a tech news site. And losses are growing: In the third quarter, Uber lost $697 million on $498 million in revenue, according to a person briefed on the numbers. Over the first three quarters of 2015, Uber lost $1.7 billion on $1.2 billion in revenue. For perspective, during Amazon.com s worst-ever four quarters, in 2000, it lost $1.4 billion on $2.8 billion in revenue. CEO Jeff Bezos responded by firing more than 15 percent of his workforce.',
'Google Paid Apple $1 Billion to Keep Search Bar on IPhone: Google Inc. is paying Apple Inc. a hefty fee to keep its search bar on the iPhone. Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014, according to a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp. s copyright lawsuit against Google. The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court. Rumors about how much Google pays Apple to be on the iPhone have circulated for years, but the companies have never publicly disclosed it. Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, and Google spokesman Aaron Stein both declined to comment on the information disclosed in court. The revenue-sharing agreement reveals the lengths Google must go to keep people using its search tool on mobile devices. It also shows how Apple benefits financially from Google s advertising-based business model that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has criticized as an intrusion of privacy. Oracle has been fighting Google since 2010 over claims that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. The showdown has returned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco after a pit stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, where Google lost a bid to derail the case. The damages Oracle now seeks may exceed $1 billion since it expanded its claims to cover newer Android versions.',
'Seeking Twitter\'s territory, Facebook launches real-time sports platform: Facebook Inc is tackling the sports arena with a new platform called Facebook Sports Stadium, which the social media site said will provide real-time updates on games, popular posts from fans, statistics and commentary from experts. "With 650 million sports fans, Facebook is the world\'s largest stadium," it wrote in a post on Wednesday announcing the feature. The new service appears to be an effort to encroach on Twitter\'s territory. The micro-blogging site has long been a popular destination for so-called "live-tweeting" games. MichaelAaron Flicker, president of XenoPsi, a New York City-based marketing firm, said the new product is Facebook\'s attempt at capturing "in the moment" engagement. "They don\'t have that piece of the puzzle," Flicker said. "The challenge for Facebook is there are already a lot of communities (like Facebook Sports Stadium). This is not a unique offering."',
'Jack Dorsey Juggles Twitter and Square, Both Caught in Downdraft: It is not shaping up as a happy new year for Jack Dorsey and his two companies. Even as the stock market s volatility has dragged down many businesses, Mr. Dorsey and the public tech companies that he runs as chief executive Twitter, the social network, and Square, the mobile payments company have been particularly buffeted.Shares of Twitter hit a record low early Wednesday before going on a wild ride and rising 4.1 percent for the day. The gain did little to erase Twitter s negative trajectory, with its shares off 25 percent this year. Square, which went public last November, fell below its initial public offering price of $9 for the first time on Wednesday before recovering. In total, the stock is down 28 percent this year. Square faces its own set of difficulties. Naysayers have long questioned the profit margins on the company s payments processing business. Square takes a small cut of every credit card payment it processes, a cut that is split with banks and other financial intermediaries. The company has expanded into other areas in recent years, such as food delivery and capital extensions to small businesses. Square also is dealing with a relatively small proportion of shares available for trading, since the company sold less than 10 percent of itself in its public offering, in what is known as a small float offering. Also, many of Square s executives and major shareholders are still held by the so-called lockup period after the offering, which prohibits them from selling their shares. Companies with relatively few shares outstanding tend to get whipsawed during volatile market periods because it becomes harder to adequately match the small amount of supply for the stock with the demand, or lack thereof. Those tiny-float I.P.O.s come back to haunt you, Mr. Wolff of Manhattan Venture Partners said.',
'Tech s Frightful 5 Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future: There s a little parlor game that people in Silicon Valley like to play. Let s call it, Who s Losing There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding. So which of these five is losing A year ago, it was Google that looked to be in a tough spot as its ad business appeared more vulnerable to Facebook s rise. Now, Google is looking up, and it s Apple, hit by rising worries about a slowdown in iPhone sales, that may be headed for some pain. Over the next couple of weeks, as these companies issue earnings that show how they finished 2015, the state of play may shift once more. But don t expect it to shift much. Asking who s losing misses a larger truth about how thoroughly Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft now lord over all that happens in tech. Who s really losing In the larger picture, none of them not in comparison with the rest of the tech industry, the rest of the economy and certainly not in the influence each of them holds over our lives. Indeed, the Frightful Five are so well protected against start-ups that in most situations, the rise of new companies only solidifies their lead. Consider that Netflix hosts its movies on Amazon s cloud, and Google s venture capital arm has a huge investment in Uber. Or consider all the in-app payments that Apple and Google get from their app stores, and all the marketing dollars that Google and Facebook reap from start-ups looking to get you to download their stuff. This gets to the core of the Frightful Five s indomitability. They have each built several enormous technologies that are central to just about everything we do with computers. In tech jargon, they own many of the world s most valuable platforms the basic building blocks on which every other business, even would-be competitors, depend.',
'Alibaba Teams With Nvidia in $1 Billion Bet on Cloud Computing: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will work with Nvidia Corp. on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and plans to enlist about 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform during the next three years. The arm of China s biggest e-commerce operator, known as AliCloud, will boost investment in data analysis and machine learning, it said in a statement Wednesday. AliCloud is staking $1 billion on the belief that demand for processing and storage from governments and companies will boost growth during the next decade as its tries to compete with Amazon.com Inc. in computing services. The investment also reflects Alibaba s own appetite for information processing as China s online-retail market grows to 10 trillion yuan ($1.5 billion) by 2020, according to Bain & Co. The push into of cloud computing, where software and services are provided to customers via remote data centers the size of American football fields, prompted Alibaba to open its second data center in Silicon Valley in October and prepare its first in Europe. AliCloud is now extending its scope beyond basic cloud-computing services. It co-founded a quantum computing laboratory with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help secure its data centers and develop machines capable of even faster calculations. The company will team up with Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia to provide customer support in the areas of deep-learning and high-performance computing, AliCloud said in a statement. AliCloud generates revenue mostly by charging clients a fee for using its computing infrastructure. For now, it contributes a mere sliver of total revenue, with computing and Internet infrastructure accounting for 3.1 percent of sales in the June quarter according to data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, Amazon Web Services revenue rose a better-than-expected 78 percent to $2.1 billion in the third quarter.',
"News Corp denies rumors of Twitter bid: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp said rumors about the company's interest in buying microblogging site Twitter Inc or building a stake in it were untrue. Twitter's shares, which rose as much as 14 percent on Wednesday, pared some gains and closed up 4.1 percent at $17.38. The stock rose from a record low after unconfirmed chatter about News Corp's interest in Twitter circulated on Wednesday. The rumors intensified after a CNBC segment, tech website Re/code said. The social media site was evaluated as a takeover target because of the company's shrinking stock price",
'How Amazon Is Slowly Building a World in Which It Takes Very Little Effort to Shop \'Replenishment\' service nabs GE, other brands: If you use all of Amazon\'s technologies in the near future, you almost won\'t have to leave your home. And you won\'t even have to push buttons to get your household needs fulfilled. The Seattle-based retailer today revealed that General Electric, printer brand Brother and glucose-monitor player Gmate Smart are the latest brands to partner with Amazon Dash Replenishment. The 3-month-old program lets appliances and gadgets order products without any help at all. For instance, GE\'s washers that utilize what\'s called "smart dispense technology" can be programmed to automatically order detergent when the owner is running low on his or her go-to brand. You don\'t even need to push one of those Amazon Dash buttons the e-commerce giant unveiled in April. Essentially, the Replenishment system will send the order through your Amazon Prime account via its namesake mobile app think items you always need like dog food, coffee beans or grounds, ink cartridges (when it comes to Brother), blood-sugar testing strips (for Gmate Smart), water filters for purifying pitchers, dish-washing soap, etc. No effort required, and if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gets his way with drones, very little human energy will be spent on delivering such items to your home. A new commercial world is emerging, indeed. Other brands that were already a part of Dash Replenishment include Whirlpool (for its high-tech dishwashers) and hand sanitizer Purell. The initiative builds on Amazon Echo, the 11-month-old speaker system with voice-control technology that lets folks order goods just by talking into the device. ',
'Why an Ex-Google Coder Makes Twice as Much Freelancing: With a talent war raging, companies from Airbnb to Pfizer are paying top dollar for the services of independent programmers. James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: quitting a well-paid gig writing software for Google to go freelance. No more catered lunches, gold-plated benefits or million-dollar views from the search giant s Manhattan office. Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because as an independent he s pulling down about twice as much as he did at Google. Plus, he has more freedom. In March, Knight and his wife plan to travel to Spain and hopscotch across Europe all the while writing code for a dating app and a self-portrait app, among others. "I d rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food," Knight says. Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar as much as $1,000 a hour, according to a person who gets coders gigs for freelancers with the right combination of skills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they\'re turning to independent software developers to get a stalled project moving or to gain a competitive edge. In some cases, the right person can be the difference between a failed and successful product. Last spring, Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks to help get ShipHero, his cloud-based logistics startup, off the ground. "To find someone that talented in New York in three days was never going to happen," Rubin says. "Every talented engineer I know has a job.',
"Netflix global push grabs more customers than expected; shares jump 7%. Netflix said revenue rose 22.8 percent to $1.82 billion in the December quarter.Netflix's aggressive push into international markets won more customers than the video streaming service and its investors expected last quarter, sending its shares surging 7 percent. The dominant online video company said on Tuesday it had 74.8 million subscribers at the end of December and forecast 6.1 million more through March, fueled by its expansion this month into virtually every country except China, where it is exploring ways to launch its service. Shares of Netflix rose 7 percent to $115.42 in after-hours trading.New customers overseas are countering slowing growth for Netflix in the United States, the company's biggest market. It added 1.56 million U.S. subscribers in the fourth quarter, below the 1.65 million it forecast, and less than 1.9 million a year earlier. ",
'IBM forecasts weak earnings for 2016; shares slide: Revenue fell 8.5% to $22.06 billion. International Business Machines Corp forecast weak earnings for this year after reporting an 8.5 percent fall in fourth-quarter revenue as a strong dollar and tepid IT spending weigh on Big Blue\'s results. Shares of the company, which receives more than half its revenue from markets outside the United States, fell 3 percent in extended trading on Tuesday. IBM has been shifting away from hardware by selling low-margin businesses such as low-end servers and semiconductors to focus on high-growth areas such as security software and data analytics, besides cloud-based services. Yet the new businesses have so far failed to make up for revenue lost to divestitures. IBM\'s fourth-quarter revenue fell to $22.06 billion in the quarter ended Dec. Revenue from "strategic imperatives", which include cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose about 10 percent in the fourth quarter. Net income fell to $4.46 billion, or $4.59 per share, from $5.48 billion, or $5.51 per share, a year earlier. Up to Tuesday\'s close, IBM\'s shares had fallen 18.5 percent in the past 12 months.',
"AMD revenue forecast misses market estimates: Revenue fell 22.7 percent to $958 million. Advanced Micro Devices forecast first-quarter revenue below analysts' estimates, due to lower demand for its graphic chips used in consoles and an economic slowdown in China. Shares of the company, which is in the process of selling some of its assets to cut costs, fell 7.7 percent to $1.80 in extended trading. AMD has been shifting to gaming consoles and low-power servers, but progress has lagged Wall Street expectations due to intense competition from Intel Corp and Nvidia Corp. China accounted for 42.2 percent of AMD's revenue in 2014. Revenue fell 22.7 percent to $958 million but still came above analysts' expectation of $954.7 million. Up to Tuesday's close, AMD's shares had fallen 13 percent in the past 12 months. The company's net loss narrowed to $102 million, or 13 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 26, from $364 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier.",
'Twitter Stock Hits New Low Amid Struggles to Keep Website Up: Twitter Inc. shares slumped to a new all-time low after the company s website suffered disruptions, shutting out millions of users and underscoring concerns about the company s efforts to boost its audience and sales. Services including search and the news stream were unavailable for more than five hours after the company s software engineers made changes to the service that lets people post and share 140-character status updates. The stock fell 7 percent to $16.69 at the close on Tuesday, well below the price of $26 at its November 2013 initial public offering. Users of Twitter s mobile applications and website experienced a string of outages since Friday, as the company tweaks its features and services to improve the user experience and address a slowdown in growth. The glitches come at an inconvenient time for the company, which has to prove its value to any new users and keep existing ones from leaving in frustration. The issue was related to an internal code change, Twitter said on its website. We reverted the change, which fixed the issue. Services including search and the news stream were disrupted, according to the company s performance status website. The top trending hashtag for about the past two hours was #twitterdown. Prior to the latest round of issues, Twitter s last outage was about two months ago. Twitter s stock has tumbled more than 28 percent in January, following a 35 percent decline in 2015.',
"Social media buy buttons are n't off to a great start, but they might still be big: In the past year, there s been a flurry of experimentation with buy buttons, a way for social-media sites to allow users to purchase cocktail dresses, throw blankets, candle-making kits and sundry other items from retailers without leaving the social network. Pinterest launched buyable pins in June, the same month Instagram released its similar shop now feature. Those offerings joined ongoing tests by Facebook and Twitter for similar functionality. The rush by tech giants and retailers to join the buy-button arms race would suggest that these businesses see money-making potential. And given how much time people spend on social media an estimated 1 of every 5 minutes spent on a mobile phone in the United States is on Facebook or Instagram, for example it would be logical to assume that these buy buttons are bringing retailers a blast of online sales. But this holiday season, social channels accounted for 1.8 percent of overall online sales, according to data from Custora, whose software platform is used by many retailers. That s just a tiny sliver of purchases, and it s not even growing: In 2014, Custora found that social media led to 1.9 percent of sales during the same time period. But even if buy buttons have not had an explosive launch, experts say they could prove to be a crucial solution to some of retailers biggest online shopping problems. Right now, stores are seeing a massive conversion gap on mobile devices, meaning that there has been a surge in the number of people browsing sites from mobile devices, but only a small share of them are actually making purchases. In studies, shoppers frequently say they don t buy on their smartphones because it is a hassle to enter payment information and go through a checkout process on the small screen. Buy buttons could also help retailers re-create the idea of the impulse buy for the online era. On the web, a shoppers journey so often begins with a search in Amazon or Google for a specific item. That has made it hard for retailers to do what they ve long done in stores with elaborate window displays and sweet treats near the checkout counter: Persuade you to buy something eye-catching on a whim.",
"Son's SoftBank Vision at Risk as Sprint Goes From Bad to Worse: The acquisition of Sprint Corp. was supposed to help Masayoshi Son realize his vision of transforming SoftBank Group Corp. into the world s most-valuable company. Instead, the 2013 deal has become his biggest setback so far, dragging down SoftBank shares and cutting into the billionaire s wealth. SoftBank tumbled yesterday to its lowest level since the Sprint deal closed 2 1/2 years ago. Son s fortune has shrunk by $3.2 billion over the past 12 months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the Japanese company s stock plunged. SoftBank paid $22 billion for a controlling stake in the No. 3 U.S. wireless operator at the time. That investment has lost $7.3 billion in value, according to SoftBank, and Sprint is now the No. 4 carrier. At the same time, a slowdown in China brought down shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., SoftBank s biggest holding, by 22 percent last year. There will always be fans of SoftBank, it s just at this moment in time, no one cares --it s out of fashion, said Andrew Clarke, director of trading at Mirabaud Asia Ltd. in Hong Kong. They have too many concerns about Sprint and Alibaba because those shares are being crushed. ",
'Upstarts Are Leading the Fintech Movement, and Banks Take Heed: Ryan Craine hates carrying cash and finds writing checks to be a headache. He doesn t do much of either anymore he mostly uses his smartphone to pay for things. Mr. Craine, a 28-year-old tech support worker in Washington, D.C., uses Apple Pay at the stores and restaurants that accept it. About 20 times a month, he turns to Venmo, a digital wallet for transferring money from one person to another, to pay his share of rent, meals, groceries and utility bills. To refinance his student loans last year, he went to an online lending start-up, Earnest. Mr. Craine s money choices point to the millennial-led shift toward new digital financial services, a change in behavior that threatens to upend the consumer banking industry. The popularity of the services has left the major banks rushing to adapt, even as they have regained their footing after the financial crisis. Americans in their 20s and early 30s, analysts say, offer a glimpse of tomorrow s banking market. Their relationship with the financial system is very different it s an electronic one, on their smartphones, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody s Analytics. That can and will be very disruptive to the banking system. Money is pouring into so-called fintech start-ups. And major technology companies Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Samsung are all entering consumer banking, typically starting with digital payment apps. Investment worldwide in start-ups focused on retail banking markets rose to nearly $6.8 billion in 2015, according to CB Insights, a research firm. That is more than triple the $2.2 billion in 2014. In 2010, 40 percent of Americans with bank accounts visited a physical branch once a week, while only 9 percent made a mobile transaction weekly, according to survey research by Javelin Strategy and Research. By 2014, the percentage reporting weekly visits to bank branches fell to 28 percent, while the weekly mobile banking share tripled, to 27 percent.',
'WhatsApp drops $1 subscription, studies making businesses pay: The world\'s most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, is dropping its token $1 fee still levied on some users as it experiments with making businesses pay to reach their customers, Chief Executive Jan Koum said on Monday. In addition, the Facebook-owned communications service expects in the coming months to offer complete encryption of messages, in a move to ensure the privacy of user conversations that is likely to draw further criticism from some governments. The authorities in the United States, Britain and elsewhere say the growing prevalence of encryption on services such as WhatsApp and Apple\'s iMessage, hamstring their ability to monitor criminal suspects or thwart militant plots and have threatened to pass new laws to block these changes. WhatsApp, the service that offers free text, picture and video messages, has been slowly working to develop end-to-end encrypted communications services for more than a year. It has already introduced full encryption for users on Android phones. "We are a couple of months away from calling it done," Koum said, noting that once completed, WhatsApp will represent the world\'s largest service offering completely private messaging. "Soon we will be able to talk more about this," he said. Once fully introduced, WhatsApp will be the largest encrypted communications service in the world, he noted.',
'Modi Offers $1.5 Billion Fund, Tax Breaks for India Startups: India said it will set up a 100-billion-rupee ($1.5 billion) fund to encourage startup businesses and pledged to ease regulations for entrepreneurs, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi strives to create the jobs needed in a developing nation of 1.3 billion people. Startups will get tax breaks such as income-tax exemptions for the first three years, quicker patent applications, a credit guarantee program and easier routes to wind up if they fail, Modi said at a government conference for entrepreneurs in New Delhi. The fund will be established over four years. "The government should not interfere in startups," Modi said on Saturday to an audience that included billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan s SoftBank Group Corp., and Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick. "India s youth should be a job creator, not a seeker."',
'Jawbone Raises $165 Million at Half Its Last Valuation: Jawbone, the once-hot wearable technology start-up, said on Friday that it had raised $165 million in funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion, or roughly half the amount that the company was valued at as recently as 2014, continuing a burgeoning trend of start-ups raising money at lower values than before. When private companies raise money at a lower value than they had previously, the event is known as a down round. On Thursday, Foursquare announced it had raised a $45 million round of venture capital which people familiar with the terms have said was also a down round, with Foursquare valued at $250 million, less than half of the $650 million it was valued at during its last round in 2013. Down rounds are increasing as Silicon Valley sobers up somewhat after a frothy period. In the last quarter of 2015, there was a major investment slowdown; funding to private companies dropped 30 percent from the previous quarter, to $27.3 billion, the research firm CB Insights said. Mutual fund investors have also recently marked down the valuations of other high-profile private companies like Zenefits, Dropbox and Snapchat. Down rounds, like the ones that Jawbone and Foursquare have raised, tend to destroy value for all of the pre-existing shareholders, including employees who own the company s private stock. It has been a tumultuous year for Jawbone, which is based in San Francisco. The company s Up fitness band line faces stiff competition in a crowded market for wearable technology that is dominated by Fitbit and Apple, according to the research firm IDC. Last year, Jawbone laid off employees as part of a restructuring. The company raised nearly $300 million in debt from the money management firm BlackRock last April.',
'As Delivery Startups Cool, Food-Delivery Startup DoorDash Eats Its Words in Fundraising Talks: The company lowered its ambitions by cutting as much as $400 million off its proposed valuation to investors. In meetings late last year, DoorDash pitched venture capitalists on an investment that would value the food-delivery company at $1 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said. The company is back on the fundraising trail for that same round, except this time it s slashed its lofty goal to as low as $600 million, according to the people, who requested not to be named because the discussions were private. If DoorDash closes the financing at the terms proposed to some investors recently, the valuation would be around the same as the one from the last round in March 2015, which was $600 million, the people said this week. The talks are ongoing, and the terms could change again, they said. A spokesman for DoorDash declined to comment. The comedown for DoorDash shows delivery startups may be losing some of their allure. Such businesses are costly to operate and often take on huge losses in pursuit of growth. Instacart, the grocery-delivery company that was valued at $2 billion by investors, raised prices in December, a move it attributed partly to changing market conditions. It also cut staff, according to Re/code. Good Eggs, which works with farmers to deliver fresh produce, closed all of its operations outside San Francisco in August.',
'Alphabet (formerly known as Google) Shakes Up Its Robotics Division: Google s robotics division has been plagued by low morale and a lack of leadership since the unit s founder left abruptly in 2014. Now Alphabet is cleaning it up. Over the last two months, Alphabet, the new holding company that separated Google from its collection of speculative projects, has reframed the robots effort, moving it from a stand-alone division inside Google to a piece of the X research division. The company has also hired Hans Peter Brondmo, a technology industry veteran who last worked at Nokia, to help with management. A reorganization of the robots group is one of several recent moves inside the X division, which used to be called Google X but was rebranded with the Alphabet reorganization and recently unveiled a new logo. A range of companies, including tech competitors like Amazon and car manufacturers, are signaling their interest in robotics. X has several projects in varying degrees of completion, but has lately been graduating them as stand-alone companies or preparing them for such a move. The life sciences group, for example, is now called Verily. X also recently hired an auto industry veteran to lead its self-driving car effort called Chauffeur internally and noted that the project was a good candidate to be spun out. Robotics has gone in the opposite direction for reasons that are personal and practical. The division was created in 2013 by Andy Rubin, who led the development of the widely used Android operating system software, and it has been without a leader since Mr. Rubin left in 2014 to start a technology incubator that helps young start-ups turn their ideas into businesses. After starting the robotics division, Mr. Rubin quickly went on a buying spree, purchasing a number of promising companies, including Boston Dynamics, the maker of experimental military robots, and Schaft, an elite group of Japanese roboticists from the University of Tokyo. But while the companies were promising, Mr. Rubin invested in several technologies that had industry observers scratching their heads about his overall direction. Mr. Rubin originally said that the robotics division would be a 10-year moonshot, and when he was in negotiations to acquire companies he talked about the possibility of the driverless Google car rolling up to your house and the Google robot jumping off the back bumper. Google s robotics effort stalled after his departure, going through a variety of leaders, including James Kuffner, a Carnegie Mellon roboticist who has since joined Toyota s research and development laboratory in Palo Alto, and Jonathan Rosenberg, who is a troubleshooter for Larry Page, the Google co-founder who is Alphabet s chief executive. Many in the industry say it is likely to be awhile before companies, Alphabet included, can get through the many technological and regulatory hurdles that stand in the way of robots becoming a huge business.',
'Xiaomi Misses Smartphone Sales Target by 10% on China Slowdown: Xiaomi Corp. sold more than 70 million smartphones last year, falling well short of its target and prompting founder Lei Jun to tell employees he was refocusing research efforts into cool stuff like robotics and virtual reality. The Chinese startup had a stated goal of selling 80 million devices. Xiaomi originally predicted selling 100 million units, but then changed that after China set its lowest growth target in 15 years and copycat vendors started taking away market share. The miss was a blow to company morale, Lei said in an e-mail to employees. We set a target of 80 million and, before we knew it, it became an obligation, Lei said. We changed under this pressure, and everyone s faces gradually lost all traces of humor. The smartphone maker was one of China s most exciting startup stories of past years, with a valuation of $45 billion that trailed only that of Uber Technologies Inc. Xiaomi thrived through online sales of budget-priced devices with advanced components, overtaking domestic competitors and challenging Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. for supremacy in the world s biggest market. Xiaomi s market share has been pinched by competitors including Huawei and Meizu, said Jeff Pu, an analyst at Yuanta Securities Co. They are among the Chinese vendors that have flooded the Internet with ultra-thin phones offering similar features and prices to Xiaomi s Mi 4i and Redmi Note 2. Huawei said it shipped more than 100 million smartphones last year as it expanded in the U.S. and Europe, defying an industry slowdown. Pu expects Xiaomi s sales growth to slow to 10 percent this year. With sales growth slowing, Xiaomi s valuation will be hurt, Pu said. It could even face a down round, as investors are less willing to pay. ',
"Intel s Earnings Fall; Despite Exceeding Investor Expectations, slowing data center revenue growth sends shares down 5%: Intel Corp's (INTC.O) strong quarterly profit beat was overshadowed by concerns about slowing revenue growth in its highly profitable data center business, sending its shares down about 5.6 percent in after-market trading. In quarterly earnings reported by Intel on Thursday, the company s revenue was up slightly from the same period last year, but money from data center chips was up markedly. Intel reported that its net income in the fourth quarter of 2015 fell 1 percent to $3.6 billion, or 74 cents a share, from the year-earlier quarter. The company said revenue climbed 1 percent, to $14.9 billion. The net income was above the expectations of Wall Street analysts. They had anticipated 63 cents a share on revenue of $14.8 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters. For all of 2015, Intel revenue was $55.4 billion, down 1 percent from 2014. Net income was $11.4 billion, down 2 percent. Intel s share price was down about 4 percent in after-hours trading Thursday evening. Intel still gets 59 percent of its revenue from chip sales to PC makers like HP Inc. and Dell, just as Microsoft and other makers of PC software count on the demand for new PCs to sell their products. Now PCs are a tough business: On Tuesday, the market research firm IDC said 276 million PCs were shipped worldwide in 2015, a drop of 10.4 percent from 2014. On Thursday, Intel said data center chip sales, not just to clouds but to older kinds of computing, rose 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. Along with Intel s much smaller businesses in memory and sensor chips for devices, data center chips accounted for than 60 percent of the company s operating profit margin. Keeping up with Moore s Law is increasingly expensive. In 2001 research and development, along with marketing and sales, cost Intel about $8 billion. In 2015, Intel said Thursday, it cost $20.1 billion. Last year, Intel scared many technologists when it announced that a critical next step in delivering on Moore s Law would happen about a year later than expected. The company has since released numerous charts showing this was a temporary blip. If it was more than a blip, developers of those self-driving cars, connected drones and other new devices will also struggle to make improvements. Relax, said Stacy Smith, the chief financial officer of Intel. Moore s Law is the heartbeat of our company, he said. It is the core of our competitive advantage. ",
"Amazon Can Now Ship Packages From China to the U.S. by Sea - Enters the Ocean Freight Business: Amazon's China subsidiary has registered in the U.S. to operate as an ocean freight forwarder, an entity that organizes the shipment of goods from a supplier or factory in one region say, China to a company or customer somewhere far away, like the U.S. The registration was unearthed by Flexport, a San Francisco-based logistics startup that published a blog post on the news today. Amazon China now has the appropriate paperwork to provide ocean freight services for other companies, the blog post read. This is Amazon s first step toward entering the $350 billion ocean freight market. The move comes as Amazon continues to make inroads in controlling more of what happens after a customer clicks Buy to ultimately cut down on shipping costs and improve speed and reliability of deliveries. In the blog post, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen suggests that Amazon s competitive advantage over old-school freight forwarders will be the automation of some steps of the shipment process through software, thus cutting labor costs along the way.",
"You Already Knew Parents Post on Facebook More Than Others. Now Find Out How Much: Its an old joke that moms and dads love to post photos of their kids on Facebook. But thanks to the social network's research with Ipsos Media they surveyed 8,000 people in eight countries and Facebook's internal data analysis, we now know just how true that idea is. Some of the more interesting findings came from its U.S.-based study. For instance, new American moms post 2.5 times more status updates, 3.5 times more photos and 4.2 times more videos than nonparents, per Facebook's internal stats. And hey, the updates work: New parents' posts (those from moms or dads) about their babies get 37 percent more interactions from family members and 47 percent more interactions from friends than their general posts. And more than most people, new moms and dads worldwide seem to be uploading posts from their smartphones. The global end of the research which included 1,000 people from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Australia, respectively found that new parents use Facebook mobile 1.3 times more often than nonparents, Facebook found.",
'Parallels Between Netflix and Amazon: Netflix has grown substantially over the last few years, now claiming more than 70 million subscribers who pay about $8 to $10 a month for access to a large library of movies and TV shows. Last year the streaming service s stock was the best performing of the Standard & Poor s 500-stock index, rising 140 percent. And its prospects keep looking brighter: Last week, Reed Hastings, Netflix s goateed chief executive, announced he would make his movies and TV shows instantly available to almost every country in the world (the big exception, for now, is China). The move nearly doubled Netflix s potential market the service is now accessible to more than 540 million households worldwide with broadband Internet access. On paper, Mr. Hastings s plan to take on the traditional TV industry has long sounded slightly nutty, as delusional as Jeff Bezos s strategy at Amazon to overrun retailing once seemed. Netflix s plan is certainly high risk it is spending billions to create and license content, it is fighting determined media incumbents across the globe, and it owns none of the pipes leading into people s homes. (Among Netflix s many competitors is Amazon itself, which has its own growing and well-regarded original-content division) A capacity for surprise is the first and most obvious similarity between Netflix and Amazon. There are lots of others. Like Amazon, Netflix is amassing a cache of intelligence on what customers want, and it s using that data to create content that appeals to a wide range of demographics globally. And finally, Netflix, like Amazon, is a flywheel that keeps spinning faster: As it gets more subscribers, it gets more data and more money to fund more content, which in turn helps it bring in more customers, and on and on, ever faster. Netflix barely ekes out a profit now, but the bulls say that as the flywheel spins, it will eventually begin earning enormous sums.',
'GoPro Issues Weak Q4 Revenue Estimates, Plans to Cut 7 Percent of Workforce - Stock down 20%: GoPro had a hard time selling cameras in the fourth quarter last year, and there are major layoffs planned at the camera maker and action sports media company. Wall Street did not take the news well. After a brief suspension in trading, the company s stock is down more than 20 percent in after-hours trading. A release from the company says it anticipated $435 million in Q4 revenue and $1.6 billion in revenue for the 2015 calendar year, coming in way below what was expected. As a result, the company plans to cut 7 percent of its workforce. Additionally, the company s top media exec, Zander Lurie, is leaving his job and moving onto the GoPro board. In email obtained by Re/code that CEO Nick Woodman sent to GoPro employees, Woodman places the blame for the layoffs on the launch and pricing of GoPro s $399 Hero 4 Session camera last year: "Today s announcement reflects the issues we faced in 2015, largely related to our launch and pricing of HERO4 Session. While we clearly made a mistake pricing Session at $399 (more specifically I made the mistake, it was my decision), I m proud of how we responded. We recognized the problem, price adjusted to $299 recognized that wasn t enough and price adjusted again to $199 which positioned Session as the best entry-level product we ve ever made." GoPro s stock has dropped precipitously over the last year as it has struggled to sell more cameras and develop its media business.',
'The big fund manager mistake of 2015 Being de-FANGed: Missing out on the hot technology stocks known as the "FANG" group last year came back to bite some well-known mutual funds. Funds that avoided Facebook, Amazon.com, Netflix and Google - now Alphabet dramatically underperformed peers that loaded up with the fast-rising tech stocks, according to a review by Thomson Reuters Lipper unit. In fact, despite a volatile year in which active managers faced shifting trends in many sectors, it seems that simply choosing to overweight the FANG group was the path to beating the market. Without them, the S&P 500 Index would have declined 2.7 percent last year; instead it fell 0.7 percent, according to Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. For the year, among 228 funds reviewed by Lipper, those that had less than 5 percent exposure to the FANG group fell 1.3 percent on average; funds with more than 10 percent exposure rose 6.4 percent. Shares in Amazon and Netflix more than doubled last year as both added more content and subscribers to their competing video-on-demand-services. Facebook rose 34 percent as the social media giant continued to increase mobile ad revenue, while Alphabet also increased revenue and showed more cost discipline, boosting its shares 47 percent. Of the four, all but Amazon have outperformed the S&P 500 so far in 2016 through Tuesday, although it is far too soon to say if the group will repeat its performance for investors in 2016.',
'Uber Invites Developers to Build Apps for Customized Passenger Distractions: Uber, the huge ride-hailing service, delivers millions of rides to passengers. Now the company wants to give people something to do while they re in the car. On Tuesday, Uber introduced a way for smartphone app developers to create trip experiences for riders. The idea, the company says, is to give riders tailored information and entertainment during their time in an Uber vehicle. Uber gave a few examples of how it might look. Upon entering the vehicle, riders could receive a quick news briefing or perhaps be served with a music playlist built to last the length of their ride. What if developers could also offer users of their apps new ways to enjoy themselves or get stuff done while they re on the road Chris Saad, head of product on Uber s developer platform, wrote in a company blog post. These integrations help make life simpler and easier for people to get around. Uber has long been selective about how it works with partner apps and companies. It has struck deals with Facebook, Foursquare and OpenTable to allow users to hail rides from inside the companies apps. Uber is also working with a handful of retailers in some cities for its delivery service, UberRush. For Uber, the goal is to make the user experience more pleasant than a usual ride, which may in turn drum up repeat business and affinity for the company s brand. The company has struck similar partnerships in the past, such as one with Spotify, in which users can select the songs being played during their Uber rides. This approach invites developers to work directly with Uber to submit and test their ideas, but Uber will have final say over whether a developer s trip experience will be allowed. It is a different, more cautious approach than that taken by companies like Facebook and Twitter, both of which have had strained relationships with third-party developers in the past. The announcement coincided with Uber s first hackathon in Bangalore, India, where the company is soliciting developers for new integration ideas.',
"Tech Funding Slowdown Hits Venture Capital Firms: Venture capital firms raised less money and closed fewer U.S. funds last year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, a trade association. With less capital to invest, the decline from 2014 could signal an even tighter funding environment for technology startups this year. Venture capital decreased to $28.2 billion last year, from $31.1 billion in 2014, according to the report from the NVCA and Thomson Reuters. The 235 venture capital funds that closed in 2015 represent a 13 percent decline from 2014. While venture capitalists invested more money into private tech companies in 2015, the number of investments declined, according to research firm according to research firm CB Insights. This suggests that venture investors are chasing fewer but larger deals. Tiger Global closed a $2.5 billion venture fund in November. If the firm's recent investments in Flipkart, Ola, and Airbnb are any indication, Tiger's new fund will continue to make large bets in late-stage private companies. Some startups, facing a tougher fundraising environment, have decided to reduce spending, cut staff, and focus on turning a profit.",
'PC shipments fall a record 10.6 percent in fourth quarter: IDC: Global personal computer shipments fell 10.6 percent in the quarter ended in December compared to a year earlier, research firm IDC said on Tuesday, the largest decline since IDC started tracking PC shipments. Longer lifecycles for PCs, along with competition from mobile phones and tablets, have continued to hobble demand, IDC said.',
"Rocket Internet faces new setback with loss of senior managers: Germany's Rocket Internet is losing two senior managers, sources told Reuters, in the latest setback for a company that a year ago was considered one of Europe's best hopes for competing with global tech giants. Europe's largest internet firm, which has helped create a buzzing tech scene in Berlin, seeks to be a launch pad for stock market listings of start-ups ranging from online fashion to food delivery, but has seen its stock slide as plans to float its bigger investments have stalled. Rocket's strategy of rapidly expanding into scores of emerging markets raised the possibility that it could outflank the likes of Amazon and Alibaba as well as powerful venture capital firms. But planned flotations of Rocket start-ups have been put on ice in the past year due to a cooling market for tech initial public offerings (IPO) with investors increasingly unwilling to meet high valuations. Now it faces further upheaval with Franziska Leonhardt, head of its legal department, and Uwe Gleitz, senior vice president of corporate finance, both departing soon, according to sources close to the company, both for personal reasons. Leonhardt and Gleitz were members of the team that steered Rocket through its own IPO in October 2014, since which its share price has fallen by almost half from the 42.50 offer price. Since it started out in 2007, Rocket has set up dozens of e-commerce firms around the world, but all of its current crop are still loss-making - meaning it needs to keep eating into its cash reserves to keep them afloat, and making corporate finance a crucial department.",
'Flipkart, Amazon s India Rival, Changes CEOs: In a move that has been rumored for some time, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal has stepped down as CEO of the Indian e-commerce company, the company announced today. He will be replaced by his co-founder, Binny Bansal (no relation). Sachin Bansal will become executive chairman and mentor the senior leadership of the company and look for new investment opportunities, the company said in the announcement. Binny Bansal, formerly chief operating officer, will now run the business day to day. The move comes as competition for market share in India s burgeoning online shopping industry has ramped up between Amazon, Flipkart and fellow Indian upstart Snapdeal. Amazon has promised to invest billions into its India business, which is run by Amit Agarwal, who spent two years earlier in his career working as Jeff Bezos s right-hand man.',
"Uber China Raises Financing at $7 Billion Valuation: Uber said its China division has raised financing that values that part of the ride-hailing company's operation at $7 billion. Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive officer, discussed the new funds at a press conference in Beijing on Monday. Uber is bumping up against local competitors around the world. Nowhere is the competition more fierce than in China, where Uber faces Didi Kuaidi. The company is backed by Alibaba and Tencent, the country s two most valuable technology companies. Uber and Didi Kuaidi are each spending aggressively to expand, partly by subsidizing the costs of rides. In a letter to investors in 2015, Kalanick committed to spending $1 billion that year in China. It may have surpassed that figure. Didi Kuaidi said on Monday that it completed 1.43 billion trips in 2015. Uber said it increased its share of the private car market in China to 30 percent or 35 percent as of the end of 2015, from 1 percent in January 2015. (The Information reported a similar figure earlier on Monday.) Didi Kuaidi said it holds 87.2 percent of China's private car-hailing market, attributing the figure to a Chinese research firm. A recent round of financing gave Didi Kuaidi a valuation of $16.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said in September. Uber, which owns a controlling stake in Uber China, was last valued at $62.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said in December. Uber China s $7 billion valuation does not include the new cash. ",
'Digital Display Ads to Overtake Search, Bringing a Reckoning for Google: As advertising keeps flooding over from television to digital screens, this year will mark a first: More online ad dollars will go to ads that aren t for search results than to those that are. That s per eMarketer, which measures this sort of stuff. A Monday report claims that spending on display ads banners, videos, sponsored content and in-stream mobile promotions will outpace search ads in 2016. The research firm estimates that U.S. spending on display will hit $32.2 billion this year (a 47 percent annual growth), overtaking spending on search (estimated at $29.2 billion, a 10 percent growth). That trend does not bode well for Google, which reaps the lion s share of search ad revenue. Of course, the search giant also reaps other ad money from its massive banner business and YouTube, primarily. But in this category of digital ads, Facebook is a far greater foe. Figures from eMarketer show that Facebook claimed just under 30 percent of U.S. display ads in 2015, more than twice Google s share. Plus, many in the industry see Facebook s nascent automated ad platforms as a potential threat to Google. Google knows this that the tremendous profitability of its search business will peter out eventually. Hence the importance of Alphabet: It is scouring for some business after search.',
"Israel brings tech expertise to protecting connected cars: Most cars today are equipped with some level of connectivity and self-driving vehicles are being developed. Given this level of sophistication, protecting cars from contamination with malicious software has become big business. Building on its expertise in technology, Israel is emerging as a leader in the race to keep cars secure and prevent the nightmare scenario of a hacker commandeering your vehicle. The threat appears real enough. Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles to install new software last year after cybersecurity researchers showed they could turn off a Jeep Cherokee's engine as it drove. Software manipulation, albeit intentional, was also behind Volkswagen's emissions scandal. From its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Check Point, one of the world's largest cyber security firms, pioneered the computer firewall two decades ago. It hopes to repeat that success with a security capsule for vehicles. Connected cars need a two-pronged defense. First, they must make sure nothing bad gets in, like a virus sneaking through a navigation system. Then they have to keep internal communications secure to allow functions like side-view mirrors which angle down when vehicles are put into reverse.",
'Zuckerberg Plea for Free Web in India Wins Support in Review: A majority of Indians who submitted comments to the nation s telecommunications regulator said they support Facebook Inc. s Free Basics plan that would allow free Web access. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that 1.35 million responses in support of the plan -- or 56 percent of all comments -- came from Facebook s @supportfreebasics.in, according to a report on the agency s review of different pricing for data services. It received another 544,000 responses from @facebookmail.com, with most backing Facebook s plan, the regulator said, without providing a percentage. Comments either supporting or opposing differential pricing were basically template responses" and "identical in nature," the regulator said Saturday on its website, without explaining how the views would be used in the review. The agency s chief, R.S. Sharma, told The Hindu newspaper in an interview published Jan. 1 that such responses were "not helpful at all" and didn t represent meaningful input. The regulator has appealed to respondents and Facebook to solicit more detailed opinions. Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India s leading newspapers last month for the country to allow a free Internet service. Facebook s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Industry groups say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites.',
'Aerodrome Is The First Commercial Airport For Drones: Aerodrome is working with the City of Boulder, Nevada, to launch the first commercial drone airport the Eldorado Droneport. It s one of only a handful of FAA-appointed UAS test sites in the United States. The plan is to offer training, maintenance and other support functions for the commercial drone industry, as well as for individual drone pilots. The company already operates teaching facilities in Detroit, Michigan and Henderson, Nevada.',
'Israel s Best-Performing Tech Stock Hasn t Sold a Single Product: Occupying a small, second-floor space in the same office park as 3D printing giant Stratasys, a tiny Israeli upstart is trying to sell investors on a future in which physical objects materialize with the press of a button. Nano Dimension is nowhere near achieving that goal, yet somehow has become Israel s best-performing technology stock in 2015. While Stratasys lost nearly three-quarters of its value last year, the much smaller Nano Dimension rallied 261 percent. Not bad for a company with no customers or revenue. This little 3D printing shop, with 44 employees and a market cap of 193 million shekels ($49 million), has become a source of hope for Israeli entrepreneurs struggling to secure venture capital. That s because Nano Dimension took an unorthodox route to raise about $18 million and become a public company, while managing to avoid the long, costly process of an initial public offering. Nano Dimension found its way onto the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange using what s known as a reverse merger. This involves a private company taking over a public one, bypassing the formalities of an IPO. We re selling shares like any other public company, said Amit Dror, the chief executive officer of Nano Dimension. It s just that it happens to be that our case is a public company that s pre-revenue. ',
'China Setting Up Fund for Its Electronics Industry: A Chinese technology regulator said on Friday that it would cooperate with a bank to set up a $30 billion fund to support the country s huge electronics supply chain. The creation of the new fund underscores China s ambitions to expand its tech capabilities and also signals how those ambitions are being threatened by slowing growth and recent market turmoil. Official accounts of the fund did not make clear precisely how the money would be spent. But given the recent weakness in Chinese manufacturing and lower-end electronics manufacturers, it may be intended as a form of stimulus to the tech industry. The terminology used in media accounts signals China s bold technology ambitions. Reports about the new fund said it would be used to build a strong manufacturing country and an Internet power. A report in state-run media said the fund was created to address problems faced by small and medium enterprises that have come under pressure or folded recently because of a lack of funding. The report made reference to recent factory closures, specifically pointing out the closing in October of Fu Chang Electronic Technology, a supplier to the telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE. The fund will be created through a partnership between an industry group controlled by China s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ping An Bank. Signaling the importance of the initiative, the signing ceremony was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, which is often used to host visiting dignitaries, and was attended by representatives of many of China s largest technology companies, including Lenovo and Alibaba, according to an official release. The new fund seems to resemble a separate multibillion-dollar fund, announced in 2014, to provide financing and enable acquisitions to increase the size and sophistication of the country s semiconductor industry.',
'Flashing Red: A day of distress in the financial markets, and of distress sales in the tech startup-world.',
'U.S., world stock markets slide as panic in China spreads: A collapse in China s ailing stock market spread like contagion across the globe again Thursday, pummeling nervous investors looking for respite from the week s rocky trading. Chinese stocks traded for less than 30 minutes, slumping 7 percent and triggering the second emergency market closure this week. The action prompted markets in Europe to retreat and then spread to the United States, where stocks tumbled 2 percent. China s CSI 300 had traded for only 14 minutes before the first circuit breaker kicked in, calling a 15-minute halt to trading after a 5 percent fall. But instead of calming the market, it caused only more panic. When trading reopened, prices soon fell further, triggering a halt for the rest of the day. The Dow Jones industrial average, which tracks 30 blue-chip stocks, and the Standard & Poor s 500, a broader measure of the market, both fell about 2.3 percent. They have lost about 5 percent of their value the week so far. The tech-heavy Nasdaq suffered the deepest losses, falling 3 percent on Thursday. It is down about 6 percent this week and on pace to enter a what s known as a correction, meaning the index will have fallen about 10 percent from its most recent high. The sell-off was widespread, even hitting tech giants Apple and Amazon, which were down 4 percent and 3.7 percent respectively. JPMorgan Chase slid 4 percent, while Nordstrom tumbled 5.5 percent. ',
'Distress Sale #1: Gilt s Unicorn Tale Comes To An End After Being Acquired For $250M: Hudson s Bay Company, the owner of department chain stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, said today it was acquiring Gilt Groupe for $250 million. The sale still represents a tough end to the story of Gilt. The startup was one of the original darling flash-sale sites coming out of New York. But that whole market has found itself challenged by slim operating margins, its initial popularity waning, and the difficulties of building a large-scale e-commerce operation. Prior to the acquisition, the company had been widely considered to be part of the billion-dollar startup club. But the company struggled to become profitable, and in October last year the company continued cutting jobs (at that time laying off 45 people). The company previously said a few times that it would go public in 2013 and 2014, before putting that on hold indefinitely and raising additional capital. It s also not the greatest return for its investors. Prior to the sale the company had raised more than $270 million, which makes this look like a deal that will not return the total amount of money that it had raised. ',
'Distress Sale #2: One Kings Lane, Once Valued at $900 Million, Is Likely to Sell for a Fraction of That: One Kings Lane, the online seller of furniture and home decor that has struggled for the better part of the last two years, has been running a process to sell the company for several months, four sources told Re/code. The company had aimed to seal a deal by the end of 2015, one of these people said, calling it a fire sale. After originally seeking a higher price, One Kings Lane notified potential buyers in the last few months that it was willing to sell for less than the $230 million it had raised in venture capital, multiple sources said. It s not clear if a deal is done or who the potential buyer would be, but sources say a deal is unlikely to fetch more than $150 million. That would mean at least some investors will lose money and any employee stock would likely become worthless. Several of One Kings Lane s investors have a liquidation preference, according to venture data startup PitchBook, meaning they will get paid out before holders of common stock, such as employees. The company most recently cut a quarter of its staff in December, including five members of its senior management team. Sources said the layoffs were likely a condition to get a deal done.',
'Distress Sale #3: Quikr closes purchase of online real estate portal Commonfloor.com, pushed by investor Tiger Global: Online classifieds firm Quikr India Pvt. Ltd, one of India s most valuable start-ups, bought real estate portal CommonFloor in a distress sale orchestrated by Tiger Global Management Llc, the influential US-based hedge fund that is an investor in both. Quikr, valued at an estimated $1 billion, and CommonFloor (maxHeap Technologies Pvt. Ltd) didn t disclose the terms of the transaction, but two people familiar with the matter said Quickr paid $120 million in an all-stock deal. The people spoke on condition of anonymity. CommonFloor was valued at more than $150 million when it last raised Rs.60 crore from Google Capital in December 2014. The company raised a total of Rs.321 crore from Tiger, Accel Partners and Google Capital since 2011. Quikr and CommonFloor have valuations that seem disproportionate to their revenue. Quikr reported sales of Rs.24.78 crore for the year ended 31 March 2015 while CommonFloor generated sales of Rs.45.76 crore for that year, according to documents with the Registrar of Companies. Despite having generated revenue that is much larger than Quikr s, CommonFloor attracted a much lower valuation because of the valuation metrics used by e-commerce investors that may seem peculiar to shareholders in traditional businesses.',
"Samsung's Earnings Miss Underlines Sputtering Global Demand: Samsung Electronics s profit miss is the latest sign the global smartphone market is running out of steam, spelling trouble for the suppliers of displays, semiconductors and other components that go into mobile devices. The world s largest maker of displays and memory chips, which sells to Apple and many other brands, posted fourth-quarter profit that fell short of analysts estimates as sales remained sluggish over the holiday season. Demand is waning for smartphones as markets mature and China s economy slows, pressuring profit margins at Samsung. Concerns that the smartphone market is fizzling out has spurred analysts to trim estimated demand, which in turn has hammered device vendors as well as suppliers of components and contract assemblers. Apple, which garners most of the industry s profits, ended Thursday below $100 for the first time in over a year after investment brokerages from UBS to Morgan Stanley lowered forecasts on iPhone shipments. Samsung phone shipments are headed for their second straight annual decline in the wake of tougher competition from Apple in the high-end segment to China s Xiaomi and Huawei. for budget consumers. Yet even Xiaomi, which rose from obscurity to become the country s biggest phone brand, may have missed its 80-million unit sales target in 2015, people with knowledge of its production plans have said.",
'Amazon Is Now Selling Its Own ARM-Based Chips: An Israeli company acquired by Amazon last year has announced a new line of semiconductors, marking Amazon s first foray into the chipmaking market. The company, Annapurna Labs, announced its Alpine line of ARM-based processors on Wednesday, nearly a year after Amazon acquired it for a reported $350 million. The company says that its chips are designed for Wi-Fi routers, media streaming devices, connected home products and data storage gear, and that they ve already been used in commercial products from Asus, Netgear, and Synology.',
'Collapse in Q4 Venture Deal-Making Could Signal End of Unicorn Era: A study released in October found that venture capital firms were raising significantly less money than in previous quarters. Around that time, a bunch of well-known investors like Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson began saying that the days of steady unicorn valuations were coming to a close. Here s more cold water: An upcoming report from CB Insights says that VC funding levels in the fourth quarter of 2015 fell 30 percent amid weakening mega-round activity while deal activity fell 13 percent vs. the previous quarter. Here are the core findings from the KPMG International & CB Insights 2015 Venture Pulse Report, which will be released on January 19: In the third quarter of 2015, there were 72 $100 million equity funding rounds for VC-backed companies. In Q4, there were only 39 of those gigantic growth equity rounds. There were only nine new unicorns birthed in the fourth quarter, versus 23 in Q3. Deal-making activity in general fell to its lowest levels since the first quarter of 2013. While these numbers are by far the most concrete indicator that venture startup investing is getting less, um, frothy, there have been warning signs for the last few months. December data from Ernst & Young indicated that tech startups were avoiding IPOs, partly fearful that public markets would tank their private sector valuations. In November, a series of valuation writedowns of a number of unicorn startups shaved billions off Snapchat, Zenefits and other high-flying and fast-growing tech companies.',
'Facebook s Oculus Says It Will Charge $599 for the Rift: After months of teasing the introduction of its Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, the company said on Wednesday that it had opened orders for the system, which includes a headset and controller devices, with a price of $599. That s without a computer included you ll need a fast one that will probably cost around $1,000. The device begins shipping in March. Oculus also said that in February, it would open orders for a bundle, which includes the Rift headgear system and a computer that is certified to work with Oculus, for $1,500. Oculus is just one of many companies preparing to offer virtual reality devices this year. HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer, worked with the software distribution company Valve to develop the virtual reality gadget Vive that will be released in April. Similar to Oculus, the Vive requires connecting to a powerful computer, meaning the pricing should be similarly high. The companies have not announced the price yet. And Samsung Electronics teamed with Oculus last year to offer an entry-level virtual reality system, the Gear VR. That device, at $100, requires inserting a Samsung Galaxy smartphone into the headgear because it relies on the smartphone s screen for video and its computing brains for running apps and games.',
"Apple s App Store made $1.1 billion over the holidays: Apple said Wednesday that customers bought $1.1 billion worth of apps and in-app purchases in the two weeks between Dec. 20 and Jan. 3 alone. They also set a new single-day spending record, dropping $144 million on apps on New Year's Day. In a release, Apple said that this broke a record that had been set just a week before, on Christmas Day. Overall, Apple said that customers spent $20 billion on App Store purchases in 2015. Most popular apps included games such as Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Trivia Crack and Heads Up!, as well as messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Snapchat. In terms of top-grossers, Apple also noted that gaming and subscription apps did the best this year, mentioning Clash of Clans, Monster Strike, Game of War - Fire Age and Fantasy Westward Journey as well as Netflix, Hulu and Match. The firm was also quick to note that the App Store has made developers about $40 billion over the lifetime of the App Store, with roughly one-third of that figure -- about $13 billion -- coming from 2015 alone. Last year, the company said that it had generated $10 billion in revenue for developers in 2014.",
'Netflix Goes Live in 130 New Countries Including India - But China Skipped; Shares Advance: Netflix Inc. began selling its streaming service in India and more than 100 other countries, closing in on its goal of becoming the first global online television service. The stock logged its biggest gain since July, surging 9.3 percent. Netflix went live in 130 new countries, including Russia, Poland and Singapore, during his presentation. Adding India, most of the rest of Asia and other countries around the world marks a major step for Netflix. But China, the world s most populous country, remains a gap. The company faces challenges in China, where a local partnership is essential given government controls over licensing for online content, and many potential allies already have competing businesses. Alibaba recently acquired full control of Youku Tudou, one of the largest video streaming services in the country, while Baidu and Tencent own popular video services.',
'Netflix launches in India; basic monthly subscription at Rs 500: Netflix is offering three packages for Indian consumers starting with a basic plan that would cost Rs 500 a month and allow users to access all content on any one device at a time with standard definition quality. The other two higher subscription plans allows users to watch content with HD or ultra HD quality and a choice of 2-4 devices at the same time. The topmost package is priced at Rs 800 a month. In contrast, domestic and international peers in India like Hungama Play, BoxTV of Times Group, HOOQ and Singapore-based Spuul charge Rs 200-300 a month. HOOQ, which was launched globally in a three-party JV by Sony Pictures, SingTel and Warner Brothers a year ago, also offers a bundled deal with Airtel s Wynk Movies App. A cable TV service, on the other hand, costs around Rs 250-300 a month for a bouquet of a basic set of channels in the country. Where Netflix can differentiate is its huge catalogue, especially English language entertainment content. It is currently offering a one month free look period. However, this comes with a catch. Besides bandwidth issue and cost of watching entertainment content online another hurdle to wider adoption of Netflix to begin with could be its insistence on credit card details even if one chooses to opt for a one month tasting period.',
'Apple falls on Nikkei report of ~30% iPhone production cuts: Apple is expected to cut production of its latest iPhone models by about 30 percent in the January-March quarter, the Nikkei reported. As inventories of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have piled up since they were launched last September, production will be scaled back to let dealers go through their current stock, the business daily reported. Apple\'s shares were down 2.2 percent at $102.97 in afternoon trading. The stock has lost about a quarter of its value from record highs in April, reflecting worries over slowing shipments. "This is an eye-opening production cut which speaks to the softer demand that Apple has seen with 6s out of the gates," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said. "The Street was bracing for a cut but the magnitude here is a bit more worrisome." Apple shares fell on the report. Tepid forecast by Apple suppliers such as Jabil Circuit, which manufactures casings for iPhones, and Dialog Semiconductor GmbH in December stoked fears that iPhone shipments could fall for the first time. Wall Street has also tempered its view on the high-flying stock in recent months. Since early December, about a third of the analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters have trimmed their estimates on Apple.',
"Stuff from CES that you may actually want to buy: CES, the largest consumer electronics show in the world, kicked off Monday with a sneak peek at what some companies will be exhibiting on the show floor this week. Even with a smaller sampling of exhibitors, there was a dizzying amount of tech to take in -- everything from drones to laser-powered gizmos that promise to regrow your hair. We walked the floor and picked out five items that might be worth buying if they ever get to the market. There is a catch: Like so much of the gadgetry on display at CES, all of these items aren't for sale yet. They also don't have some of the finer details, such as price, worked out yet either. Parrot drones have been a highlight of CES for many years, and this year is no different. The company is showing off a new model called the Parrot Disco, a fixed-wing drone that you can launch by hurling it into the air like a Frisbee. Ili, the wearable translator: This little translator is about the size of a thumb drive, has one button and is described as the world's first wearable translator. The idea is that users speak into the device while holding down the button, let go, and then have the Ili translate into another language in real time. The whole thing is designed to work offline -- so no connection needed. It instead draws on a database of words and phrases stored locally in the device. Stabilo Digipen: Moving from the high-flying to the everyday, Stabilo's Digipen promises to be the modern notetaking instrument of my dreams. Made by an established German pen company, this souped-up ballpoint reads and learns the way you write and converts it into digital text for you. Unlike other smart pens, the Digipen is designed to work with any kind of paper.",
'India s most funded hyperlocal startup Grofers shuts shop in 9 cities: Hyperlocal grocery and fresh food delivery startup Grofers India Pvt Ltd, which ran a massive expansion drive four months ago, has shut down its operations in nine cities. The cities where it has stopped services are Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana, Bhopal, Kochi, Mysore, Nashik, Rajkot, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam. Grofers reportedly withdrew from the nine cities as it didn t see much uptake even after running massive marketing campaigns. A company spokesperson told Mint that all the employees in these cities are being relocated to other centres. The company s founder Albinder Dhindsa did not respond to Techcircle.in calls to confirm the development.',
'Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Shows Users Why 10,000-Character Tweets Aren t So Crazy: Show, don t tell. It s a general rule for writers and it was a helpful tool for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Tuesday afternoon just a few hours after Re/code reported that the company is working on a feature that would allow people to send tweets that are 10,000 characters long. (The current limit is 140 characters.) As expected, Twitter users freaked out, so Dorsey tweeted an explanation for the potential change, and he did so in many, many characters. Because Twitter can t accommodate more than 140 characters in a single tweet, Dorsey shared his much-too-long explanation as a photo instead. This is the closest Twitter has ever come to speaking publicly about the feature, referred to internally as Beyond 140. The product could launch as early as March, according to sources, but Dorsey didn t acknowledge a launch date in his post. It s clear, though, that Twitter isn t afraid to make drastic changes to the product in its effort to jump-start user growth and its sagging stock price.',
"In reversal of strategy, Verizon launches auction to sell data centers - sources: Verizon has started a process to sell its data center assets, hoping to fetch more than $2.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, as the U.S. telecommunications conglomerate focuses on its core business. A sale would represent the latest effort by Verizon, the No. 1 U.S. wireless carrier, to streamline its portfolio following a divestment last year of a chunk of its landline business and a portfolio of wireless towers. It would also mark a reversal of its strategy to expand in hosting and colocation services after it acquired data center operator Terremark Worldwide Inc in 2011 for $1.4 billion. The so-called 'colocation' portfolio up for sale includes 48 data centers, and generates annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of around $275 million, one of the people said.",
"Fitbit Takes On the Apple Watch With the Blaze - Stock Falls 18% on News: The fitness tracking leader goes for a full-on, fashionable smartwatch. Fitbit has come out swinging by introducing the Blaze, the company's first smartwatch with some fashion sense. The Blaze isn't a smartwatch that you can weight down with apps or customize to organize your entire digital life. It is primarily meant to be a detailed fitness tracker that can be worn all the time, offering a few additional features for convenience. Apart from interacting with Fitbit's own fitness app, the Blaze can push calendar appointments, calls, and texts, but it doesn't get into the weeds with such things as e-mail or Twitter notifications. The Fitbit Blaze will set you back $200 for the tracker and the rubber strap that's included. Additional rubber straps will cost $30, leather options are $100, and the steel bracelet is the most expensive, at $130. The Fitbit Blaze is now available for pre-order via Fitbit and will go on sale January 6 via Fitbit's larger retailers such at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target in the United States. Global availability isn't yet set, but the Blaze will start rolling out outside the U.S. in March. After the announcement, shares fell throughout the day before ending down 18 percent. The Fitbit Blaze, starting at around $200, represents not only new competition with smartwatch makers, but also potentially a lack of focus for the company which investors may be punishing. Fitbit had carved out a strong niche in the fitness tracking market, setting itself up for one of the strongest stock performances from companies that went public last year.",
'Expanding push into ad-tech, Oracle Buys Audience Tracking Firm AddThis For Around $200M: Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech. Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories or follow accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and audience tracking technology for online publishers and marketers. AddThis says it currently covers activity data for 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors and over 15 million mobile and desktop web domains. Oracle and AddThis are not disclosing the terms of the deal, but we have been digging around, and sources with knowledge of the company tell us that it was in the region of $100 million to $200 million, closer to the latter. The acquisition underscores a couple of bigger developments in the world of advertising and marketing tech. The first of these is the growing role that Oracle is playing in this area. Oracle says that it will continue to serve existing clients of AddThis, but it is currently evaluating the future product roadmap. More concretely, AddThis will become a part of Oracle s Data Cloud business, a division that also includes assets from two other recent Oracle acquisitions: BlueKai (advertising data) and Datalogix (marketing data). Taken together, the technology and big data portfolios that Oracle has amassed in this division give the company a strong play for more business from brands and ad firms, as well as from online content companies that want better tools to make better sense of their audiences and to monetise them more effectively. Secondly, the deal points to a wider trend for consolidation in marketing tech and ad tech. While AddThis has been around for more than a decade, it s interesting to see that it finally made the leap to join a bigger company. On its own, AddThis had developed some interesting, but also somewhat controversial, technology. One example, canvas fingerprinting, was being tested by AddThis last year as a potential replacement for cookies, by way of a digital image created by each browser to follow users wherever they went online. As Pro Publica described it, canvas fingerprinting was extremely persistent and nearly impossible to block, raising concerns from privacy advocates. It s not clear whether canvas fingerprinting is something that AddThis uses today, or whether Oracle plans to market the tech in future. AddThis is Oracle s 96th acquisition.',
'Augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: Understand the Difference: The Battle Is Real: Although virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have existed in some form for decades, only recently have they garnered mainstream attention. VR is blowing up right now, and its content and hardware advances have been exciting to watch. In a short amount of time, content creators have made some mind-blowing advances in storytelling with this new technology. Brands, movie studios, gaming companies and news organizations are all tinkering with this tool and channel. VR will gain ascendancy throughout 2016, but my money s on AR becoming the dominant technology in our daily lives. The New York Times recently distributed more than one million Google cardboards to its digital-edition subscribers. YouTube and Facebook are enabling VR online through digital video players. Everything is aligning to have VR hit critical mass next year. VR is the only medium that guarantees the user s complete focus on the content. There is no looking away, no checking email or text messages and no updating social-media statuses. VR is the most immersive way to tell a story because what happens inside that headset makes you feel something in your head, heart and gut. But VR s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. The immersive nature of VR hinders users from interacting with their surroundings. It takes them out of the moment. They can t walk around and see what is right next to them, look people in the eye or read someone s body language. VR is a powerful way to experience content, but is not practical for interacting in the real world. And therein lies the major problem with VR. Content is king, no doubt, and providing immersive experiences is the holy grail in advertising. But VR will never become an innocuous part of our daily lives. AR adds contextual layers of information to our experiences in real time. We have seen this future foretold in Hollywood films, such as Avatar, Minority Report, Iron Man and Wall-E, among others. Soon these depictions will become real. However, AR has issues with execution, which tends to feel gimmicky. Remember pointing your smartphone to a print ad to get some poorly made content Google Glass showed some innovative AR applications, but they were ultimately a failure because the hardware and technology were too broad and lacked focus on the consumer problem they were trying to solve. These examples have shown the promise of AR, but have failed to deliver on contextual utility. Still, the future is bright for AR with several tech companies working on their AR offerings. Microsoft is working on HoloLens AR headset glasses. Developer kits are scheduled to hit the market in early 2016. Google invested in a company called Magic Leap, whose technology beams lasers into the viewer s iris to activate AR. That future will become a reality in another year s time. Both VR and AR tinker with our reality but AR enhances it, while VR diverts us from it, which is why the latter will come to the fore in 2017, with its promise of contextual data for marketers and utility for consumers.',
'Oculus to take preorders for Virtual Reality headset Rift from Wednesday: Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook Inc, said on Monday it would take preorders for its much-awaited virtual reality headset, Rift, from Wednesday. The Rift would come bundled with the game, Lucky\'s Tale, and a multiplayer space combat game, EVE: Valkyrie, Oculus said in a blog post. The blog post did not contain any further information such as pricing of the headset. Rift "remains on schedule to ship in Q1," Oculus had said in a blog post last week. However, the touch controller, a pair of motion controllers, would be delayed and shipped only in the second half of 2016, the company had said. In September, Oculus and Samsung unveiled a new version of Gear VR virtual reality headset for $99.',
'G.M., Expecting Rapid Change, Invests $500 Million in Lyft: The founders of Lyft, the ride-hailing service, have long imagined that the future of transportation would involve fewer cars on the road. Now General Motors is helping the start-up reach that goal. Lyft announced on Monday that G.M. had invested $500 million in the company, or half of its latest $1 billion venture financing round. The funding, which recently closed, values Lyft at $4.5 billion, not including the new capital. G.M. s $500 million interest in Lyft is the single largest direct investment by an auto manufacturer into a ride-hailing company in the United States, according to data from PitchBook, an alliance that pairs an auto stalwart with the kind of start-up trying to disrupt it. The investment reflects how much consumer automotive habits have been changed by technology over the last decade. With the rise of ride-sharing companies, car manufacturers have raced to adapt to how people can now use each other s vehicles for rides, which could potentially lead to a decline in car ownership.',
'Toyota Snubs Tech Companies With Ford Dashboard Deal: Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to use a car-phone connectivity system championed by Ford Motor Co. in a front to keep Apple Inc. and Google from dominating control of dashboards. Toyota will introduce a telematics system with Ford s SmartDeviceLink, an open platform that the automakers are inviting their peers to adopt for in-car applications, it said in a statement. Toyota has resisted offering Apple s CarPlay and Google s Android Auto, citing safety and security concerns, while Ford is offering them as apps within its Sync connectivity system this year. The deal shows two of the world s largest automakers remain wary about giving Apple and Google too much control over displays that IHS Automotive estimates will generate $18.6 billion in sales by 2021. For Toyota, which is involved in another system called MirrorLink that competes with the two tech giants, the collaboration with Ford suggest the company is spreading its bets on car connectivity options. Ahead of this week s Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota also said it will equip U.S. vehicles with data communication modules next year that connect cars with cellular networks. The modules will enable a system that notifies authorities when air bags deploy due to traffic accidents.',
"Alibaba's Finance Arm Said to Seek at Least $1.5 Billion: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. s finance affiliate is seeking at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in a second round of fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said. Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co., controlled by Alibaba s billionaire chairman Jack Ma, plans to issue stock to existing and new investors, according to the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private. The firm, known as Ant Financial, is speaking to potential investors including insurers and other financial institutions, as well as private equity funds and venture capital firms, the person said. Challenging bricks-and-mortar banks, the Internet-based Ant Financial runs China s biggest online payment service, Alipay, and controls the company which manages Yu E Bao, the nation s largest money-market fund with more than 600 billion yuan of assets. It also holds a stake in MYBank, a private online lender. Ant Financial was valued at about $45 billion after completing an initial round of fundraising in June 2015, the person said. The company may sell shares in an IPO as early as this year and hasn t decided yet whether to conduct a third round of financing ahead of that, according to the person. Ant Financial may use money from the current fundraising for acquisitions, the person said, without identifying potential targets. Ant Financial has already invested in companies including India s One97 Communications Ltd. and Postal Savings Bank of China.",
'Facebook fights for Free Basics in India, global test-case: India has become a battleground over the right to unrestricted Internet access, with local tech start-ups joining the front line against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his plan to roll out free Internet to the country\'s masses. The Indian government has ordered Facebook\'s Free Basics plan to be put on hold while it decides what to do. The program, launched in around three dozen developing countries, offers pared-down web services on mobile phones, along with access to Facebook\'s own social network and messaging services, without charge. But critics say the program, launched 10 months ago in India in collaboration with operator Reliance Communications, violates principles of net neutrality, the concept that all websites on the internet are treated equally. It would put small content providers and start-ups that don\'t participate in it at a disadvantage, they say. "India is a test case for a company like Facebook and what happens here will affect the roll out of this service in other smaller countries where perhaps there is not so much awareness at present," said Mishi Choudhary, a New York-based lawyer who works on technology and Internet advocacy issues. Also at stake is Facebook\'s ambition to expand in its largest market outside the United States. Only 252 million of India\'s 1.3 billion people have Internet access, making it a growth market for firms including Google and Facebook.',
'Uber s No-Holds-Barred Expansion Strategy Fizzles in Germany: Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe. But here in this city of 690,000 less than the population of San Francisco, Uber s hometown the company recently did something unusual: It retreated. In early November, Uber shut its small office in Frankfurt s centuries-old city center after just 18 months of operation, mothballing the online platform that had let people in the city hail rides through a smartphone app. The pullback was spurred in part by drivers like Hasan Kurt, the owner of a local licensed taxi business, who had refused to work with the American service. With more than 20 years of experience as a taxi operator, Mr. Kurt said he disliked how Uber barreled into Frankfurt in early 2014, using primarily unlicensed drivers who had not passed the same exams and health checks required of licensed drivers. That low-cost service, UberPop, which is similar to UberX in the United States, faced legal challenges and was eventually outlawed, last March, by German regulators. Uber then tried to recruit licensed operators like Mr. Kurt to build its service within the letter of the law. But Mr. Kurt would not budge. It s not part of the German culture to do something like what Uber did, Mr. Kurt, 45, said over a cup of tea last month during a break in his busy holiday schedule. We don t like it, the government doesn t like it, and our customers don t like it. Uber s withdrawal from Frankfurt is just one of a multitude of retreats by the company now valued at $62.5 billion across Europe in recent months. In November, Uber also pulled out of Hamburg and D sseldorf after less than two years of operating in each of those German cities. In Amsterdam, Uber recently stopped offering UberPop. And in other European cities, Uber faces the prospect of being beaten back or at least contained. In Paris and Madrid, Uber has been confronted by often violent opposition from existing taxi operators, while in London, local regulators are mulling changes that could significantly hamper Uber s ambitions there. Uber s aggressive tactics also turned off potential customers like Andreas M ller, a financial analyst who tried the company s Frankfurt service after first using Uber on a business trip in Chicago. Mr. M ller said he liked the convenience of paying through his smartphone, but soon turned against the company after reading that it had continued operating in violation of court orders and did not directly employ its drivers, who are independent contractors. That might work in the U.S., but that s not how things are done here in Germany, said Mr. M ller, 37. Everyone must respect the rules. ',
'It s Amazon and Also-Rans in Retailers Race for Online Sales: Two decades after Jeffrey P. Bezos started Amazon in his Bellevue, Wash., garage, his e-commerce juggernaut could be forgiven for letting up on its rapid growth. Not Amazon, though, which steamrolled through 2015, capturing an ever-growing share of United States retail sales. Of every additional $1 Americans spent for items online this year, Amazon captured 51 cents, according to a recent estimate by analysts at Macquarie Research. And of the expected $94 billion growth in all retail sales this year both in stores and online Amazon took a staggering $22 billion, or almost a quarter, Ben Schachter, a retail analyst at Macquarie, calculated. Two decades after Jeffrey P. Bezos started Amazon in his Bellevue, Wash., garage, his e-commerce juggernaut could be forgiven for letting up on its rapid growth. Not Amazon, though, which steamrolled through 2015, capturing an ever-growing share of United States retail sales. Of every additional $1 Americans spent for items online this year, Amazon captured 51 cents, according to a recent estimate by analysts at Macquarie Research. And of the expected $94 billion growth in all retail sales this year both in stores and online Amazon took a staggering $22 billion, or almost a quarter, Ben Schachter, a retail analyst at Macquarie, calculated. And at times, Amazon has seemed to be in danger of getting trapped in a race to the bottom that it brought on with its steep discounting. They were just trying to sell more by underpricing everybody, said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consulting firm. But they realized they would never make any money that way. They evolved, he said. It s much a different company than it was five years ago. ',
'Bill Miller Is Misfiring on Twitter Options After Boon on Amazon: Bill Miller turned to an unusual strategy in mounting his comeback as a top stock picker, buying options on hard-hit technology companies to make leveraged bets with a big impact on his returns. The tactic paid off in 2013 and 2014 as Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. rebounded and helped lift Miller s $2.3 billion Legg Mason Opportunity Trust to a top ranking. The veteran manager is having less success so far with a similar wager on Twitter Inc. that he escalated last quarter, when he owned options allowing him to buy $350 million of the stock -- equal to 15 percent of the fund s assets. The massive wager highlights how some managers are using derivatives to boost profits in mutual funds, tightly regulated investment vehicles that have strict limits on what they can invest in. The technique allows funds to make big wagers with relatively little money up front, though they can lose that money should their bet go wrong. Proponents of the strategy include bond manager Bill Gross, who has said managers need to use leverage to juice up gains in a low-return environment. You are going to get a much bigger pop to the upside, said Abraham Goodfriend, founder of Yedid Capital Management, a Miami Beach, Florida-based firm that employs options. The downside is, if you are wrong you are going to lose all your money paid for the contracts. Miller bought options on 9 million shares of Twitter in the third quarter, filings show. The drop in value of the options may be one reason the fund lost 4.6 percent over the past month and ranked among the bottom 5 percent of peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, though it s still ahead of 95 percent for 2015. Buying options frees cash to invest elsewhere and allows a fund to bet on a large number of shares with a small down payment, boosting returns if the underlying stock gains. Miller said in an e-mailed response to questions that options occasionally provide more potential reward for the amount of risk being taken than the underlying stocks. This almost always happens after the stock has gone down significantly, which was the case with Amazon, Apple and Twitter, he wrote.',
"Few Computers Are Powerful Enough to Support Virtual Reality: VR headsets are almost ready to hit stores, but less than 1 percent of PCs will be capable of running them. Virtual reality has a very real problem. With several technology giants preparing splashy introductions for the first VR headsets in 2016, few people own hardware capable of fully supporting Facebook s Oculus Rift or other systems. Just 13 million PCs worldwide next year will have the graphics capabilities needed to run VR, according to an estimate by Nvidia, the largest maker of computer graphics chips. Those ultra-high-end machines account for less than 1 percent of the 1.43 billion PCs expected to be in use globally in 2016, according to research firm Gartner. VR headsets, which create immersive 3D environments the wearer can interact with and explore, are poised to be a star of CES 2016. The massive consumer electronics trade show, which kicks off in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, will have more than 40 exhibitors demonstrating VR products, a 77 percent increase from 2015. Taiwanese gadget maker HTC is expected to show off a new version of its Vive headset at CES before releasing it in stores in April. Facebook is still on track to sell its first VR product to consumers by the end of March, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey tweeted on Dec. 22. I think the technology has significant potential, but I also think we have to be realistic about how strongly it will be adopted in the short term, Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst for researcher IHS, wrote in an e-mail. The hype is somewhat understandable considering the investment some big technology companies are making in VR. However, VR headsets come to market with a number of specific challenges. IHS estimates that 7 million VR headsets will be in use by the end of 2016. The Consumer Technology Association, which organizes CES, forecasts VR headset sales of 1.2 million units in 2016. While that's a sixfold increase from last year with total revenue of $540 million, that s a ways short of covering the $2 billion Facebook paid for Oculus VR in 2014. There s a very good reason why VR demands such processing power: Anything less, and you might hurl. Early VR prototypes caused many testers to suffer from motion sickness due to slight delays in the screen s responses to the user s movements. A standard PC game runs at 30 frames per second. But to deliver the fluid, natural motion our brains need to be convinced an image is real, VR needs to achieve 90 frames per second on two video projections (one for each eye). Right now, that means a $1,500 laptop.",
'App differentiates a baby\'s crying sounds: Why\'s this baby crying Well, there\'s an app that can tell us. It\'s called the \'Infant Cries Translator\'. It was developed at Taiwan\'s National Yunlin University of Science and Technology by a team led by Chang Chuan-Yu. "The Infant Cries Translator can differentiate four different statuses of sounds of a baby\'s cry, including hunger, a wet diaper, sleepiness, and pain." An audio recording of the baby crying is uploaded to a Cloud Drive. It\'s then analyzed in a database of around 200,000 crying sounds Chang and his colleagues collected over two years. And moments later, the results are in......This baby\'s hungry. Chang warns the app is not foolproof yet. But the results, he says, are promising. So far, according to our user feedback, the APP\'s accuracy can reach to 92 percent for the babies under two weeks. As for the babies under one to two months, the APP\'s accuracy can also reach up to 84 to 85 percent. Even for a four-month-old baby, the accuracy can reach up to 77 percent." The accuracy rating varies because over time the baby adapts to new conditions. But for new parents, the app can be a valuable resource. ',
'With Car-Sharing Service Via, Sharing More Than Just a Ride: The back seat of a Via functions as Joanne Gamel s mobile office. It is where Ms. Gamel, a New York real estate agent, checks email, calls clients and gets listings, all while being chauffeured to appointments in Manhattan. But the best part of a shared car service like Via is the business she does with fellow brokers who are also in the back doing the same thing. I ve gotten at least 15 different business cards from other agents, said Ms. Gamel, 35. It s great for networking, especially if they share their listings or refer a client. I love getting in the car with another agent. And if he has a nice smile, even better. Inside an UberPool car last month, Tanner Wells met the woman of his dreams. He was riding from a Brooklyn party back to his apartment in Manhattan when she hopped in. We flirted on the way back to the city, said Mr. Wells, 37. She was telling me about some guy she was going to visit. We were talking about goofy stuff. When we got to her stop, she said, It was nice meeting you, and got out. The driver turned to me and said, Why didn t you get her number The next day Mr. Wells created a missed connections post on Craigslist in the hope she would find him. (So far, no answer.) Within the last year, ride-sharing services like Via, Lyft Line and UberPool have exploded onto New York streets as an alternative to pricey taxi rides and unreliable public transportation. Their fleet of S.U.V.s has created a new vision of car-pooling that is luxurious, cost-effective and timesaving. Executives are taking them to work. Parents are taking them on school runs. Packs of young professionals are taking them home after happy hour. Compared with taxis, where rides are on the decline, the price of a shared ride is worth the middle seat and constant pickups. A Via ride costs just over $5 for any two points throughout Manhattan south of 110th Street. But convenience aside, these shared cars are also prime breeding grounds for scandalous, titillating exchanges, where New Yorkers sandwiched together are networking, flirting and sparring in a seemingly consequence-free environment where nearly anything goes.',
'Instacart s crazy-growth days may be coming to an end: the $2 Billion Grocery Delivery Startup, Lays Off 12 In-House Recruiters: The grocery delivery startup, which investors valued at $2 billion last year, laid off 12 in-house recruiters earlier this month, according to multiple sources. A spokeswoman confirmed the layoffs, but did not disclose how many recruiters the company still employs. In a statement, CEO Apoorva Mehta attributed the job cuts to the company s plans to be less aggressive in hiring in 2016 than it was in 2015, when its staff tripled, from just under 100 employees to a little more than 300. A person familiar with the move, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company likely should have employed fewer full-time recruiters and more contractors since it was unlikely that last year s pace of hiring would continue indefinitely. Those affected by the cuts will be paid through the end of January, this person said. Instacart delivers groceries in 18 American cities from big chains like Whole Foods, Costco and Target and smaller grocers like Fairway and Zabar s in New York City. Customers place orders through Instacart s website or app, and the goods are whisked from local stores to customer doors, usually within an hour. A substantial portion of Instacart s revenue originally came from marking up the in-store price of a given item, but the company now often charges the same price as the grocer, but takes a cut of the sales from the store. Earlier this year, Instacart finally began being transparent about when it was charging higher prices than its partner grocers.',
'First Look at New Foldable Google Glass for the Workplace: The division of Google responsible for wearable technology, Project Aura, has been hard at work on numerous iterations based on the original Glass headset. Now we ve got a glimpse at what one of those devices may look like. In FCC filings published today, a version of Glass designed for the workplace shows a familiar-looking device with a glass prism, but equipped with a hinge so that it can be folded and placed in pockets like a standard pair of glasses.',
'Sidecar Squeezed Out by Uber and Lyft, Will Shut Down on Dec. 31: Sidecar, the third-biggest U.S. car-hailing service, said it will end its ride and delivery operations as the company is squeezed out by better-known competitors Uber and Lyft. One of the pioneers of the ride-sharing concept, Sidecar will end its service on Dec. 31, co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a blog post. The move will help pave the way for the "next big adventure in 2016," according to the letter. Founded four years ago, Sidecar created one of the first apps to try ride-destination tracking, discounted carpooling and deliveries that placed people and packages on the same route, according to its founders. The closely held San Francisco-based company shifted from transporting passengers to goods after struggling to compete with Uber and Lyft, according to CB Insights. "They re competing with very heavily funded companies, and they didn t have the same pull with drivers that these other companies might have," said Nikhil Krishnan, a technology analyst at CB Insights. "Even when it pivoted to transporting goods, it still had to compete with Postmates, and even Uber is transporting goods." Sidecar has raised about $35 million, according to Margaret Ryan, a company spokeswoman. That number pales in comparison to venture capital raised by Uber and Lyft. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Uber is seeking $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion. Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing service, is currently seeking to raise $500 million, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg last month. Sidecar s investors include Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, and Richard Branson.',
'Foodpanda India to sack about 330 employees: Foodpanda India is laying off one in seven staffers, continuing its clean-up drive after allegations of operational irregularities rattled the Rocket Internet-owned food ordering marketplace. The company said on Tuesday it will sack 15 per cent of its employees, or 330 people, as increased automation of 98 per cent in order processing has reduced the need for staffers. Foodpanda joins a raft of food-tech startups such as Zomato and TinyOwl in laying off employees amid a tightening in fund flow from investors due to high cash burn and growing profitability concerns. Before the job cuts, Foodpanda had 2,200 employees on its rolls. The company said it will provide affected employees due remuneration and help them explore job options.',
'Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future: Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges and elite institutions in particular have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges and elite institutions in particular have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Some of that spirit was on display at Rice in October. In an engineering department design lab, teams of students in the university s global health technologies program were working on assignments to develop products for real clients many of them for hospitals in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, seeking low-cost medical devices.',
'LinkedIn Rival Viadeo Exits China: Viadeo, the French rival to LinkedIn, is to exit China in order to focus on becoming a profitable business. In a further cost-cutting move, it will also shutter its data center in California and migrate to the cloud. The company moved into China eight years when it acquired local professional social network Tianji.com, but that site will cease to exist on December 31. Viadeo claims that Tianji has 25 million users, but it has struggled to attract the very considerable development resources necessary to drive it forward in China s fiercely competitive market . Viadeo had planned to use one-third of the proceeds from its 2014 IPO to develop Tianji.com, but the listing didn t raise enough capital and the firm wasn t able to pull in money from private investors. Post-China, Viadeo said it will refocus on its home market of France and other French-speaking countries, while putting great emphasis on its B2B sales model. Viadeo s foray into China was a fascinating one, since it doubled down on the country in 2011, a time when Twitter and Facebook were heavily linked with opening local operations there. The company two-sided play having a global site (Viadeo.com) and a China-only one (Tianji.com) was a model that both of the U.S. social networks had reportedly shown interest in. In contrast to Viadeo s troubles in China, LinkedIn seems to be finding some success there. The U.S. social network opened a joint-venture with Sequoia China last year. LinkedIn China isn t a totally separate site, but it does block some content from China based on the country s web censorship regulations.',
'Facebook Pitches Free Basics to India as Net Neutrality Activists Clash With Facebook: Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India s leading newspapers for the country to allow a free Internet service that has stirred controversy and invited questions from regulators. Facebook s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care, and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Yet activists say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites. The backlash in India centers on net neutrality, the principle that all Internet websites should be equally accessible. Critics accused the world s largest social networking company of favoring a limited swath of the Internet and excluding rival services. And Facebook s broader Internet.org initiative, including Free Basics, is seen as an effective way to draw more users onto a social network already used by over a billion people. Zuckerberg s Facebook is spending billions of dollars on Internet.org, including projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. The billionaire co-founder has said Facebook or its partners will not make money off this initiative and that the goal is to bring Internet access to the developing world and alleviate poverty. This isn t about Facebook s commercial interests there aren t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics, Zuckerberg wrote in an opinion piece in the Times of India. If people lose access to free basic services they will simply lose access to the opportunities offered by the Internet today. This month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India asked in a consultation paper whether telecommunications service providers should be allowed to charge different pricing for data usage on websites, applications and platforms. The initial comment period for the Indian consultation paper ends Dec. 30. Activists have argued that Free Basics is a land grab on government property and that with data rates in India already being low, eventually everybody will be on the full and open Internet. ',
'TVF and AIB, Stars of India s Online Video Scene Struggle to Make a Living: It s not just the streaming video services that are struggling to make a profit in India. Even the country s most popular YouTube stars have trouble making a living from digital video. The Viral Fever, a troupe of actors that creates TV-style episodic comedies, has one of the country s most popular channels on YouTube, with about 1.3 million subscribers. Its most recent series, Pitchers, focused on a group of young tech workers trying to decide whether to form their own start-up. But the ad revenue from YouTube is so low that the group, known as T.V.F., has turned to sponsors like Kingfisher beer and Pond s cold cream for funding to create its shows. T.V.F. also makes corporate videos and does live comedy shows at Indian colleges to help pay the bills. All India Bakchod, a four-man comedy troupe, has had similar challenges. The group has produced videos making fun of topics like Bollywood, Indian weddings and politics and has nearly 1.5 million followers on its YouTube channel. About two months ago, A.I.B. finally hit the big time, when Star India, a group of television channels owned by 21st Century Fox, began airing a weekly news satire show starring the group on its Hotstar app and on TV. Mr. Joshi said that A.I.B. essentially breaks even on video production costs and makes extra income from branded content it creates for Red Bull, Xbox and Quiksilver.',
'Apple Pay Seeks Growth in Asia, Europe After Slow U.S. Adoption: After a sluggish start in the U.S. since its debut more than a year ago, Apple Pay is ramping up in markets where people are more comfortable with so- called contactless payments. The service, which lets consumers pay in an app or by tapping their iPhone on store terminals, will be introduced next year in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain. Apple is counting on its brand recognition as it enters markets that are further along than the U.S. in all things mobile payments, particularly in advanced technologies needed to accept them in retail outlets. Still, it won t be easy. The iPhone maker will compete with local banks and Internet companies that already offer the service -- not to mention Samsung Electronics Co., the world s leader in smartphones. The mobile-payment service, which only works with Apple devices, is a way for the company to make products more appealing and spur customer loyalty. After Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook called 2015 the year of Apple Pay in January, the service has been slow to take off domestically, partly because of a lack of promotion and a limited number of store terminals able to accept it. China: Apple said its service will be rolled out as soon as early 2016. Last week, Apple teamed up with Chinese bank-card association UnionPay, which will make Apple s market entry a lot easier, said James Wester, an analyst at researcher IDC. Still, Apple Pay will compete with services like Tencent s WeChat and Alibaba s Alipay that control more than 75 percent of the mobile-payments market. And Apple should be prepared to race with Samsung, which also announced a partnership with UnionPay and plans to bring Samsung Pay to China as soon as early 2016.',
'Jet.com s Strategy: Low Prices, Fast Delivery, Happy Workers: You can t accuse Jet.com of timidity. Jet has had some bumps and turns since last summer, when it began selling products as varied as cans of chili, exercise bikes and WowWee personal robots. It changed its business model, dropping a membership fee. It is burning through cash as it continues to scale up, now with more than 900 employees. When it went out to raise more money in the fall, it encountered skepticism. A week before Christmas, it told some customers they would not get their orders in time. Jet said only about 500 shipments out of a million were affected, but such admissions never look good. Yet Marc Lore, Jet s founder and chief executive, says he is not worried. What will separate Jet from Fab and every other failed company, he says, is happiness. In particular, employee happiness. I m constantly asking people at Jet if they re happy, he said. It s really important for me to know that they love working here and think this is the best place they ve ever worked. Jet supplies its employees with typical start-up perks like free food (weekly lunches, plus Red Bull in the refrigerator and protein powder in the kitchen cabinet), four months of paid parental leave, unlimited vacation and an ownership stake that could one day be worth a lot. But it also has some decidedly less common policies, like standardized, no-negotiation pay packages and worker-friendly employment agreements. Employees can see, every day, how the business is doing. Transparency is a big word with Mr. Lore. So is fairness. Make people feel good, he says, and they will do their best. Trust them and they will reward you. As the holiday shopping season was beginning in late November, Mr. Lore convened his top executives in Jet s Hoboken, N.J., headquarters for their regular weekly meeting. Here are some of the things that were not on the agenda: warehouse logistics, customer concerns, fine-tuning prices, potential shipping bottlenecks, supplier issues or any of a dozen other topics that could have bedeviled Jet s first December. Instead, the executives discussed the mood and well-being of Jet s employees. The preliminary results of Jet s first Happiness Pulse were in. More than 500 employees responded to the survey, which means basically everyone who had been at Jet for at least a month. Two-thirds of them said they viewed Jet favorably. Only 4 percent had a negative opinion. So only 25 people are basically unhappy, Mr. Lore said. In an interview a few weeks after Jet s official debut in July, Mr. Lore pulled out his phone and opened an app. It showed that Jet sold $667,200 in gross merchandise value in one day, up 89 percent in a month. Jet had 6,100 first-time buyers the previous day, and 7,800 orders. The company had $153 million in cash. The app is bulging with data, and it is available to investors and the salaried but not the hourly employees. Some information is available even to casual visitors. Dominating one wall in the reception area in Hoboken is a board posting constant updates of the day s sales by number and dollar volume. For technology companies, this is radical openness. Also radical is a practice to keep salaries the same for jobs grouped together, a process called leveling. This is meant to rule out the common ploy I got a job offer, can you match it Extroverts who promote themselves and introverts who keep their heads down are paid the same for jobs of the same value to the company.',
'Common Stock Ownership Spreads Among Start-Up Investors: When institutional investors put money into companies backed by venture capital, they typically end up owning a type of stock called preferred shares. Now, institutional investors are also becoming owners of a different class of start-up stock: common shares. The competition among investors to get into hot start-ups has been so fierce that many hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and others have been unable to participate when the up-and-coming companies sold preferred shares, a kind of stock that generally comes with many protections. So to make sure they got a stake in private companies like Palantir Technologies, Dropbox and One Kings Lane, the institutional investors instead began buying common stock generally owned by employees of start-ups often from workers directly or from platforms that sell employee shares. In doing so, the investors chose to forgo the protections that come with preferred shares. Common stock usually comes with no guarantees and is paid out only after the preferred shareholders get their money. The spreading of common stock may have some unintended consequences, especially as the air begins to come out of the Silicon Valley boom and some companies get sold for modest amounts of money. For one, institutional investors who own common stock could take home much less than other investors in the same company who have preferred shares. That gap, in turn, could lead to more litigation between investors.',
'Indian Regulators Suspend Facebook s Free Basic Services: Telecommunications regulators in India have ordered the suspension of Facebook s controversial program to bring free basic Internet services to mobile phone users in the country. Facebook s program, called Free Basics, is one of the signature projects of Internet.org, the company s ambitious plan to bring the Internet to the billions of people around the world who do not have it. Under the initiative, the company works in partnership with local telephone carriers in 35 countries to offer free access to a text-only version of the Facebook social network as well as to certain news, health, job and other services. The idea is to give novices a taste of the Internet and encourage them to buy paid data services when they want to explore the Internet more widely. But critics say that by offering a free package of handpicked services, Facebook and its partners are discouraging people from using competing services and violating the principle of net neutrality, which calls for telecommunications carriers to treat all Internet services equally. In India, for example, the program offers free web searches using Microsoft s Bing service but Google searches incur a charge. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook s chief executive, has been particularly keen to expand Free Basics in India, which already has more Facebook users than any other country except the United States. Facebook has waged an aggressive advertising campaign in newspapers and on its own social network to build support for the program. But Facebook has encountered a series of setbacks, including intense opposition from net neutrality advocates, the poor marketing efforts and weak network of its Indian phone partner, and skepticism from regulators. One of those regulators, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, has now told Reliance Communications, Facebook s partner in India, to stop offering Free Basics. The order which was quietly issued about two weeks ago but leaked to the Indian news media this week came after Reliance failed to turn over information about the terms and conditions of the service, which it had planned to expand across the country beginning last month.',
'When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt: On Sept. 4, employees of Good Technology, a mobile security start-up in Sunnyvale, Calif., awoke to discover that their company was being sold to BlackBerry, the mobile device and software maker. Some workers immediately began trying to figure out what it meant for Good to abandon its long-anticipated plan to go public a move that would have potentially turned their shares in the start-up into gold. They didn t get firm answers that day, but the prospects did not look great. In an investor document about the sale that was distributed to shareholders, employees discovered their Good stock was valued at 44 cents a share, down from $4.32 a year earlier. In contrast, preferred stock owned by Good s venture capitalists was worth almost seven times as much, more than $3 a share. The paperwork also showed that Good s board had turned down an $825 million cash offer just six months earlier, in March. For some employees, it meant that their shares were practically worthless. Even worse, they had paid taxes on the stock based on the higher value. A few nights after the investor document went around, a glass conference room wall at Good s headquarters was broken, according to an incident report. At a subsequent company meeting, Ms. Wyatt told employees that counselors were available to talk to people who needed to vent. Many employees may not recover what they ve lost, said Matthew Parks, Good s director of cloud products, who has worked at the company since 2006. His Good shares are now worth a fraction of the six-figure tax bill that he paid for the stock allotted to him before the company was sold. What Good s employees experienced is an example of who loses out when a company backed by venture capital goes south. While plenty of people including founders, top executives and investors are involved in the rise of a start-up, those hit the hardest during a company s fall are the rank-and-file employees. Investors and executives generally get protections in a start-up that employees do not. Many investors have preferred stock, a class of shares that can come with a guaranteed payout. Executives frequently get special bonuses so they will not leave during deal talks. In Good s case, the six investors on the board had preferred shares worth a combined $125 million. After the sale to BlackBerry, Ms. Wyatt, who has since left the company, took home $4 million, as well as a $1.9 million severance payment, according to investor documents. In contrast, start-up employees generally own common stock, whose payout comes only after those who hold preferred shares get their money. In Good s case, the board s preferred stock was worth almost the same as all 227 million common shares outstanding. Missing out on the upside of the sale was bad enough, but that wasn t the half of it. Some Good employees actually lost money when BlackBerry bought the company. Good was a unicorn, that is, a private company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. The high valuation increased the paper value of employee shares and thus the income tax bills levied on their stock when they received the stock grants, or when they bought and sold shares. To pay those taxes, some employees emptied savings accounts and borrowed money. Some of Good s common shareholders have sued most of the board for a breach of fiduciary duty, asserting that directors looked after the interests of only preferred shareholders.',
'Palantir Technologies raises $880 million from investors: Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and security company that helps government agencies track down terrorists and uncover financial fraud, said on Wednesday it has raised $880 million in its latest financing round. Founded in 2004, Palantir, which is considered Silicon Valley\'s most secretive company, does highly confidential work for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Its data mining system, which uses algorithms to search for patterns and connections, helped the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The company\'s large staff of consultants also work with large businesses, police departments, banks and branches of the U.S. military. Palantir has raised close to $2 billion from investors. Its valuation earlier this month reached $20 billion, up from $15 billion in late 2014, making it the fourth-highest-valued, venture-backed private tech company in the world. The company has bucked growing skepticism among late-stage investors about plowing millions into highly valuable companies. Other "unicorns," or venture-backed companies ostensibly worth $1 billion or more, have watched their valuations come under heightened scrutiny. Palantir\'s strong government ties and an annual revenue estimated by some at more about $1 billion likely set it apart from other cash-burning startups. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, two of Silicon Valley\'s more influential investors and entrepreneurs.',
"Elon Musk's SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket After Launch of Satellites Into Orbit: People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing. It really felt like it was right on top of us, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX for short, said during a telephone news conference afterward. For SpaceX, the 8:29 p.m. liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was a threefold success. First, it marked the company s return to flight after half a year. In SpaceX s last launch attempt, a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station disintegrated. Second, SpaceX s upgraded design for its Falcon 9 rocket worked flawlessly. The liquid oxygen was chilled to minus 340 degrees Fahrenheit, about 40 degrees colder than on earlier flights, and the kerosene fuel was cooled to 20 degrees instead of 70 degrees. Most significant to SpaceX s ambitions, however, is that after the second stage of the rocket with the satellites continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around, back to Cape Canaveral. Currently, most rockets are launched just once, the boosters falling back to Earth as expensive junk. Making spaceflight more like air travel, with rockets capable of being refueled and sent up again, is essential for SpaceX s long-term goal of sending people to Mars. It s all the difference in the world, Mr. Musk said, absolutely fundamental. ",
"Google, Ford in talks on self-driving car partnership: source: Google and Ford Motor Co are in talks about forming a partnership to develop autonomous car technology, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. The extent of a partnership between the second-largest U.S. automaker and search engine giant Alphabet Inc remains under discussion and the precise framework of any effort is unclear but it could include jointly building and developing cars. The two sides have been talking for months, the source said. A partnership between a major automaker and Google could speed the introduction of self-driving vehicles by giving the car company access to Google's wealth of software development while Google would benefit from the industrial and automotive know-how of a firm such as Ford. Fully autonomous cars could eventually prevent thousands of crashes, deaths and injuries, reduce oil use through better traffic management and extend personal mobility to people unable to drive.",
'Jet.com Misses Last-Minute Christmas Sales and Shows Downside of Its Model: The heavily funded e-commerce startup began notifying customers 10 days before Christmas that it could not guarantee delivery by the holiday, citing nationwide shipping delays that have affected many of our shipping partners. On December 16, Jet.com added an alert to the top of its homepage. The company has still been guaranteeing two-day delivery for items it ships out of its own warehouses, but those are mostly household goods like toilet paper, detergent and packaged groceries that are typically not bought as gifts.While Jet.com is less than six months old, the incident highlights one big downside of its current model compared to Amazon s. Jet s pitch is that its large network of warehousing partners helps it choose the most efficient way to fulfill an order, thus stripping out excess costs and passing along discounts of 5 percent to 10 percent to shoppers if they order multiple items at once. But the model also means Jet doesn t currently have as much control over the experience shoppers have after they complete a purchase for a large number of orders. Some items on Amazon also come from someone else s warehouse. But Amazon can still guarantee two-day shipping on more than 20 million items through Amazon Prime, thanks to its huge Fulfillment by Amazon program that lets merchants store goods with Amazon for a fee.',
'Google Calls Its New Ad Option for App Developers \'an Install-Seeking Machine\' Google says developers running "universal app campaigns" across its network are finding them to be more cost-effective than ads run than other digital platforms. The Adwords-based campaign option, which Google introduced in September, allows developers to run a campaign across Google search, YouTube, Google Play store and the Google Display network. A developer designates a target cost per install and budget, and then Google automates where across its platforms the promos should go."Basically, think of it as an install-seeking machine," Anthony Chavez, Google\'s product management director for mobile ads and Universal App Campaigns, told Adweek. As an example, Google pointed to Sparkpeople, which has 15 million users in the U.S. and Canada for its fitness and dieting apps and has been testing the sytem. Joe Robb, the digital marketing director for the company, said that while the cost per install has been slightly higher than he expected, his team is still spending between 30 and 50 percent less than they do on Facebook. The campaign is also now driving about 20 percent of the company\'s total downloads.',
'Cisco reviews code after Juniper code backdoor found; more scrutiny expected: Networking equipment maker Cisco said on Monday it has launched a product review to look for tampering after rival Juniper Networks\'s disclosure found code in firewall software that made it vulnerable to cyber attacks. Juniper warned customers on Thursday that it had uncovered "unauthorized code" in its firewall software, saying it could be exploited to allow an attacker to unscramble encrypted communications that travel through the security devices. That prompted the code review by Cisco. Security experts said they expect other technology companies to conduct similar investigations after last week\'s unprecedented news from Juniper. It was the first time a major technology firm discovered the addition of an unauthorized \'back door," or code that could be exploited to facilitate cyber attacks, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was investigating how the Juniper "back door" might impact government networks.',
'Toshiba Plans to Cut 7,800 Jobs as It Warns of Huge Loss: Toshiba warned on Monday that it would incur its largest net loss ever as it tries to restructure a stable of unprofitable businesses. The Japanese company, whose financial struggles were laid bare this year in a $1.2 billion accounting scandal, said it would eliminate 7,800 jobs, mostly in its slumping consumer electronics division. That brings the number of job cuts announced this year to more than 10,000 total, or roughly 5 percent of its work force. Shedding workers is expensive in Japan, where the majority of employees enjoy legal protection from layoffs. Toshiba will have to negotiate voluntary buyouts instead, a process it said would contribute to a loss of 550 billion yen, or $4.5 billion, in the financial year ending in March. The bookkeeping scandal has been an embarrassment for corporate Japan. Though wrongdoing by businesses is hardly unheard-of here, Toshiba was among the bluest of blue-chip companies, featuring on a prominent index of businesses believed to combine profitability with clean, modern corporate governance. Instead, it turned out that the company had been massaging its earnings since the global financial crisis took hold in 2008. A committee of investigators hired by the company concluded in the summer that it had engaged in a systematic cover-up. The committee found problems in virtually all corners of Toshiba s business, which encompasses products as various as refrigerators and nuclear power plants. Half the company s board of directors stepped down. The more than 150 billion yen in profit overstatement discovered by the committee was equal to about a third of the pretax profits that Toshiba reported during the seven-year period under scrutiny.',
"Ericsson signs patent deal with Apple, shares soar: Swedish mobile telecom gear maker Ericsson said it had signed a patent license deal with Apple Inc over technology that helps smartphones and tablets connect to mobile networks, sending its shares up much as 8 percent. The deal ends a year-long dispute with Apple, one of the biggest legal battles in mobile technology and Ericson said it would pave the way for cooperation between the companies on future technologies. Ericsson had said in its filing to a U.S. district court in January that Apple's license to use the technology developed by the Swedish firm had expired, and that two years of negotiations had not led to a new deal. Ericsson on Monday estimated overall revenue from intellectual property rights in 2015 would hit 13 to 14 billion crowns ($1.52-$1.64 billion) up from 9.9 billion in 2014 as a result of the agreement.",
"Uber's Rival Lyft Plans to Raise Up to $1 Billion in New Funds: Ride-hailing company Lyft plans to raise as much as $1 billion in new funds, according to a Delaware state filing, in a round of financing analysts said could sharply boost the valuation of Uber s largest U.S. rival. Lyft didn t indicate in the Friday evening filing how much had been raised, who was investing in the round or list a valuation. Sven Weber, a financial filings expert, pegged the pre-money valuation at about $4.5 billion while Justin Byers at VC Experts estimates it closer to $3.9 billion. Lyft was valued at $2.5 billion when it announced a previous funding round in March. The latest fundraising round contained some downside protection for new investors, including the provision of extra shares should Lyft go public at a lower valuation. Lyft is competing aggressively with Uber, which recently filed to raise $2.1 billion at a $62.5 billion valuation. The discrepancies in the valuations reflect Uber s pole position in the U.S. and its global ambitions. On Dec. 3, Lyft said it was teaming up with Uber s biggest rivals in Asia, including China s Didi Kuaidi, Singapore s GrabTaxi, India s Ola, to form a global alliance that will make their apps cross-compatible for travelers. Lyft lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg. It said last month it has gained market share in key markets such as San Francisco, and has a gross revenue run rate of $1 billion.",
'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 ',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'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.',
'Big data company Palantir raises $679.8 million: Palantir Technologies, the data firm best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has raised $679.8 million, according to a filing on Wednesday. The cash injection, which further expands the $500 million the company originally said it was raising in July, shows that despite shifting market conditions for privately held companies investors still hold confidence in the strongest of them, particularly those geared toward enterprises. Palantir is currently valued at $20 billion, making it the richest venture-backed company in the United States after ride service Uber and accommodation service Airbnb. It works closely with the U.S. government, whose steady business provides part of the reason investors like the Palo Alto, California-based company.',
'Atlassian, the Profitable Aussie Unicorn Going Public Tomorrow: Atlassian is Australian management and workplace software maker. It s set to begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow under the ticker symbol TEAM. Atlassian is looking to raise $440 million at a $4.2 billion valuation, up from the $370 million at under $4 billion it was shopping around last week. The bootstrapped Sydney, Australia-based startup has never taken any VC funding, and says it has been profitable for the last 10 years. The service it offers that people are most likely to have heard of is HipChat, an office chat and workflow management service that s squaring off against Silicon Valley-adored Slack. CNBC has a detailed rundown on what Atlassian s IPO prospectus says about its business. Atlassian is an outlier to all this. A decade of profitability buys a lot of credibility with investors, and having never taken venture dollars, it doesn t have to worry about activating a ratchet if something goes wrong tomorrow.',
"Who won, who lost in Square's IPO Square s recent $2.9 billion IPO is either a huge win for its investors or a sign of very bad days to come, depending on whether you believe the high-five tweets from prominent venture capitalists (VCs) or the slew of hand-wringing articles from sources like NPR, The Verge and the Wall Street Journal essentially saying it marks the end of free-flowing startup capital.The wildly contradictory responses to Square s Nov. 19 debut on the New York Stock Exchange, when the payments-processing company s stock was priced below its previous funding round in the private markets, has left a lot of people in the startup community (and beyond) wondering what s going on. My take is that the IPO is further evidence that the new rules of the hunt for unicorns startups valued at more than one billion dollars are creating a small class of haves and a much larger class of have-nots. The lucky ones are the earliest-stage investors that find tomorrow s unicorns. The less lucky are often the late-stage investors generally the providers of the bulk of the capital and the talent that signs on as these companies grow to fighting strength and scale. I think this is likely to cause a rebalancing of late-stage valuations and an increase in transparency in private markets. ",
'AT&T is out-building Google Fiber: Consider this: The number of cities where Google Fiber has actually been switched on can be counted on your fingers, whereas AT&T GigaPower is already up and running in some 20 metropolitan areas. Where many of Google\'s prospective expansions are still in the discussion phase, AT&T has made concrete though critics might say "limited" investments in many more markets. In short, AT&T is out-building Google Fiber. That\'s a sign of a broader shift in the industry. What we\'re seeing now is Google\'s early lead in the fiber race being eaten away by AT&T\'s traditional advantage in building networks. Though Google deserves much of the credit for jump-starting the competition in the first place, not to mention blazing a trail for AT&T in important ways, AT&T is on pace to beat Google to many cities in America. And this is why. AT&T is benefiting tremendously from a chain reaction that Google initially began. By now, it\'s a familiar story: Google went around to cities and basically got them to compete for Google Fiber, handing out a standardized checklist to municipalities laying out all the things they could do to make themselves more attractive to the search giant. In so doing, Google drew attention to many local regulatory processes that otherwise slow down investments in infrastructure. Now, mayors everywhere are scrambling over each other to attract Google. And that has had knock-on benefits for AT&T. In plain English, when Google gets a good deal, so can AT&T. But getting the rights to dig up streets or string fiber along telephone poles is only part of the equation. Then there\'s the matter of actually doing it. And it can take a long time in Google\'s case, as many as 18 months in Kansas City, according to Hunter Newby, chief executive of the company Allied Fiber. And in Austin, Texas, AT&T says it beat Google to market by roughly two years, even though the two companies announced their projects within days of each other. Google declined to comment. Part of what\'s going on is that AT&T is leaning on decades of expertise in building networks. Many analysts say that Google aims to invest just enough into fiber to encourage more traditional providers to build out their own networks. Then, when consumers subscribe to the better service and take heavier advantage of Google services, Google\'s core business benefits. In that respect, Google isn\'t so much going toe-to-toe with AT&T as nudging it to expand.',
'Investors hover as e-tailers boost demand for Indian warehouses: E-commerce in India is booming: the market is expected to grow to $220 billion in terms of value of goods sold by 2025, up from an expected $11 billion this year, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. With more Indian consumers shopping online, the country\'s $110 billion logistics and warehousing sector is stretched. e-tailers need to move goods around swiftly with minimal damage. They demand fire sprinkler systems, climate control, levelled loading bays and paved roads to warehouses. Simply adding this in can lift rents by up to 20 percent, according to real estate firm JLL. Existing spaces, known as "godowns" - low-rise sheds with poor ventilation and only a shutter to ward off heat and dust - are too old and cramped for firms like retail giant Amazon.com and Indian rival Flipkart. Amazon India has leased 20 fulfilment centres - warehouses where it stores goods and packs and sorts orders - in the last 18 months from multiple landlords. Still, it needs bigger, modern spaces closer to customers; the average size it leases today is 200,000 square feet. To satisfy that, supply of modern warehouses in India is set to more than double by 2020 to 200 million square feet, JLL estimates, fuelled by online retailers. They took up over 20 percent of the space added in the first half of 2015. Overseas firms including Dutch pension fund manager APG and U.S. buyout group Warburg Pincus are looking to invest in India\'s warehouses, hoping to cash in on demand for modern and efficient storage space from booming online retailers. "We have got enough people running around with bags of money, and not that many assets," said Ben Salmon, head of Singapore-based Assetz Property Group that has raised $50 million from Asian investors to buy warehouses in India.',
'It s Come to This: Yahoo s Future Now Hinges on Taxes (And Not Products): Yahoo is not going to spin off its 15% stake in e-commerce giant Alibaba, according to sources cited by CNBC. Instead, Yahoo is going to look into selling its core Internet business. Yahoo s core business includes its web properties, apps, search, media, ad business, etc. Yahoo s 15% stake in Alibaba is worth around $32 billion, while its core Internet business is worth anywhere between $3.4 billion and $4.1 billion, according to analysts. Internet companies are about a lot of things, but primarily their success hinges on making great and innovative products. And unless the execution of getting those offerings out is just abysmal, this trumps all in Silicon Valley. That was the alleged promise of bringing in Google wunderkind Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO more than four years ago. Now the company s fate seems in the hands of tax attorneys, rather than entrepreneurs, which tells you all you need to know about Yahoo at the end of 2015. Last week, Re/code and others reported that the board of the Internet giant was seriously considering pausing the spinoff of its enormously valuable stake in China s Alibaba Group. The reason: While Mayer and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman were assured by their pricey tax advisers at Skadden Arps that the transaction would be tax-free, the Internal Revenue Service would not provide any guarantee of that. No spinoff puts Yahoo into play in a very significant way, even if the board does not say so. And none of it has anything to do with creating great products for consumers, which was the only thing that would have saved Yahoo in the first place. Score one for the accountants.',
'Google s High-End Pixel C Tablet Launches to Tepid Reviews: In September, Google surprised us all when it announced its Surface competitor, the 10.2-inch Pixel C Android tablet with its optional Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike its Nexus line of tablets, this is the first time Google has built its own tablet. If you re willing to pay the price starting at $499 for the 32GB model plus another $149 for the keyboard the Pixel C is a very nice, solid tablet that sits atop the current crop of Android tablets. At that price, it directly competes with the iPad Air 2 (though the basic model of the Air only comes with 32GB of storage space). The Pixel C is now available in the Google Play store in a select number of countries. You can now buy it in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland. If you think this tablet/keyboard combo sounds a little bit like a Microsoft Surface, or maybe even Apple s iPad Pro with a keyboard, you re not alone. It s impossible not to compare the C with them. While Microsoft s Surface is essentially a fully featured laptop with a detachable keyboard, Google and Apple are opting for a combination of a tablet and mobile operating system with a keyboard. There is a market for the C, but I think it ll be a small one. The Pixel Chromebooks were meant to show what you can build when you don t cut corners to keep the price down the C is meant to showcase what that would look like for a high-end Android productivity tablet. It s the Android Tablet for the CEO assuming your CEO uses Android.',
'In China\'s O2O tech, today\'s \'unicorns\' risk becoming tomorrow\'s \'unicorpses\': The Beijing offices of Shequ001, a start-up delivering supermarket goods booked via smartphone, stand almost deserted. Leaflets lie scattered on the floor. Nearly 400 former employees, of a workforce that in March topped 2,000, have joined a social network clamoring to get their unpaid wages. Zhang, who gave only his family name, is one of fewer than three dozen workers left at a company that last year was worth 2 billion yuan ($312 million). "We just wanted to build the market, so we burned through our money," he said, adding he hasn\'t seen the firm\'s CEO since March. In China\'s hottest tech sector, hundreds of "online to offline" (O2O) start-ups like Shequ001, which draw mobile users to local physical stores and services, have failed as skyrocketing valuations deter investors and put the brakes on fresh funding. Many more are expected to fall by the wayside, or be driven into mergers in what executives and investors say is a market bubble. China now boasts 21 \'unicorns\' - private start-ups valued at over $1 billion - says CB Insights. But now, those inflated valuations - for companies that rarely make any money - are proving too much for investors and new funding is drying up. O2O has found particular traction in China through a combination of widespread smartphone use, a booming mobile payment sector and cheap migrant labor. Entrepreneurs developing O2O apps - for firms offering anything from ride hailing and food delivery to group discounts at shops, restaurants and cinemas - have had easy access to money from technology giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as from venture capitalists, private equity, sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises. Start-ups backed by venture capital raised $9.6 billion in July-September alone, four times the level of a year earlier, according to a KPMG and CB Insights report. "The whole O2O concept is getting too expensive," said Han Weiwen, head of Bain\'s private equity practice in China. "The valuation is very, very high. There\'s no traditional way to look at the valuation ... because they don\'t have revenue." The fierce competition and high spending drives start-ups back to their investors for frequent cash injections, pushing valuations higher. But as the financing roller-coaster has slowed, many start-ups have struggled to afford the subsidized discounts they need to keep users. In O2O, user numbers, whether from inflated demand or not, are a key metric to attracting fresh investment. "This kind of craziness can\'t go on forever," said Liu Jun, who heads Baidu\'s efforts in O2O and sits on the board of Uber\'s China unit. "Enough is enough."',
'Apple Executive Seeks a Touch of Chic at Retail Stores: Angela Ahrendts, Apple s senior vice president of retail, got a private demonstration of the fancy wireless speaker, the Phantom, and its sound quality seven weeks ago. On the spot, she said she wanted the space podlike device, which starts at $1,990, to be sold in Apple s retail stores. This week, the Phantom will appear in 14 Apple stores in the United States, and the company is discussing how widely to roll out the product next year. The device will get the sort of prominent display treatment that is typically reserved in Apple stores for the company s Beats audio accessories. The move is an indication of how Ms. Ahrendts, who started at Apple last year, is changing the playbook at some of the iPhone maker s stores this holiday season and the direction she s going in: ultraluxe. Apple s stores typically spotlight the company s devices, with the most expensive audio accessories topping out in the hundreds of dollars. The Phantom is the first high-end non-Apple gadget that Ms. Ahrendts, the former chief executive of the fashion house Burberry, has brought in since she took the job. It buttresses some of her other recent moves to create more of a luxury Apple retail experience, including initiating private try-on appointments for the most expensive Apple watches, reducing the numbers and types of accessories that are sold, and pushing manufacturers to make special packaging for gadgets carried in Apple s stores. Apple has traditionally sold the most expensive accessories online only, like the $2,700 B&O BeoPlay A9 MKII speaker. I asked Tim a very simple question: Why do we do it this way she said of her boss, Timothy D. Cook, Apple s chief executive. Mr. Cook told her he didn t know, she said',
'Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, revealed a new name for the company s Life Sciences division: Verily. Alphabet made the branding announcement with a video and a company website that went live on Monday. In it, Verily laid out a multidisciplinary approach to health and longevity, describing disease as a continuum that will be fought with experts from different fields and divisions working on hardware such as medical devices, software that might use algorithms to look for health patterns, as well as clinical studies like the Baseline Study of health and disease. The new name for the business is part of Google s transition to a holding company structure under the parent entity dubbed Alphabet. For those keeping track of Alphabet s soup of operating companies, Verily is the division that was the Life Sciences unit of Google s X lab. Life Sciences graduated from Google X shortly after Google announced the Alphabet structure. Verily means truth or truly and the name, according to the spokeswoman, is meant to underscore the company s mission to reveal a true picture of health and disease. Background: For years, Google has been entering new businesses, but struggling to recreate the success it enjoys in search and advertising. In August, Google announced that it would create a new org structure where its traditional businesses (search, advertising, YouTube, maps) would continue to be called Google, while all other businesses would become separate companies. The parent of all of these companies would be called Alphabet. The idea is that the new businesses would get more room to grow and innovate like startups, while the traditional businesses would get higher stock market valuations because of their incredible profitability and size. ',
'Can t Put Down Your Device That s by Design: Digital life keeps us hooked with an infinite entertainment stream as its default setting. Tech companies often set it up that way. There s Facebook beckoning with its bottomless news feed. There s Netflix autoplaying the next episode in a TV series 10 seconds after the previous one ends. There s Tinder encouraging us to keep swiping in search of the next potential paramour. And then there are the constant notices and reminders a friend liked your photo or tweet; a colleague wants to connect with you on LinkedIn; an Evite awaits your response which automatically induce feelings of social obligation. You damn yourself to distraction if you respond, and to fear of missing out if you don t. Tech companies tend to present these feedback loops as consumer conveniences. A new Intel TV ad, for instance, shows a young girl in the back of a car growing sad because the laptop on which she was watching a singalong video suddenly runs out of power. The company s new battery-preserving processor, though, ultimately saves the day, so you never have to stop watching. T-Mobile has just introduced BingeOn, a feature that offers subscribers on certain plans unlimited high-speed access to popular streaming video channels. There s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers. ',
'Verizon Would Explore Yahoo Deal If It Made Sense, CFO Says: Verizon would explore a possible acquisition of Yahoo! if a deal made sense, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said. Shammo, speaking at an investor conference in New York Monday, said that while it still wasn t clear what Yahoo s board has planned for the tech company, Verizon would take a look if it were to be offered up for sale. Yahoo directors met last week to discuss the viability of spinning off its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and whether to seek a buyer for Yahoo s Web businesses. Verizon acquired AOL for $4.4 billion earlier this year as part of a push into mobile video advertising. Yahoo owns online sports sites, financial and general news and advertising technology including BrightRoll, which Verizon might find attractive at the right price. Impediments to a sale of Yahoo are the fate of its stake in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, and the tax implications of a sale of that unit. ',
"Dropbox Shuts Down E-Mail and Photo Apps as It Gets Back to Businesses: The cloud storage company is increasing its focus on corporate customers as it tries to develop a sustainable business. Cloud storage provider Dropbox is killing off two applications it introduced to much fanfare, including a photo-sharing app released last year. The San Francisco company has placed more focus recently on creating tools companies are willing to pay for, while these apps were designed with everyday consumers in mind. The photo app, called Carousel, offered to automatically back up photos stored on a phone and display them alongside images already stored in a Dropbox account. The other app, an e-mail and task manager called Mailbox, came through an acquisition Dropbox made in 2013. The company said in a statement that features from each app will make their way into other Dropbox services. After achieving a valuation of $10 billion in a financing round last year, Dropbox is under pressure to increase its revenue and eventually go public or sell itself. Fidelity Investments and BlackRock wrote down the stakes of their Dropbox investments this year. Dropbox has tried to straddle two missions in recent years: to build a product beloved by consumers and to create a service that satisfies businesses' unique needs. The former strategy, which includes these apps, has fallen somewhat out of favor since the company brought in Chief Operating Officer Dennis Woodside from Google last year. Both Carousel and Mailbox competed unsuccessfully with much more popular services from Google and Apple. Mailbox will shut down on Feb. 26, 2016, and Carousel on March 31, 2016. ",
'Airbnb Officially Confirms Gargantuan $1.5 Billion Funding Round in SEC Filing: Home rental service and unofficial sharing economy mascot Airbnb has made its $1.5 billion funding round official in an SEC document today. The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the equity offering back in June, writing that it set the company s value at more than $25 billion. The round makes Airbnb the third-most valuable privately held tech company in the world, after Uber (worth $62.5 billion) and the Chinese phone maker Xiaomi (valued at around $45 billion). Airbnb s lead investors in this round were reportedly General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital Group and Tiger Global Management, which together composed a third of the Airbnb shares sold. Airbnb is raising giant sums like this and putting off an IPO because the startup like other highly-valued darlings of Silicon Valley wants to put its resources into emerging markets around the world, especially China. The company is also busy putting out political fires in its more well-saturated markets like San Francisco and New York City, and is in the process of building a (likely expensive) global political organizing operation to protect its revenue streams. Onstage at the Code Conference earlier this year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that he thinks an IPO is still a couple years away. ',
'Mother-Son Team Demo Translate For Code: Meet Roslyn Scott and Dalton Scott, a mother and son team who just demoed a neat idea for making code more accessible, here at the Disrupt London 2015 hackathon. Their hack, called the Human Code Project, uses several IBM Watson APIs, including its Natural Language Classifier, to power a search interface for translating JavaScript code terms into plain English. It s designed much like a language translation interface, so someone who s trying to understand what a piece of code is doing can search for a particular Javascript word or phrase within that code to see a definition of what a term such as onclick might mean in that particular context. The interface returns a percentage breakdown of how confident the system is in its definition for that term. During the hackathon they uploaded a training document to Watson, and created two classifier sets one for definitions of code terms and one for phrases, explains Roslyn.',
"Some Twitter Users Call Foul as It Switches Moments and Notifications Buttons: Twitter moved Moments for Web and Android viewers yesterday to where the Notifications button once was, causing considerable consternation among faithful users. In a nutshell, many in the Twitterati thanks to muscle memory are reflexively tapping the Moments button by accident when they want to check their notifications. Numerous tweets accuse the company of tricking users. San Francisco-based Twitter has declined comment. But the move raises the question as a few of the tweets above hint at about whether or not the social media company is happy with the metrics that Moments has been getting so far. The end of the fourth quarter is near, and newly re-appointed CEO Jack Dorsey would certainly like to tell Wall Street investors during the next earnings call that Moments is drawing a big crowd. Twitter has made Moments a centerpiece development since Dorsey came back to the helm. Additionally, Digiday reported this week that Twitter's ads for Moments, called Promoted Moments, have an asking price of $1 million. So it stands to reason that Twitter needs Moments to scale in order to make such a purchase worth it for brands. ",
'Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers as Its Transportation Ambitions Grow: Amazon goes to great lengths to get packages into customers hands as quickly as possible even if it means employing drones. Those efforts will now include putting thousands of Amazon-branded trucks on the road. The ever-ambitious online retailer planned to announce on Friday morning that it had purchased thousands of trailers the part of a tractor-trailer that stores the cargo to make sure it had the shipping capacity to move products on time as its North American business continues its rapid growth. The trailers won t be used to deliver packages to customer doors. Instead, they ll be utilized to transport items from one Amazon warehouse, known as a fulfillment center, to another, as well as between fulfillment centers and sort centers, where Amazon organizes orders by zip code to be delivered to local post offices. A spokeswoman stressed that Amazon would continue to rely on existing trucking partners, which own and drive the tractor portion of the vehicles that will tow the Amazon trailers. The announcement comes as Amazon s North American retail business is growing at its fastest clip in several years. Revenue for this unit grew 35 percent in the third quarter, fueled by product assortment expansion in categories such as apparel and the growth of Amazon s hugely popular Prime membership program. The trucking announcement marks the latest initiative aimed at taking more control over how quickly the company can get goods into the hands of its customers. While Amazon continues to utilize trucking partners to move goods within its warehouse network, and UPS and FedEx for package delivery to customer doors, it is increasingly unveiling initiatives to take over more of these functions. Former employees say the goal is to someday be able to circumvent UPS or FedEx entirely, in large part so that snafus like the one that caused late deliveries during the 2013 holidays don t happen again. One guess on why Amazon only wants to own the trailer at this point: If it owned the tractor, it would have to register as a commercial trucking company and incur the insurance costs and liability risks that come with that. By sticking with just the trailer body, Amazon potentially saves money and avoids other potential headaches. That said, some reports suggest Amazon may eventually go all the way and own the trucks, too.',
"Samsung to finally pay Apple $548 million in patent dispute: Samsung fought until the bitter end to avoid paying Apple, but the company now says it will finally hand over the more than $548 million it owes for infringing the patents and designs of its biggest smartphone rival. In papers filed in federal court in San Jose, California on Thursday, Samsung Electronics said it will make the payment by Dec. 14 if Apple sends an invoice on Friday. Asked if it had done so, Apple declined to comment on Friday. The payment comes after a U.S. appeals court last May reduced a $930 million judgment against Samsung by $382 million, stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple patents and copying the look of the iPhone. Another trial over remaining damages relating to some of Samsung's infringing products in the case is set to go ahead next spring. Even though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. had authorized damages to Apple in May, Samsung again appealed the final figure to the same court, and was rebuffed twice more. Now agreeing to pay, Samsung told the San Jose court that it expects to be reimbursed if it eventually succeeds in a forthcoming appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over its liability for copying the patented designs of the surface, bezel and user interface of the iPhone, which accounted for $399 million of the total award.",
'All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy - Online Odd Job Site Fiverr In Focus Over Fake Reviews : The holiday online shopping season has begun, and that means reading lots of online product reviews. Some of these reviews are helpful, others are not. And many are fakes raves or pans from people who have never actually used the product. Where do fake reviews come from In this column, a close-up look at one notable source. Q. Starting in early November, and over the course of a week, the Facebook business page for the company where I work, Long s Jewelers, was hit with 200 one-star reviews. Many of the reviews arrived in a matter of minutes, and all were left without comment. They were bogus reviews that were composed by a freelance spammer, who we believe was paid by one of our competitors. Our average customer rating on our Facebook page fell from 4.8 stars to 2.3 stars. We contacted Facebook, which at first refused to help. I wrote a post on a marketing website, asking for the community s aid, and then released a statement asking for the public s assistance. My pleas went viral enough to compel Facebook to re-examine the issue, and it has since taken down nearly all of the purchased reviews. Through a bit of sleuthing, I found that the reviews came through a website called Fiverr, where people offer to perform odd jobs for $5 and up. Leaving negative reviews is apparently one of those jobs. Fiverr banished the person who wrote these particular sham reviews, but hundreds of other people are still on the site, offering a similar service. Fiverr, which started in 2010, is based in Israel and hosts thousands of people performing tasks in hundreds of categories. The sellers use pseudonyms, for some reason, and most gigs, as they are called, are perfectly legitimate, even delightful. I will create a 16-line song about anything, reads a gig by Tylerbarks. I will write message in beach sand at sunrise, reads another by Batykefer1. But the Haggler rummaged around Fiverr and quickly found dozens of people offering to post positive reviews to Facebook, different Google sites, the Apple App Store, iTunes and elsewhere. None said anything about trumped-up negative reviews, but fabricated raves are nearly as bad or perhaps just as misleading, though perhaps not quite as malicious.',
'Google Ventures Owns Part of Several Unicorns, but the Biggest (and Trickiest) Is Uber: The venture firm has $2.4 billion under management and has invested in 300 companies, a number of which have secured billion dollar valuations (a.k.a. unicorn status). According to new figures released on Sunday, the VC shop added 39 new startups in 2015, including significant bets in commerce (Jet.com), biotech (Editas) and agricultural software (Farmer s Business Network), a new terrain. Most investments during the year, nearly a third, went into life sciences and health companies, followed by consumer and enterprise startups. It is hard to anticipate that any of these investments will be bigger than Uber in dollars sunk in or payout. In 2013, Kara Swisher reported that Google Ventures spent $250 million for 1.8 million Series C-1 preferred shares in the ride-hailing app startup. At a then $3.5 billion valuation, that put its stake just north of 7 percent. (Google Ventures declined to comment on this or the size of any other investment stakes.) Uber is now reportedly en route to a valuation of $62.5 billion. Its many subsequent rounds since 2013 have likely diluted Google Ventures share, although a source familiar with the deal terms says not by much. Even at the low end of analyst estimation, around 2 percent ownership, the Google Ventures share would, at Uber s current valuation, hit fivefold return. And who knows how Uber will climb before an IPO. Increasingly, however, it s a sticky situation. As Uber balloons, many of its ambitions in mobile app integrations, mapping and self-driving cars are aimed squarely at Google. The startup is partly driven, several sources said, by a concern the search giant could one day clobber it. Google should be worried if it can t.',
"Uber Valuation Put at $62.5 Billion After a New Investment Round - Tiger Global, Investor in Uber's Rivals, Joins In: Uber s fund-raising efforts are showing no signs of slowing down. The company, based in San Francisco, is close to completing the raising of a $2.1 billion round of venture capital, according to people briefed on the company s plans, the company s single largest round to date. Once completed, the investment will value the company at $62.5 billion, according to three people briefed on the plans, securing Uber s place as the world s most valuable private start-up. Tiger Global Management participated in the newest round, led by its partner Lee Fixel, as did T. Rowe Price, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the terms are still private. Talks of the funding plans were previously reported by The New York Times in October. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported the $62.5 billion valuation. Competition is intensifying in the global ride-hailing market, as rivals like Lyft, Didi Kuaidi and other companies raise billions of dollars in to expand as quickly as possible. Lyft, another ride-hailing start-up, is in talks to raise a further $500 million in funding, according to four people briefed on the round, which could value the company at roughly $4 billion. Didi Kuaidi, to date, has raised more than $4 billion in private investment. The participation of Tiger Global, however, is particularly interesting. Tiger Global is an investor in Ola and GrabTaxi, two of Uber s largest competitors in India and Southeast Asia. It is perhaps the first time a major institutional investor participated in the rounds of both Uber and its major competitors. And on Thursday, Ola and GrabTaxi announced a strategic partnership with Lyft, which is also based in San Francisco and is Uber s major competitor in the United States.",
'Why would anyone want to buy Yahoo Now, that question may be the key to understanding the parlor game of rumor and conjecture currently swirling around the company. Depending on which speculating analyst you talk to, Verizon, Microsoft, Time Inc., Comcast, AT&T, and even IAC the company that owns Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com could all jump in as potential buyers.To be specific, what we\'re talking about is a possible sale of Yahoo\'s "core business," but even that term belies the dizzying range of things that Yahoo actually does. Is it a search company A media company An advertising company In truth, it is all of those things, which is one reason we\'ve seen so many names come out of the corporate woodwork. But it turns out there\'s one metric that makes Yahoo really attractive here: The number of eyeballs that Yahoo commands on a monthly basis.This might seem obvious in an era where clickbait and traffic seem to rule with an iron grip. But if you take Yahoo apart piece by piece, you start to understand why snapping up the company would benefit some firms more than others.Take Microsoft, for instance. It actually tried to buy Yahoo before, in 2008.Microsoft was worried about Google dominating a new market, search. Microsoft tried to build its own competitor, Bing (then known as Windows Live Search), but it didn\'t take off with users. So Microsoft figured it would buy the No. 2 player, Yahoo, and combine its search and search ad business with Microsoft\'s.Fast-forward to today, and Bing is no longer lagging behind Yahoo. In fact, what you have is a market where Bing actually covers more than 20 percent of search, compared to Yahoo\'s 13 percent. Both have been helped, no doubt, by a joint partnership on search.Combining the two might get Microsoft a bit closer to Google (which commands 64 percent of the market), but it still wouldn\'t be within striking distance. And Microsoft would also be inheriting all of Yahoo\'s other Internet businesses, potentially slowing the company down as it tries to execute a shift toward offering more cloud services, especially for corporate clients.But let\'s shift to some of the other names that have been floated. Three are providers of fixed or mobile Internet four, if you count Softbank, the Japanese parent company of Sprint. That isn\'t a coincidence; Internet providers increasingly view original online content as the way to turn their networks into cash cows. Carrying data over simple pipes is no longer as lucrative as before.',
'Lyft Joins With Asian Rivals to Compete With Uber: The anti-Uber global alliance of ride-hailing companies has now officially taken shape. On Thursday, Lyft, a ride-hailing start-up based in the United States, announced a coalition with GrabTaxi, Ola and Didi Kuaidi, three of the largest ride-hailing companies in Asia. Under a partnership, the companies can operate in one another s home countries, forging new pathways for each in markets they have yet to tap into. Many of Uber s competitors are far smaller and operate in just one or two markets. Lyft, which is currently seeking $500 million in funding at a valuation of $4 billion, operates in more than 60 cities in the United States, for instance. By banding together, the companies aim to achieve more scale and more service adoption in relatively short amounts of time. Partnerships are less expensive than having to spend to establish operations in multiple markets. The companies declined to reveal financial details of their partnership. The alliance has been forming over the last few months. In September, Lyft teamed with Didi, the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth, to provide service to Chinese Didi Kuaidi app users who enter the United States. The move also lets Lyft users find rides in China using the Lyft app; the requests are fulfilled by Didi Kuaidi drivers. Ola is a ride-hailing company in India, and GrabTaxi operates in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Under the partnership, Lyft users traveling to India will be able to open the Lyft app there and have local rides supplied by Ola. In Southeast Asian countries, Lyft will have a similar arrangement with GrabTaxi.',
'Startup Founders Sound Just as Pessimistic About a Bubble as Tech Journalists: There has been a lot of kvetching of late about whether or not we re in the middle of another tech bubble, and most of the pontificating has come from venture capitalists and tech media. But what do people who launch startups actually think According to First Round Capital s new State of Startups Report a survey of more than 500 founders of VC-backed companies founders are also largely convinced we re in a tech bubble of some sort. First Round s findings indicate that startup leaders are having a harder time raising money and that they think it s only going to get tougher. The report also says they believe bitcoin is one really overhyped technology, whereas self-driving cars don t get enough attention. We ve embedded the report in a slideshow below, but here are some key facts and figures from First Round: 80 percent of founders say they were able to raise what they wanted to in their last rounds, but virtually all of them say that it will be harder to do so in the next year. 73 percent of startup founders believe we are in a bubble, but enterprise startup leaders are twice as likely to say we aren t (twice as many enterprise tech founders also say they ll be profitable in the next year). No one has a clue about what the IPO market will look like in 2016: One third says there will be more IPOs, one third says it ll be about the same and one third says there will be fewer. 90 percent of founders expect to see more tech mergers and acquisitions over the next year, which is also what s generally expected by industry analysts and experts.',
'Crazy Like a Box: Going Public Can Give Start-Ups Outsize Power: In early 2014, when the cloud storage company Box filed for an initial public offering, many on Wall Street looked at its numbers and laughed. Box s revenues were soaring, but its losses were growing nearly as quickly. It was pouring vast sums into sales and marketing, it had less than a year of cash remaining, and executives did not anticipate making a profit for years. When Box eventually went public this January after raising another round of private funds to delay its I.P.O. its stock price briefly surged but has since lost about 40 percent of its value. The company reported on Wednesday that in the third fiscal quarter, it again increased sales, and it projected slightly higher sales in 2016 than it had previously expected. Now, with a stock market valuation of about $1.7 billion, Box is technically in league with the unicorn private companies valued at more than a billion dollars but compared with some of those highflying start-ups, it could easily be mistaken for a pony. Dropbox, a cloud storage competitor that remains private, was valued at about $10 billion in its last fund-raising round. To many in Silicon Valley, Box s inauspicious debut on the stock market, like several other recent tech offerings, serves as a cautionary tale. While floating an I.P.O. was once seen as a rite of passage in Silicon Valley, in the last few years it has become a much bemoaned annoyance to many tech founders. Companies are waiting longer to go public, and thanks to a surge of money from hedge funds and mutual funds looking to get in on the start-up scene, young companies have been given resources to stay private for years on end. Go out to the public markets before you re bulletproof, the thinking goes, and you ll get crushed. No one wants to be the next Etsy, Hortonworks or Box, all of which now trade below their I.P.O. price. But what if Box gets the last laugh Despite the company s languishing stock price, it s possible that a few years from now, many in the Valley may come to look back on Box s I.P.O. as a masterly timed bit of corporate strategy an initially painful move that ultimately rewarded investors, improved employees financial stability, provided executives with independence from unpredictable private investors and pushed the company to adopt a more structured path toward profitability. To understand why, it helps to look at the market for private tech funding, and how it is affected by public valuations. Several unicorns have recently discovered that taking money from mutual funds and other large investors brings surprising public scrutiny. The mutual fund company Fidelity and others must regularly report assessments of their private-company holdings, and lately they ve calculated that start-ups like Snapchat and Dropbox are worth less than what the funds paid for them. Dropbox s valuation, in fact, may now be tied directly to Box s, since large investors look at comparable public companies to help determine the value of their private investments. The same logic applies to employees. If you re an engineer looking to work at a cloud storage company, you could go to Dropbox, where you ll receive stock options at a lofty $10 billion valuation that you ll have a hard time turning into actual money. Or you can go to Box, in which you ll get shares at a relatively reasonable valuation that can also be traded on the public market.',
'Ballmer Chides Microsoft Over Cloud Revenue Disclosures: One major Microsoft Corp. investor wasn t happy with the level of disclosure Wednesday at the company s annual shareholder meeting: Steve Ballmer. The company should disclose profit margins and sales for its cloud and hardware businesses, Microsoft s former chief executive officer said. It s sort of a key metric -- if they talk about it as key to the company, they should report it, Ballmer, who is the company s biggest individual shareholder, told Bloomberg at the software maker s annual meeting in Bellevue, Washington. Microsoft reports an annualized revenue run rate -- or sales at a certain point in time carried out to a yearly rate -- for its commercial cloud business and has said it is aiming to reach $20 billion on that basis by 2018. Ballmer, who handed the reins to Satya Nadella in 2014, derided the use of run rate as bulls---. They should report the revenue, not the run rate, he said. Margin -- a measure of profitability -- is important because while gross margins for software are very high, they are far lower for things like hardware and cloud services, Ballmer said. Microsoft also said in April it would end its fiscal year with a commercial cloud gross margin of 44 percent. Though it reports revenue and margin for some of its cloud businesses, it doesn t provide a total sales number for cloud. Ballmer said he has discussed the issue with the company and that after almost two years out of the CEO job, he can t even guess what these numbers are. We enjoy a regular dialogue with Steve, and welcome his input and feedback, as we do from our other investors. said Chris Suh, Microsoft s general manager for investor relations. Ballmer also criticized Nadella s answer to an audience member questioning the lack of key apps, like one for Starbucks, on the company s Windows Phone. Nadella responded by citing the company s plan to appeal to Windows developers by allowing them to write universal applications that work on computers, phones and tablets, targeting a larger array of devices than just Microsoft s handsets that have just a single-digit share of the mobile market. That won t work, Ballmer commented as Nadella spoke. Instead, the company needs to enable Windows Phones to run Android apps, he said.',
'Uber launches taxi-hailing button for third-party apps: Online taxi-hailing service Uber [UBER.UL] said it would allow third-party app developers to add a \'Ride Request\' button within their apps for free. Developers would need to register their apps on Uber\'s website to get access to the code to add the button, which users can tap to request a ride. To entice developers to use the feature, Uber said it would pay $5 for every new U.S.-based customer that uses the button from the developer\'s app. Earlier this year, Uber had partnered with Zomato, an India-based restaurant finder, to add a "Ride there with Uber" button on the restaurant page. Last year, Google Maps also integrated Uber within its app to allow users to book a ride.',
"Yahoo shares spike 6% on reports board to weigh selling core business, Marissa Mayer's future role: WSJ. The board of Web giant Yahoo is set to discuss the company's future, and that of high-profile Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, when it meets this week, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Tuesday. People familiar with the matter told the newspaper the board was expected to discuss during meetings from Wednesday through Friday whether to proceed with a plan to spin off more than $30 billion in shares of Alibaba or find a buyer for its core business of web properties, or both. Yahoo's core business, which includes popular services like Yahoo Mail and its news and sports sites, could attract private equity firms, media and telecom companies or firms like Softbank analysts have said in the past. The news comes as Mayer faces growing pressure over the company's performance. Mayer came to Yahoo after a long stint at Google. The company's shares were up more than 6 percent in extended trading.",
'Forget China Google Has to Fight Off Alibaba on Mobile in India: Should Google return some services in mainland China, as many expect it to do soon, it will have to go head to head with China s Internet giants. In the meantime, Google is squaring off against one of them, Alibaba, in India, Google s largest growth market. The Information published a solid look at mobile habits across India, courtesy of data from mobile startup Quettra. Some of the figures aren t surprising. Facebook dominates: Indians love the social site and really love Facebook s WhatsApp it has 55 million users monthly hours spent, blowing away other messaging apps. Google, though, has a solid lead in utilities and video apps, thanks to YouTube. A potentially troubling sign for the search giant is the race on mobile browsers. The UC browser, which Alibaba acquired last year, is beating Google s Chrome in India, with over five million more monthly hours of use. Alibaba s stripped-down browser takes fourth place. Android dominates India. But Google is still concerned with getting the millions there coming online with smartphones to take their first steps on Google s service, particularly since Facebook is making a similar push. A mobile browser is, for now, one key thing Google has that its U.S. rival does not. But getting mobile users to use services isn t the hard problem in India. It s covering their data costs, which are often prohibitively high. Hence Google s recent push on building lighter, even offline versions of its products. On Monday, Google unveiled an update to the data-saving mode for mobile Chrome that will roll out first in Indonesia and India.',
'Zuckerberg Vows to Daughter He ll Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares: Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares during our lives holdings currently worth more than $45 billion to charitable purposes. The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago. Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money, through an unusual limited liability corporate structure. Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities, they wrote. Mr. Zuckerberg s charitable plans are the latest indication of a growing interest in philanthropy among Silicon Valley s young billionaires, who unlike previous generations of business tycoons, appear eager to spread their wealth while they are still young. Mr. Zuckerberg is 31, and Dr. Chan is 30. Yet they are entering largely uncharted waters with a charity effort of such scale. They have not yet detailed how the money will be spent and the pace in which the money will be given out indicates they plan to take their time.',
'Amazon gadget sales more than triple over Thanksgiving weekend: Amazon.com Inc said sales of its electronic gadgets more than tripled over the Thanksgiving weekend from last year, with the Fire tablet the top-selling product. Sales of the 7-inch tablet more than tripled, while the Fire TV set-top box sold six times more than last year, the company said, without providing the number of units sold.',
'Holiday Shopping Is Chilly for Buy Buttons at Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest: More than a year after Twitter and Facebook began placing Buy buttons on their social networks, their e-commerce initiatives still appear to be relegated to experimental side projects. And at Pinterest, the tech platform that many believe is most conducive to e-commerce, one of its mainstream launch partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day via so-called Buyable Pins. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Facebook and Twitter, and tepid early results at Pinterest, highlight the myriad challenges all three platforms face in transforming their immense user bases into shoppers. The sluggishness of the combined efforts also serves as a warning to other industry players betting big on the idea of social commerce that it s still unclear if consumers will make purchases in big numbers on platforms that aren t mainly retail destinations. Spokespeople for the three companies declined to disclose sales numbers for these initiatives. While each platform had its own reasons for pursuing e-commerce initiatives, the central idea was that they thought there was an opportunity to make it easier for their users to buy a product when they discover it on the platform. In theory, the usefulnesses of such a feature would be the biggest on mobile phones, where clicking through to make a purchase on another site can make purchases less likely because of uneven mobile webpage experiences. Facebook was the first to take a crack. Sixteen months after Facebook first began testing Buy buttons on ads and regular posts to let people purchase products they discover on Facebook without leaving Facebook, the initiative is still being dubbed a beta test, restricted solely to online merchants who work with e-commerce software provider Shopify. The company has also recently added purchase capabilities to some Facebook business pages and to a dedicated shopping section of Facebook, but these features, too, are being characterized as tests that aren t available to all Facebook users in the U.S. At Twitter, it s still unclear how big of a priority e-commerce will be going forward under the leadership of new CEO Jack Dorsey. The company began placing Buy buttons in tweets in September of 2014, and struck partnerships in October of this year with software partners such as Bigcommerce and Stripe to get more merchants on board. Best Buy, for example, will soon join the program just not in time for the just-passed Black Friday weekend. But regular Twitter users can still go weeks without seeing any tweets enabled with e-commerce; most Re/code colleagues I polled, who are absolute Twitter power users, said they never come across them at all. Then there s Pinterest, the massive tech platform that retailers were most excited about for its e-commerce potential. The company began inserting Buyable Pins into its iPhone app in late June, and just added the feature to its Android app in early November. The company says more than 10,000 merchants have joined the program, including big retailers and brands like Macy s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Tory Burch, but at least one of these big partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day on Pinterest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the sales figures. This source and another also said that Pinterest insiders have privately admitted to being disappointed with early sales numbers.',
'AppDynamics Raises $158M; Now Valued At $1.9 Billion: Last month, based on an SEC filing, we told you that seven-year-old, San Francisco-based AppDynamics had raised a fresh $83.4 million in funding as part of a round that was targeting up to $150 million. Turns out the company met that target and then some. CEO David Wadhwani who joined the firm in September after spending more than a decade as an executive at Adobe, including as its digital chief says the company has just closed on $158 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital. Other participants in the round include Adage Capital, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Cross Creek Advisors, as well as earlier backers Institutional Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. AppDynamics makes software to monitor the performance of business applications, competing with some traditional firms like IBM, as well as younger outfits like New Relic, which went public last December and has seen relatively steady stock performance since. (New Relic, which raised $214 million in venture funding, has a current market cap of $1.8 billion.) AppDynamics had previously raised roughly $206 million in debt and equity, including a $120 million round $70 million equity and $50 million of debt that closed in July of last year. At the time of the funding announcement, the company told VentureBeat that the money represented pre-IPO growth financing. Asked today what this new round means, Wadhwani said he won t speculate on the exact timing of an IPO but added, I was brought in to take this company public, and that s what I intend to do. The new funding, he said, represents freedom. We can [execute on our plans for the company] on this money and effectively choose when we want to go public. Wadhwani declined to discuss the company s post-money valuation, but a source close to the company pegs it at $1.9 billion.',
'In a Global Market for Hacking Talent, Argentines Stand Out: Want to learn how to break into the computerized heart of a medical device or an electronic voting machine Maybe a smartphone or even a car Thanks to the legacy of military rule and a culture of breaking rules of all sorts, Argentina has become one of the best places on earth to find people who could show you how. As Silicon Valley s talent war has gone global, particularly for those skilled at breaking into things, this Latin American nation has become a rich recruiting ground for corporations and foreign governments. Companies need hackers to help defend against online criminals and state-sponsored spies. And as the world s critical infrastructure moves online and the threat of war moves into cyberspace, governments are desperate to acquire hackers tools. Within Latin America, Brazil has become known in recent years as the world leader in Internet banking fraud. But Argentina s hackers have a reputation for creativity. In particular, they are known for their ability to find so-called zero-day flaws, which are unpatched holes in widely used technology that can be used to spy on or even destroy adversaries computer networks. Technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have encrypted their products and services so that in many cases the only way to monitor a target s communications is to hack directly into its device. As a result, there is a new urgency among governments in acquiring zero-day exploits. A mix of executives from around the world, government officials, contractors and or so it was rumored spies gathered here in October in an industrial building converted into a cultural center to watch hacking done the Argentine way at the 11th annual EkoParty, the largest hacking conference in Latin America. Long before foreign companies came calling, hacking things was a life skill in Argentina, a way to get by through decades of repressive military rule and a volatile economy. Argentines have a saying, atado con alambre, which translates roughly as held together with wire, to describe the inventive nature of so many here who learned to do much with little. The country still has one foot in the tech industry s past because of stringent import rules. Amazon will not ship to your door here. BlackBerry has more market share here than Apple. A new iPhone costs $2,000 or more on MercadoLibre, an online auction site, but many iPhone owners said they had been able to persuade a friend traveling from abroad to sneak one through customs. To get their hands on the latest, greatest devices, Argentines often have to think like a hacker or even become one. You make do without resources, without high-end technology, with poor Wi-Fi connections, said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentine political analyst. We improvise creative solutions, for lack of other options, and many have applied these same procedures to the technical industry. ',
'FAA Permit for Drone Flight School May Help Amazon, Google Speed Up Delivery Plans: The Federal Aviation Administration is plotting how to regulate drones. Tech companies with plans for drones Amazon, Google, DJI, GoPro and a bevy of others looking to tap a potential multi-billion dollar market are itching for the FAA to get on with it already. Last week, the agency made a small legal maneuver that advocates hope indicates more leniency to come on the commercial applications of drones. The FAA authorized the Kansas State University Polytechnic campus to train students and outside companies on flying unmanned aircraft. This type of authorization, called a Section 333 exemption, is common; construction sites, news outlets and disaster relief groups have received them. Amazon scored one in April. The notable difference here is in how close the FAA lets drones get to people. Even with flight authorization, drones must stay 500 feet from people, unless the craft meet some stringent safety and logistics requirements. The only exception had been on closed film and TV sets, which deploy drones for movie magic. But the FAA lifted the 500-foot restriction for the Kansas school, even though it didn t ask for the specific closed-set exemption.',
'Target and PayPal Sites Report Problems on Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, is not immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to gain access to the site of Target, the discount chain,and PayPal, the online payments processing service. Both are now back online after an onslaught that reflects the shifting trends in the way consumers are looking for shopping bargains. Foot Locker, Groupon and Victoria s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns Monday afternoon, according to Catchpoint Systems, a web monitoring firm. In a statement on Monday, Target said it was experiencing its biggest online volumes ever in response to a 15 percent online discount that it had announced previously. Visitors to the site early Monday got a message saying: Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic s causing delays. If you wouldn t mind holding, we ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP. According to a statement from Target, the company said it placed online shoppers in a queue in order to manage the volume of users, but it then allowed them to keep trying to gain access by refreshing their browser. A heat map on downdetector.com showed most of the problems with PayPal were reported in North America and Europe. Problems started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. PayPal said in an emailed statement that the brief, intermittent interruption in service was resolved. It did not provide a reason. The holiday buying frenzy has evolved over the years as more stores offer sales before and sometimes on Thanksgiving Day. It has also shifted away from physical stores as Americans have increasingly turned to online shopping. For many people, Monday was their first day back at work after the long Thanksgiving weekend, so some shopping was presumably being done surreptitiously while at work.',
'',
'Thanksgiving Final Results OmniChannel Strikes Back: This morning we are releasing the final results from Thanksgiving 2015. What stands out is the Omnichannel players with stores and online marketplaces (Best Buy, Sears, etc.) did extremely well. This indicates that these Brick and Clicks retailers were really able to tie their store and online promotions together with great success. This data is date-shifted to compare Thanksgiving this year (Nov 26) vs. last year (Nov 27). In summary, Thanksgiving 2015 blew the doors off, coming in at 43.4% y/y growth compared to 20.1% last year more than twice the rate of growth. The trick is while we know that Thanksgiving 2015 was very strong, we don t know if this will continue through the entire Cyber Five and through all of Holiday 15, or if consumers are shopping much earlier than last year and will taper off as we get past Thanksgiving. Omnichannel marketplaces led the pack with Google Shopping and Amazon also outperforming. From a device perspective, Smartphones were 58% of traffic compared to last year s Thanksgiving 35% and a new high water mark for this device type in our data. From an order perspective, smartphone came in at 37% which was also more than double last year, although conversion rates continue to lag desktop and tablet considerably. Conclusion: consumers not only increased their Thanksgiving sales, but they utilized their smartphones heavily and favored omnichannel retailers.',
'Kobe Bryant Takes NBA Retirement News to Twitter, Not TV. Chris Sacca Is Pumped: On Sunday, outgoing NBA star Kobe Bryant opted not to make his expected retirement announcement on broadcast TV. Instead, he went for social media, posting his retirement poem on Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. It links to Players Tribune, a site for athletes from fellow superstar Derek Jeter, which subsequently crashed after the Kobe post. It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over lack of sex. )It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over lack of sex. )',
'Amazon releases video showcasing unmanned delivery drones: Amazon has unveiled what its unmanned drones for package delivery would look like with a video launched on Sunday on the prototype of technology it announced two years ago. The promotional clip, narrated by television show host Jeremy Clarkson, shows a family receiving in about 30 minutes replacement soccer shoes for the one chewed up by its dog. "In time, there will be a whole family of Amazon drones. Different designs for different environments," Clarkson says. The video shows the box containing the shoes ordered by the family fitting seamlessly into the body of the drone. It then rises vertically, in helicopter style, for nearly 400 feet, according to Clarkson, after which it assumes a horizontal orientation, flying like an airplane. Clarkson said the drone in the clip could fly for 15 miles. It was equipped with what he called "sense-and-avoid technology" to sense, then avoid, obstacles in its path. The video shows the drone approaching its targeted landing spot, dropping the package, then taking off again, presumably to return where it came from. The launch of the video appeared to be timed ahead of "Cyber Monday", one of the biggest shopping events for electronics retailers. Amazon did not say when it hoped to have the drones in service.',
'Judge Dismisses Yelp Suit Brought by Shareholders: Yelp won the dismissal of a lawsuit by shareholders who claimed they had been fraudulently misled about the authenticity and quality of its reviews, and who accused Yelp of manipulating those reviews to favor paying advertisers. In a Nov. 24 decision, United States District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar in San Francisco said reasonable investors would understand that not all Yelp reviews are real, particularly given the company s admission that its technology to screen user-generated content is not foolproof. In April, Judge Tigar dismissed an earlier version of the complaint, which sought class-action status. He said the plaintiffs could not sue again because any amendment would be futile. Yelp lets users rate restaurants and other businesses on a five-star scale. Positive reviews can bolster sales and negative reviews can harm sales, especially if viewers perceive the reviews as unbiased. Shareholders led by Joseph Curry accused Yelp of inflating its share price by falsely promoting the reliability of its reviews, as part of a calculated strategy to extort businesses into buying ads or making payments in exchange for removing bad or fake reviews. But the judge said only 11 of the complaints accused Yelp of offering to manipulate reviews in exchange for fees, a small number.',
'India s Grofers Grabs $120M To Bring Offline Merchants Into The On-Demand World: The race for on-demand delivery services in India is on, and today one of the bigger startups in the market has picked up a large cash injection as it goes for pole position. Grofers, an Instacart-style app that links up with local, offline merchants to delivery groceries, medicine, flowers, and other daily items to customers, has raised $120 million led by new investor SoftBank. The Series C round also included existing backers DST s Apoletto Managers, Tiger Global and Instacart investor Sequoia Capital. Grofers CEO and co-founder Albinder Dhindsa and SoftBank have both directly confirmed the round and investors to TechCrunch. Grofers has been on a fundraising tear to aid its expansion. This is the third round raised by the company this year alone, after earlier rounds of $10 million and $35 million. It brings the total to just under $166 million including an earlier seed round. Japan s Softbank has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into Indian startups like Ola, Snapdeal and more, and as part of this round it will take a seat on Grofers board. The Times of India, which first reported the raise, cites sources that say Grofers now has a post-money valuation of over $300 million. Dhindsa, who cofounded the company with Saurabh Kumar, would not comment on the valuation and said he hadn t even wanted to make this fundraise public. Very honestly it s just a distraction for the team, he told TechCrunch. We re in the middle of trying to build a business. Today, that business is currently live in 26 cities in India, with some 1.6 million downloads of the mobile apps that are used to order its services. While Grofers looks on the surface like another Instacart clone, there is more going on under the hood. The company originally started as a B2B provider of a supply chain platform it built to help larger brands distribute consumables to smaller merchants, and for those smaller merchants who are almost completely offline to better keep track of their stock. In India, retail is very unorganised, so we see an opportunity in helping small merchants come online, Dhindsa says. Still, perhaps to tap into a more mass market prospect, it recently pivoted or expanded may be the more accurate term to make its business more consumer-facing, by offering those small, offline businesses an additional service: a way of showing their stock to consumers, who can order and have items delivered. Typically, Grofers offers some features to businesses for free, such as its inventory management system. It then takes a cut on other business software and services, as well as on the delivery, which can range at prices to consumers of between $1 for groceries to $0.40 for medicines (not as cheap sounding in India as it may be in the U.S.). Dhindsa says that the funding will be used to continue growing its supply-chain management development, but also to continue building out its last-mile infrastructure. Today, Grofers uses a mix of its own employees and contractors to deliver goods. Perhaps cleverly, it has chosen not to make delivery the cost-and-profit focus of its whole operation. In fact, it s even considered partnering with others for that aspect of its business.',
'Thanksgiving Online Sales Stats: Growth Higher Than Rest of Year As Importance of Holiday Season Sales Rises: Thanksgiving is now in full swing in the U.S., and while many are focused on food and football, some are turning their attention online to kick off their holiday shopping. Adobe, which has tracked 100 million visits to some 4,500 retail sites so far today (including 80% of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers), says that over $1 billion has been spent so far online, and that the final figure is on track to be $1.7 billion growth of 22% compared to Thanksgiving a year ago, with Star Wars being one of the big brands driving sales. Thanksgiving Day online sales continue to trend ahead of expectation as we head into the evening hours, when mobile shopping comes back into the mix, said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index. We expect the day to come in up 22% YoY at over $1.7 billion, driven by stronger than expected toy sales due to Star Wars items and much higher shopping via email promotions (+25% YoY). Meanwhile, IBM which also tracks sales across thousands of websites in the U.S. is publishing real-time numbers showing how people are buying online. As of 3 PM Pacific time today, the average value per order has been $142.55. As a point of comparison, a year ago, IBM said the average order value was $125.25; and in 2013, it was $132. IBM says that online sales the day before Thanksgiving were up by 35% compared to the same day a year ago, with average value per order up by $9.10. (As comparison, U.S. e-commerce sales overall are only expected to go up by 14% this year compared to last, so 35% is high). Taken together, yesterday s and today s numbers indicate not only that more more of us are shopping online, but we are spending more in the process. We ll have to see how those numbers bear out over the next days and weeks before saying whether this is a sign of people getting in early and dropping off, or whether this is a bellwether for a strong season overall. Overall, the period is projected to bring in between $70 billion $95 billion in e-commerce sales. Yesterday, comScore published some numbers predicting that mobile would account for less than 17% of all sales in November and December ($11.7 billion out of $70 billion); but that it would represent nearly all the growth. IBM s numbers today so far are actually improving on those projections. It says that just under 28% of all sales are being made on mobile devices. And mobiles are also account for just under half (48%) of all e-commerce traffic that is, browsing for goods if not buying outright. Adobe, on the other hand, is reporting slightly lower numbers for mobile. It says that $283 million in sales have come mobile devices so far this Thanksgiving, with smartphones accounting for 15% of that and tablets 11%. Adobe says this is a big leap over last year s 18% but actually lower than the 29% it had expected but will pick up again during Thanksgiving dinner time. ',
'Xiaomi\'s $45 Billion Valuation Seen `Unfeasible\' as Growth Cools: Things were going so well for Xiaomi Corp. Customers were lining up, investors were swooning and the Beijing-based startup closed funding at a $45 billion valuation. That was last year. Now the high-flying smartphone maker is stumbling. Founder Lei Jun s latest business, one of China s most exciting startup stories of the past few years, is likely to miss its own goal of selling 80 million smartphones this year, according to two people with knowledge of its production plans. Suppliers also cut their internal targets for Xiaomi in anticipation of the shortfall, they said. Xiaomi s falter shows the startup s challenge in trying to maintain momentum after a meteoric ascent past Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. in China. Investors bought into the company s story of youthful disruption and online sales, yet the subsequent lowering of China s growth target and the copying of its sales strategy by rivals have neutralized Xiaomi s first-mover advantage, putting its high price tag in doubt. "All those expectations of growth aren t being realized, which now makes that $45 billion valuation unfeasible," said Alberto Moel, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein in Hong Kong. "The argument was that their business is kind of like Apple and they re growing very fast, but they re no longer growing so fast and they re not as good as Apple." Domestic shipments of Xiaomi smartphones, including its premium Mi 4 and more economical Redmi series, dropped 8 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, its first-ever decline, according to researcher Canalys. IHS, another research firm, estimates that Xiaomi shipments dropped 3.9 percent, barely maintaining the lead over Huawei Technologies Co. That s a big change from the bold growth projections used to justify Xiaomi s tag as one of the world s most-valuable technology startups. In March of last year, Lei predicted selling 100 million smartphones in 2015. Through the first nine months of this year, Xiaomi shipped about 53 million smartphones. With its optimistic forecast, Xiaomi secured $1.1 billion in December from investors including GIC Pte., All-Stars Investment Ltd. and DST. Xiaomi drew comparisons to Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company that months earlier held the largest initial public offering ever.',
'Black Friday Deal or Dud How to Shop Smart This Holiday Season: Black Friday, which has traditionally been the moment to flock to stores for steep discounts, and which has evolved to also include major online sales events for retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, is not all that it is billed to be. We asked J. D. Levite, the deals editor of the product recommendations website The Wirecutter, for some data on just how beneficial the deals are on Black Friday and the answer was not encouraging. Year round, Mr. Levite and his team track product prices across the web to unearth discounts on goods of all types, from gadgets to kitchenware. They also look at whether the product is high quality and durable based on their own testing and other reviews, and whether the seller or brand has a reasonable return or warranty policy. By those measures, Mr. Levite said, only about 0.6 percent, or 200 out of the approximately 34,000 deals online, which typically carry the same price tags inside retailers physical stores, will be good ones on Black Friday. There are just more deals on that day than any other day of the year, he said. But for the most part, the deals aren t anything better than what you d see throughout the rest of the year. There s a smarter way to shop than relying on Black Friday. With the plethora of web tools now available, consumers can research online and then use trackers to follow product pricing for drops throughout the year. While it s a time-consuming effort, the method is more precise for understanding pricing trends, both online and in stores. One useful tracking tool is Camel Camel Camel, which is geared toward users of the online retail behemoth Amazon. Using the Camel Camel Camel website, people can view a product s price history on Amazon.com and then create alerts to receive an email as soon as the item s price falls to a certain threshold. Over time, interesting trends emerge. One is that some product prices are raised in October, a few weeks before Black Friday. The prices are reduced again on Black Friday. Camel Camel Camel s database also shows some items have predictable pricing patterns over the course of a year. A pair of bookshelf speakers made by Pioneer are typically $127, but that tends to drop significantly in August to $60 in August 2014 and to $88 in August 2015, timed to the back-to-school season. This week, the same pair of speakers was again $127. In other words, there are times of year when different types of products decline in price and Black Friday isn t one of them.',
"All In: Why Nikesh Arora Bet $483 Million on SoftBank's Future: It began late one night this year when he and Son were talking about people s tolerance for risk and how it tends to decline over time. Arora took a chance as a kid by leaving India for the U.S. with only $200 in cash, but he had since gone on to a lucrative career. So Son prodded him. Masa said, How much risk appetite do you have Arora says. Do you believe you can transform SoftBank into a company two, three, five times its size Now is the time to take the risk. A week later, Arora came back with a plan to buy 60 billion yen ($483 million at the time) in SoftBank shares, more than any insider purchase by an executive in Japan in at least 12 years, according to Bloomberg data. He would become the company s second-largest individual shareholder and borrow heavily to do it. Arora says investors don t yet appreciate what SoftBank is becoming. The company has been battered recently because of struggles at two major holdings, the China e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the U.S. wireless operator Sprint Corp. SoftBank is still valued at less than the public shares it owns, meaning investors deem its operating businesses practically worthless.Arora professes not to be worried. He says investors will come around once the company makes progress in reviving Sprint, lets Alibaba recover and demonstrates that it s more than a Japanese telecommunications company with a spotty investment record. I m very relaxed, Arora said. I m here for at least the next 10 years. Arora was hired last year after a decade at Google Inc. and promoted to president in June. Since then, he has been quietly building his own operation within SoftBank, an investment arm that will take stakes in technology companies around the world. Though SoftBank put money into startups for decades, including a tumultuous foray during the dot-com bust, the effort had dwindled in recent years to what Son called a hobby next to his wireless and broadband businesses. Arora is reviving the venture push and making it much more ambitious. He is hiring a team of 15 to 20 outsiders and plans to put about $3 billion into startups each year. Arora s recruits, from companies such as Google and LinkedIn Corp., are hand-picked for the expertise they can offer startups in key areas like personnel, product development and acquisitions. He says SoftBank will hold a competitive advantage by operating at a financial strata few can reach. He plans to make five to 10 investments a year of $100 million to $1 billion. The idea is to back startups that have proven products and need to expand -- the rapid phase of growth Arora helped manage at Google.",
'Morgan Stanley Said Struggling to Sell EBay Enterprise Deal Loan: Morgan Stanley is struggling to unload $640 million of loans backing the private-equity buyout of EBay Inc. s enterprise business after investors shunned the debt, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The bank has been trying to sell the loans since mid-October and continues to hold the debt even after EBay said on Nov. 2 that the sale was completed. Morgan Stanley has discussed a steeper discount to lure buyers and has been probing investors in recent days about the price at which they may be willing to buy the debt, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. One concern investors have raised is that the company s projected earnings may be too optimistic. Buyout targets often make adjustments to forecast earnings, called add-backs, that can reduce a borrower s leverage.',
'HP Inc plunges after printer business underwhelms: Shares of HP Inc, which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co\'s legacy hardware business, plunged 16.3 percent on Wednesday after the company\'s lackluster results fueled concerns about its ability to weather a slowdown in the printer and PC markets. HP Inc\'s revenue from both its printer and PC businesses fell 14 percent each in the fourth quarter, their worst performance in the year ended Oct. 31, and forecast current-quarter profit below market expectations."Things got worse. Not only did they not get better - they got worse," said Shebly Seyrafi, an analyst at FBN Securities.HP Inc Chief Executive Dion Weisler called the printing business a "much greater challenge" than the PC business.The company has been cutting printer prices to tackle stiff competition, particularly from Japanese printer makers Canon and Epson.However, the price cuts, coupled with the effect of a stronger dollar, have reduced the value of income from overseas markets.Revenue from HP Inc\'s printer supplies such as ink cartridges and laser toner fell 10 percent this quarter. Supplies account for most of the profits for HP Inc.HP Inc\'s PC unit has been suffering as sales have been falling worldwide for several quarters and the launch of Windows 10 has so far failed to rekindle the industry."Ultimately I think (HP Inc), the way it\'s structured, it\'s going to be more of a sort of dividend yield play," said Jeffrey Fidacaro, an analyst.HP Inc\'s sibling, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, saw its shares rise as much as 8.5 percent on Wednesday, after it maintained its profit forecast for fiscal 2016.',
'Zenefits Under Investigation For Allegedly Allowing Unlicensed Brokers To Sell Health Insurance: Cloud HR platform Zenefits may have allowed salespeople to illegally act as insurance agents in at least seven states. According to a BuzzFeed investigative report, the startup let unlicensed brokers sell health insurance, leading to at least one commissioner to investigate in Washington State. Those unlicensed solicitations go back to at least the summer of 2014, and the Washington State office of the insurance commissioner started looking at the potential violations earlier this year, according to the report. This is not the first time Zenefits has faced legal scrutiny for possible insurance violations. The Utah Insurance Department took the startup to task over claims it was illegally giving insurance software away for free. Regulators at the time said that the company violated local laws and that it was unfair to traditional insurance brokers. Utah legislators threw out the complaint and let Zenefits get back to business after both the Utah House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to let the startup continue operations. The broker license violation looks a bit more serious and could be considered a Class B felony, under Washington State law. Violators may be subject to a prison sentence of up to 10 years as well as face a $20,000 fine. According to the report, Zenefits execs may have known about the violations and were aware of the consequences, but were prompted to get sales agents licensed in the state only after learning of the insurance commission s investigation. State records show 22 agents became licensed brokers just days after the report said Zenefits realized there was a state inquiry. The startup has since launched a license management system to help track which sales agents are properly licensed.',
'Facebook s Internet.org Now Available Throughout India: Internet.org, Facebook s initiative to provide free Internet services in developing countries, is now available to all Indians through the Free Basics app on Reliance Communication s network. The project is meant to give people in emerging economies easy access to the Internet, but has been hit by a slew of criticism. Reliance Communications is India s fourth-largest telecom operator, with about 110 million subscribers as of June. According to its site, Free Basics will enable users to use Facebook and Facebook Messenger and access sites like Wikipedia, BBC News, Bing Search, Dictionary.com, and local news services. Detractors say that by making a handful of services available on its platform, Internet.org gives preferential treatment to its partners, therefore violating the tenets of net neutrality. In response, Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said Internet.org will focus on offering basic services for free (hence the branding of its app) and is not meant to limit access to other providers. The company has also taken steps to make joining Free Basics easier to join for developers and other potential partners. This has done little to ameliorate critics who are concerned about the potential drawbacks of having a company as large and powerful as Facebook control what millions of new Internet users see. In addition to India, Free Basics is available in 30 countries throughout Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.',
"Apple plans to launch Apple Pay in China by February: WSJ Apple Inc (AAPL.O) plans to launch its mobile payment system Apple Pay in China by early February, the Wall Street Journal reported. The iPhone maker has struck deals recently with China's big four state-run banks, the newspaper reported late Monday, citing people familiar with the discussions. When launched, Apple Pay will mainly compete with Alipay, the online payment platform run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, and UnionPay, a state-controlled consortium that has a monopoly on all yuan payment cards issued and used in the country. Apple's plans could still face regulatory hurdles in China, where banking and e-commerce are overseen by a number of government agencies, WSJ said. Launched in the United States in October last year, Apple is bringing its payment service to China, the most important market for smartphones. The company's sales nearly doubled in Greater China in its fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier. The amount Apple would make off such transactions has been a sticking point in negotiations to bring Apple Pay to China, the Journal quoted the people as saying.",
'Google s Answer to Facebook Instant Articles Gets (Tentative) Launch Date, Ad Partners: Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google s initiative for mobile news publishing and its open source riposte to similar efforts from Facebook and Apple, is arriving early next year, the company said in a post on Tuesday. Last month, Google rolled out a preview version of the product, which Re/code readers learned of first. Google has already roped in marquee publishers, including* the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC. Some 1,600-plus newspapers and television stations have voiced their support, according to Google. On Tuesday, the company also announced it had signed up a slew of analytics and advertising providers for the back end.',
'Hewlett-Packard ended its life as one public company with a whimper. For the quarter that ended Oct. 30, Hewlett-Packard had net earnings of $1.32 billion, or 73 cents a share. Revenue was $25.7 billion, down 9 percent from a year earlier. The earnings were below Wall Street s expectations, which used nonstandard accounting popular in analyzing tech companies. By the nonstandard formula, HP earned 93 cents a share. Analysts had expected HP to make 96 cents a share, on revenue of $26.4 billion, according to a survey by FactSet. Shares of HP Inc. were down more than 7 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday, while HPE shares were up more than 2 percent. Of the two firms, Ms. Whitman s HPE drew more attention, as she is trying to remake a business that sold things like computer servers and data networking into something with more software and high-value services, which can compete in the era of cloud computing. HP, considered the grandfather of Silicon Valley, began November as two separate entities. One, called HP Inc., sells primarily personal computers and printers. The other, HPE, sells computer hardware, software and services that are used by large companies. Meg Whitman, who was chief executive of the old HP and now runs HPE, split the entity in the hope of increasing efficiency and growth. After months of planning, the two companies began operating separate financial reporting systems in August, although they were legally one company until Oct. 30. Ms. Whitman s strategy now is led by high-value consulting, in particular helping customers in planning, managing, protecting and using hybrid cloud and on-site systems to get and analyze more data, faster. Next week HPE and Microsoft are expected to make a joint announcement that Microsoft is a preferred partner, meaning they will make sales calls together and recommend each other to customers. It is a plausible plan, Mr. Bittman said, that only needs revenue and profits. It s a good series of slides, but we need to see it in action, he said.',
'Amazon Challenger Jet.com Announces $350 Million Investment, Eyes $150 Million More: E-commerce startup Jet.com announced a $350 million cash infusion Tuesday led by Fidelity Investments, providing money to help the company attract customers during its first holiday shopping season. An additional $150 million investment is expected shortly, the Hoboken, New Jersey-based company said Tuesday in a statement. The investment values Jet at $1 billion before the new funding round, the company said. Jet, which began operations in July, offers free shipping on orders exceeding $35 without a membership. Web giant Amazon.com Inc. charges customers $99 annually for delivery discounts. Founded by former Amazon executive Marc Lore, Jet is trying to undercut its chief rival s prices to attract customers. Last month, it abandoned a $50 subscription membership fee. The total value of merchandise sold on Jet was $33.2 million in October, an increase of 65 percent from September, the company said in the statement. Jet expects to end the year with gross merchandise value of $500 million on an annualized basis. Jet offers customers unique ways to save on orders, including discounts for paying with a debit card or waiving their right to return products they buy. Consumers can also amass savings by loading up their carts with more items, which minimizes the number of shipments. Jet is attracting new customers by subsidizing their purchases with big discounts, which is a lower-cost way of gaining business than advertising, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is considering offering an option to buy online and pick up in a store with its retail partners, which would help Jet compete with Amazon s larger inventory and faster shipping, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the strategy is private.',
'Tango, Chat App Unicorn, Lays Off 9% Of Staff Following Failed Move Into E-Commerce: Tango, the mobile messaging unicorn that reached a billion-dollar valuation when Alibaba invested $280 million in it early last year, has laid off around 9 percent of its workforce after it shuttered a brief effort at e-commerce. The Mountain View-based company launched an in-app commerce feature powered by Alibaba and Walmart back in May of this year, initially in the U.S. market, but it has confirmed to TechCrunch that Tango Shop was closed down last month, leading to the lay-off off around 30 employees working on it. The initiative didn t really pan out, Tango CTO Eric Setton told TechCrunch. We didn t see the conversations we wanted. [There was a] good amount of traffic but the volume didn t materialize. [We recently] updated the app to take the e-commerce flow out, but unfortunately couldn t keep the team working on that initiative. Following the reorganization, Tango now has 270 staff across its U.S. office and a smaller presence in Beijing, China. Interestingly, one high-profile exit from that reshuffle was Chi-Chao Chang formerly VP of Tango Labs and the lead on Tango s commerce initiative who is now working at Facebook, although he is involved with the social network s search business not Messenger. Despite the retrenchment, Setton claimed Tango is on track to have its highest quarter of revenue to date. This year, [revenue] is an order of magnitude above what we ve ever seen before, he said, although he declined to provide a specific revenue figure. Setton also declined to give an update on Tango s current user base. The last figure given by the company came in May, at the launch of Tango Shop, when it claimed 300 million registered users. That wasn t a big jump on the 200 million registered users that it announced in March 2014, when Alibaba invested and Tango announced its first (and only) monthly active user count: 70 million. The lack of fresh user metrics suggests that Tango s user growth is stalling, particularly as the mobile messaging scene matures and network effects come into play to drive users to the most established, more popular apps. Because, after all, chat apps are about chatting, which is hard to do if your friends all moved to Snapchat (estimated at 100 million monthly users), Kik (240 million registered users), Facebook Messenger (700 million monthly users) or WhatsApp (900 million monthly users).',
'Alphabet Trying to Mix Heft With Start-Up Agility: Alphabet was created to separate Google, the search giant, from the constellation of appendages the self-driving cars, the pharmaceutical company, the two venture capital funds that many current and former employees say had made the company too sprawling to manage. The last three months of 2015 were the first quarter of the new holding company s life, and the contours of the organization are starting to fall into place. It has hired new leaders, such as an auto industry veteran who was recently tapped to run the self-driving-car project. It is developing new processes, like an internal system that would have Alphabet companies pay Google for dull but important services like human resources, accounting or access to Google s technological infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, something first reported by The Wall Street Journal. These are normal processes in large companies, used to make sure business units have a handle on expenses. But the company is also asking questions about how it might achieve the dream that has eluded so many other big companies: find a way to take advantage of its heft while being nimble like a start-up. Larry Page, Google s co-founder and chief executive of Alphabet, has said that he wants his company to be a home for entrepreneurs. If the Alphabet concept plays out as advertised, company chiefs would have more autonomy to make strategic decisions on such matters as whom they hire and how they spend money, or even to raise their public profiles. But the pitch in particular to acquisition targets is also about what they would not have to do. They would not have to worry about building a large server infrastructure for their technology to run on. They would not have to worry about whether to use their money to hire another accountant or another engineer. In the case of more mature companies, they could skip the mounds of paperwork and reporting requirements that come with going public. That broad idea that entrepreneurs do best when they are focused squarely on new technology rather than distracted by corporate building blocks that every company needs but also take lots of time to build has taken root across Silicon Valley. It is why, in addition to money, venture capital firms now give their companies access to all kinds of marketing, sales and other services in hopes that their start-ups can more quickly become grown-ups. The first good glimpse of all this will come early next year, when Alphabet, for the first time, will separate Google s search and advertising businesses from Alphabet s more speculative divisions. But it will take months or years for Alphabet to figure out how to create the best of all possible worlds. If such a thing exists.',
'When and Where Do Black Friday\'s Biggest Crowds Actually Hit Google\'s look at foot traffic finds a few surprises: Google wants to help shoppers navigate the wretched non-holiday known as Black Friday. Today, the online Santa of search is showing when and where people head for doorbusters. Pulling aggregated, anonymized data from Google Maps users, the company is revealing for the first time traffic insights for various retailers in the month leading up to Christmas Eve. The data isn\'t just relevant to shoppers. Understanding peak traffic for shopping malls, department stores, electronic stores, cellphone stores, discount stores and dollar stores could help marketers better reach consumers when they\'re keenest to buy. Google also announced today it would provide a more detailed view of offline measurement by giving advertisers the ability to break out store visits at a keyword or ad-group level. "By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits," according to a Google blog post. "For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store." Here are a few key insights from Google\'s foot-traffic analysis: Store traffic peaks between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Black Friday, with Thanksgiving Day department store visitors peaking between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Shopping malls, superstores and discount stores experience the highest traffic on the Saturday before Christmas. Dollar stores are busiest on Christmas Eve.',
'The U.S releases draft regulations for drones: Proposed Regulations for Drones Are Released in the US: On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. The government already has rules that limit the use of drones for commercial purposes, like delivering packages. But attention has turned to recreational use more recently, as drones, many of them the size of a laptop computer, have emerged as a must-have item for thousands of people. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, has estimated that 400,000 drones will be sold this holiday season in the United States.',
'Deliveroo, an On-Demand Food Delivery Service, Raises $100 Million: On Monday, Deliveroo, an on-demand food delivery service based in London, announced that it had raised $100 million from investors, including DST Global, an early backer of Facebook, to help push the service into new markets, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. In total, the start-up has now raised roughly $200 million since its creation in 2012. Just about four months ago, Deliveroo raised $70 million to expand beyond its British roots. The company provides a one-size-fits-all offering for nontech savvy restaurants that includes food packaging, delivery drivers and other support so individuals can order the restaurants food through smartphones. As part of the new fund raising, Deliveroo expects to branch out into highly populated cities across Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore. Mr. Shu said there were no plans in the short term to offer the service in the United States, though the start-up now operates in 50 cities in 12 countries, primarily in Europe. While online food delivery companies like GrubHub and Just Eat, its European counterpart, have allowed people to order food through smartphones for years, a new generation of start-ups like Deliveroo are trying to extend that offering to restaurants that do not have their own delivery logistics. That group includes Delivery Hero, based in Berlin, which also offers a fleet of drivers and other logistical support to restaurants looking to expand into online orders. Delivery Hero is valued at $3.1 billion and operates across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Other tech companies, including Uber, the ride-booking service, now offer similar products. Yet for Mr. Shu of Deliveroo, these rivals are only a small fraction of his overall competition, which also includes people cooking for themselves at home and traditional restaurants.',
'Amazon Makes Holiday Shopping Season Tough for Target and Walmart: Neither Target nor Walmart needed a reminder about the distance between their online businesses and Amazon s. Their third-quarter sales numbers provided it anyway. Walmart s online sales grew just 10 percent in the third quarter, slower than the 15 percent industry average, while Target s grew 20 percent, well below the company s stated goal of 30 percent, the companies announced last week. These numbers might not spell all-out trouble if it weren t for Amazon s performance during the same period: The company s electronics and general merchandise business basically the core of its retail operation grew 35 percent in North America in the quarter, marking the segment s highest growth rate in several years. The third-quarter headwinds of the traditional retailers coupled with Amazon s momentum makes this e-commerce holiday season an even more critical one for Walmart and Target. It doesn t help that Amazon s huge logistics investments over the last few years mean it can flex its muscles the most during the holiday with its arsenal of express shipping capabilities when customers are often looking for last-minute gifts. If Walmart and Target going to close the gap, now has to be the time. But history isn t on their side.',
'Once Valued At $4.5B, LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today s Unicorns: The first thing you see when walking into the headquarters of LivingSocial is row upon row of mostly empty desks, broken up by small street signs that employees once needed to find one another when the office teemed with people. One row, BYFAD Lane, was named after a start-up, BuyYourFriendADrink, which LivingSocial acquired to get into the daily deals business. Other signs, such as Sky Diving Street, were named for some of the hottest discount coupons that the company once provided. On a recent visit, some desks were piled high with boxes of employee belongings, the detritus left behind after a round of layoffs that eliminated one-fifth of the work force. In one refrigerator, the milk was six months old. The technology industry s boom over the last few years has been defined by the rise of unicorns, the private companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest unicorns of its day. It now offers a glimpse of what some of today s unicorns might look like several years down the road if things go awry. Just four years ago, LivingSocial and its larger rival Groupon grew rapidly on a simple pitch: The companies would match customers to local businesses with a daily deal in users inboxes, like half off at a local deli or a two-for-one massage promotion. LivingSocial and Groupon would take a cut of each transaction. Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way that the Internet would invade local business, and by late 2011 LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, according to data from the research firm VC Experts. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price among its investors. LivingSocial spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of momentum, the company explored going public. Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled. T. Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company s work force has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 percent below its I.P.O. price.',
'Airbnb raises $100 million in funding, Valuation stays flat at $25.5B: source: Apartment-sharing startup Airbnb Inc has raised over $100 million in a new round of funding, a source close to the company said. Airbnb, once a startup selling cereal, expects to achieve profitability in 2016, the source said. Airbnb revenue doubled to $340 million in the third quarter on bookings of $2.2 billion, the source said. The company expects revenue of $900 million this year. The round was done at the same $25.5 billion valuation as the previous funding round over the summer, indicating that unicorns, or private tech companies worth $1 billion or more, are finding it tougher to convince investors to buy shares at continuously escalating valuations.',
'Snapchat\'s lackluster ad business threatens $16 billion valuation: Snapchat, maker of a free mobile app that lets users send videos and messages that disappear in seconds, is struggling to gain traction with advertisers, fuelling investor concern that its $16 billion valuation isn\'t justified by a business that hasn\'t yet shown it has a steady source of income. Even in a world where upwards of 140 private companies are reckoned to be worth $1 billion or more, Snapchat\'s outsized value stands out. Fidelity Investments\' decision to slash the estimated value of its Snapchat stake by 25 percent in the third quarter exacerbated concern about the company\'s ability to meet advertisers\' expectations. For Snapchat advertisers, the question is whether prices that can reach more than $500,000 for some ads is worth it when the company lags competitors in targeting specific consumers and measuring how ads perform. "If Snapchat doesn\'t get that figured out, they\'re in trouble," said Nick Godfrey, chief operating officer at RAIN, a digital strategy agency. Snapchat lost more than $128 million in the first 11 months of 2014, according to a financial statement leaked earlier this year, which also showed Snapchat had revenue of $3.1 million. Its advertising business began in mid-October. Tech media outlet Re/code estimated that Snapchat\'s revenue could reach $50 million in 2015, citing sources familiar with the company. Snapchat doesn\'t comment on its revenue or its losses. The company has raised $1.2 billion from investors, ample resources to develop its advertising techniques. But time may be limited as the company is in early discussions for an IPO, according to sources. Snapchat\'s $16 billion valuation was calculated at its most recent funding round in May based on how much investors were willing to pay for shares.',
'Yelp Surges as Investors See Bargain Buying Opportunity: Yelp Inc. shares surged the most in six months Friday as investors see the customer-review website at bargain prices after it lost almost half of its value this year. Shares jumped 11 percent to close at $31.21 in New York, the biggest increase since May 7 and the highest price since July 28. Yelp shares plummeted July 29 after the company cut its revenue forecast and said it would stop selling national brand advertising. The stock is down 43 percent this year. Yelp Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Stoppelman is trying to convince investors the company is on the right track by boosting its local advertising sales force and pulling back from banner ads from national brands that aren t getting responses from Yelp users. The move is part of Yelp s shift to mobile users, who make up a larger portion of its audience than desktop users.',
"Google aims for China launch of Google Play app store next year: Google, part of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), aims to launch the China version of its Google Play smartphone app store next year, according to people familiar with the matter, its first major foray in the market since ending localized product support in 2010. The Google Play app store would be set up specifically for China, and not connected to overseas versions of Google Play, two of the people said. They said Google intends to comply with Chinese laws on filtering content that might be viewed as sensitive by the ruling Communist Party, and laws requiring the company to store the app store's data within China.",
'Jawbone Lays Off 60, 15% Of Staff Globally, Closes NY Office. Some difficult news this week for Jawbone, maker of fitness trackers, speakers and Bluetooth headsets. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company yesterday laid off around 60 employees, or 15% of staff. It s a global round of layoffs affecting all areas of the business; and as part of it Jawbone is also closing down its New York office (which was concentrated on marketing) and downsizing satellite operations in Sunnyvale and Pittsburgh. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said the layoffs are part of a wider streamlining. From what we understand, there are no specific product areas being cut as part of this restructuring. The company, in other words, will continue to sell its Jambox speakers and the Era headset, along with related accessories. More generally, however, Jawbone has been increasingly focusing is R&D, product and marketing attention on its range of UP fitness trackers.',
'Successful Tech IPO#1: Shares of Square Soar by 45% After Public Offering: Square began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, at one point surging more than 64 percent above its initial public offering price of $9. It ended the day up 45 percent, closing at $13.07. The first-day pop followed a turbulent I.P.O. process for the six-year-old company, one that was marred by questions over pricing and valuation and that arrived in the face of a precarious public market for technology offerings. On Wednesday, when Square had priced its shares at $9, that was lower than the $11 to $13 range it had set, putting its valuation at $2.9 billion, well below the $6 billion price tag that private investors had valued the company at last year. As recently as Wednesday, advisers laid out options for Square including pulling the deal, three people briefed on the discussions said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but for Square, that was not a consideration. We have a great beginning, said Jack Dorsey, Square s chief, striking an upbeat note in an interview on Thursday, which was his 39th birthday. I don t see negativity as necessarily something that detracts from our work. The I.P.O. ordeal illustrates the difficulties some might say guesswork of accurately valuing companies, both when they are private and when they go public. And Square, which closed its first day trading with a market capitalization of $4.4 billion, now faces the challenge of moving on from the fund-raising event, solidifying its business and building itself up. I want to get back to a steady state and back to business, Mr. Dorsey said. He added that Square s strategy now was to continue to save people trips to the bank. We re not going out there to say we re getting rid of the banks or card networks. We ve just put a much cleaner face on that infrastructure. ',
'Sucessful Tech IPO#2: Investors \'swipe right\' in Tinder-owner Match\'s debut: Shares of media mogul Barry Diller\'s Match Group, the owner of popular dating site Match.com and mobile app Tinder, jumped as much as 24 percent in their market debut on Thursday, valuing the company at $3.57 billion. Match Group, which touts itself as the world\'s No. 1 dating company, is seen as the crown jewel of Diller\'s media properties and has driven parent IAC/InterActiveCorp\'s (IACI.O) profit and revenue in recent quarters. The U.S. online romance market, worth more than $2 billion a year, has thrived as instant messaging, photo-sharing and geolocation services grow in popularity. One of Match Group\'s most popular offerings is Tinder, a mobile app on which people "swipe right" or "swipe left" to signal their willingness or not to meet prospective partners.',
'Facebook Makes It Easier to Move On After a Breakup: Breaking up is now a little easier to do, at least on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that lets people untangle themselves from a relationship without cutting ties altogether. The operator of the world\'s biggest social network introduced a tool on Thursday for users to "take a break" after changing the status of a relationship with another person, letting them see less of an ex\'s posts without blocking or unfriending them. People can also tell Facebook to show an ex less information. While the feature might seem intrusive, it\'s become more necessary as Facebook has worked to highlight a user\'s most important relationships. The company is using its data to make better suggestions, such as who should be invited to events or whose birthdays are more important to celebrate. For example, Facebook has been serving up flashback memories of older posts, which, after a breakup, could bring back bad memories. And Facebook doesn\'t want to drive away any of its 1.55 billion users. The tools are more subtle than unfriending or unfollowing someone the ex won\'t see any changes. Twitter, which lets users know if they were blocked, came up with a similar option last year, adding a "mute" button that would keep users from seeing someone\'s posts without letting them know. Facebook\'s new breakup feature is also reversible just in case.',
'Patron of Indian start-ups Tiger Global to tone down current aggressive style; to come up with two-track approach in giving money to companies: Tiger Global Management, the most prolific backer of startups in India, has decided to tone down its current aggressive style here, several people aware of the thinking at the US firm said, in a reflection of the limits of its strategy so far as well as the changing investor mood. Tiger, which is based in New York with private investments led by Lee Fixel, is coming up with a twotrack approach when it comes to giving money to companies in its portfolio, conversations with founders and investors reveal. The ones that are in leadership positions in the market can expect Fixel to keep his purse strings open, but not the laggards which have been told to fend for themselves. They must obtain validation from investors other than Tiger to lead new rounds and get unit economics right with positive operating margins. One of the founders who met Fixel recounted the conversation thus: "I will be leading very few investments in the next six to eight months, but if you use your cash and survive this cycle, then the pressure will ease out." Tiger, which is the main backer of India\'s most valuable startup Flipkart and owns significant stakes in the country\'s largest cab aggregator Ola, has invested around $2 billion (Rs 13,000 crore) in over 35 Indian companies. This year it has been even more active than in the past, but that has changed along with the onset of a more cautious mood about throwing large sums of money at consumer internet ventures. ',
'Trailing in the Cloud, Google Taps VMware Founder to Chase Amazon: With its cloud business, Google finds itself in a rare position: Behind. The search giant has toyed with different enterprise products for years, with limited success, and now faces fierce competition from Microsoft and Amazon. But Google is signaling that it is serious about building an enterprise business. And here is its biggest sign: Alphabet has tapped Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of the software company VMware, to run it. Sundar Pichai, Google s CEO, announced the move in a blog post. Therein he said Greene, who has been a Google board member since 2012, will take over all our cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Cloud Platform and Google Apps. The move includes an acquisition of Greene s new company, Bebop. Pichai describes it as a new development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications. Google isn t sharing a price on the deal. Greene is joining at a moment when Google s cloud efforts, both on the application and the infrastructure side, seem to be spinning. Three years ago, the narrative about Google Apps was how it was so often displacing Microsoft Office with its word processing and spreadsheet apps that run in a browser. Now that Microsoft Office has gotten the cloud religion with Office 365, which runs both as an on-premise version and in the cloud, the narrative around Google Apps has shifted in the last year or so: It s now described generally as doing well with small businesses, even though Google itself still touts the fact that 60 percent of the Fortune 500 use it. Still, the cloud world has just gotten a lot more competitive. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Office Graph, a set of unified APIs that will let third-party developers build add-ons and apps that enhance how Microsoft Office works. This hiring seems a partial response to that.',
'Square prices shares at 52% discount to last valuation in disappointing turn to long-awaited IPO: sources: Mobile payments company Square Inc priced shares at $9 late on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter, further discounting the company\'s valuation before it begins trading Thursday morning. Square has raised $243.5 million in its Wall Street debut, about $80 million less than expected. The price set on Wednesday puts Square\'s market capitalization at $2.9 billion, a 52 percent drop from the $6 billion valuation it had earned at its last private funding round. San Francisco-based Square, led by CEO Jack Dorsey, earlier this month set a price range of $11 to $13, well below the $15.46 per-share price of its most recent private financing. The steeper discount to $9 - a 42 percent drop from what investors were willing to pay a year ago - suggests widespread uncertainty about the profitability of the payments industry and the future of Square itself, which has seen slowing revenue growth. "The way that Square was valued as a private company is they were just going to disrupt everything and change payments," said Andrew Chanin, CEO of PureFunds, an exchange-traded fund for mobile payments companies. "And the reality is not that." Compounding concerns is Dorsey\'s dual role running Twitter Inc., a social media company struggling for a turnaround. Founded in 2009, the company started as a way for small businesses to accept credit card payments through mobile devices. It has evolved to a suite of small business services, relying on partnerships with companies such as Apple and Visa. The valuation cut triggered a ratchet, or protection investors wrote into previous funding rounds, that requires Square to sell several million additional shares. Square will begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SQ". Square is one of the most prominent "unicorns," or private companies valued at $1 billion or more, to plan a public debut this year. Many have held up Square as an example of how fleeting - and at times nonsensical - private market valuations can be. There are more than 140 "unicorns" globally.',
'Match Prices Its IPO at Bottom of Proposed Range as Tinder CEO Breaks Quiet Period Rule with a Bizarre Interview ("Models Beg Me For Sex") Match has priced its IPO at $12 per share, raising $400 million . The company will begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow, under the ticker symbol MTCH. The $12 per share is at the bottom of the anticipated $12 to $14 proposed price range and gives the company a market cap of roughly $2.9 billion. Square, which is also going public tomorrow, just priced its IPO at $9, below the $11 to $13 price range. Match owns a group of dating companies, including OkCupid and the infamous Tinder. That particular subsidiary came under fire today after its leader gave a bizarre interview that may have broken SEC-mandated quiet period rules. Tinder CEO Sean Rad: Models Beg Me for Sex:, Dick Pics Aren t Cool: Tinder s parent company, the IAC-owned Match Group, is going public tomorrow. As the most attractive and valuable part of the company, it makes sense that Tinder s CEO, Sean Rad, is talking to media outlets to drum up excitement for the IPO. This morning, a fresh Tinder PR disaster dropped in the form of an interview with journalist Charlotte Edwardes in the London Evening Standard. In it, Rad talks about the number of women he s slept with ( Is 20 low ), confuses the word sapiosexual for sodomy and condemns fame-hungry journalists. It makes sense that Rad would say some really, really stupid things in an interview. Rad was the dude who mishandled a sexual misconduct scandal (and the resulting lawsuit) that led to the exit of co-founder and CMO Justin Mateen last year. Rad stepped down as CEO last November, but got a second chance at the top job after his successor, former Microsoft exec Chris Payne, was canned in the wake of a memorable Twitter meltdown. The interview is very long and there are many different great parts. Below is perhaps the best selection from it (here s another one: I do not condone penis pictures that is just not who I am ). I m sure it will inspire a lot of confidence in investors looking to buy Match Group stock tomorrow: He s desperate to impress on me how gallant he is, citing the fact that a supermodel, someone really, really famous has been begging him for sex and I ve been like, no. She s taunted him, he says, and called me a prude. She s one of the most beautiful women I ve ever seen but it doesn t mean that I want to rip her clothes off and have sex with her. Attraction is nuanced. I ve been attracted to women who are he pauses well, who my friends might think are ugly. I don t care if someone is a model. Really. It sounds clich d and almost totally unbelievable for a guy to say this, but it s true. I need an intellectual challenge. He continues: Apparently there s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff. You know, just talking. What s the word His face creases with the effort of trying to remember. I want to say sodomy ',
'How Amazon s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut: Shares of Jeff Bezos s company have doubled in value so far in 2015, pushing Amazon into the world s 10 largest companies by stock market value, where it jockeys for position with General Electric and is far ahead of Walmart. There is a simple explanation for Amazon s rise, and also a second, more complicated one. The simple story involves Amazon Web Services, the company s cloud-computing business, which rents out vast amounts of server space to other companies. Amazon began disclosing A.W.S. s financial performance in April, and the numbers showed that selling server space was a much bigger business than anyone had realized. Deutsche Bank estimates that A.W.S., which is less than a decade old, could soon be worth $160 billion as a stand-alone company. That s more valuable than Intel. Yet the disclosure of A.W.S. s size has obscured a deeper change at Amazon. For years, observers have wondered if Amazon s shopping business you know, its main business could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little As we embark upon another holiday shopping season, the answer is becoming clear: Yes, Amazon can make money selling stuff. In the flood of rapturous reviews from stock analysts over the company s earnings report last month, several noted that Amazon s retail operations had reached a critical scale or an inflection point. They meant that Amazon s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.',
'Goldman Says to Buy Apple Because It\'s Becoming a Services Company: It\'s time to stop thinking of Apple as a hardware company and start thinking of it as a service company. At least, that\'s what Goldman Analyst Simona Jankowski and her team are telling clients as they add the stock to their "conviction buy" list and call for a price of $163 in the next 12 months. "We expect that over the next year, the focus will shift from unit growth (which is slowing given a maturing smartphone market) to installed base monetization and recurring revenues ( Apple-as-a-Service ). Apple s model has already tilted that way with its new iPhone 6s installment plans, and we see the upcoming TV service as a powerful next step." Due to Apple\'s large and loyal customer base, the team argues that there is a "significant multi-year opportunity" for the tech giant to boost monetization. Jankowski\'s team estimates that over 90 percent of those purchasing iPhones are repeat customers, which will make it much easier for Apple to become a service-like company, especially as it launches a TV service. The timing might prove perfect for a foray into the TV space as well, with Goldman pointing towards acceleration in cord cutting as millennials are more apt to use what it refers to as "over-the-top media consumption," and the skinny bundles such as Sling TV and Vue become more common. "Theoretically, Apple could transition other products to installment plans as well, and charge customers a monthly bill that also includes its other services such as Apple TV and Music. We think a potential live TV service from Apple would be a key enabler of this transition to an Apple-as-a-Service business model." The shift to a service model could prove to dramatically increase Apple\'s average revenue per user (ARPU). Jankowski estimates that Apple\'s current ARPU would be $42 operating with a service business model.',
'As Lyft Seeks $500M in New Funding, Leaked Lyft Financials Show the Struggles of Being No. 2 Behind Uber: In the first half of the year, the ride-sharing company generated less revenue, lost more money, and added fewer customers than projected in February. Ride-sharing pioneer Lyft is heading back to the fundraising till, but its numbers may not look that rosy to investors. The company lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to private fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg. Lyft, the second-biggest U.S. ride-hailing service, is raising roughly $500 million as the company burns through tens of millions of dollars a month, according to a fundraising presentation compiled by Credit Suisse. It highlights tepid financial performance at Lyft and reveals that the company has repeatedly underperformed its own expectations. In the first half of the year, Lyft generated less revenue, lost more money, and added fewer customers than projected in February. The numbers suggest Lyft has had to burn through cash as it chases growth in a competitive industry. The willingness to spend big on growth is a costly strategy that s becoming increasingly common in Silicon Valley. Public market investors have expressed concern about the high valuations of private technology companies recently. Fidelity Investments, BlackRock, and others wrote down their stakes in some startups this year.In the first half of 2015, Lyft spent $96.1 million on marketing. That s more than twice Lyft s net revenue during the same period. In one document, Lyft promotes its ability to attract new drivers and riders, even as it does so at a sizable loss. Customer discounts represent a big portion of Lyft s marketing costs. This year, Lyft has also purchased billboards in New York s Times Square and on Market Street in San Francisco, in addition to paying drivers big bonuses.',
'Earnest, Fueled by Growth in Student Loans, Raises $275 Million: At the start of this year, Earnest was an intriguing but small entrant in an emerging field of start-ups using new tools of data and software to analyze credit risk and make consumer loans. Its loans were typically a few thousand dollars for things like relocation expenses and professional training. But today, the lender, based in San Francisco, is growing at a torrid pace, and on Tuesday it announced a $275 million round of debt and equity to fund further expansion. Already this year, Earnest has made 50 times as many loans as last year, and it is lending from $2 million to $5 million every day, said Louis Beryl, a co-founder and chief executive. In this round, $75 million is equity investment, and $200 million is debt funding. The debt portion is led by New York Life. The new financing brings the total raised by Earnest, founded in 2013, to $325 million. Earnest now employees 165 people, up from 30 at the start of this year. Mr. Beryl says he plans to hire about 200 more employees over the next year, especially technical people like software engineers, data scientists and user-experience designers. The long-term goal, he said, is to build a platform for the next generation of consumer financial services. The financial service that has carried Earnest so far is refinancing student loans, which it began at the end of January. It is by far the largest part of the company s business, and Earnest s success points to the opportunity in services to ease the burden on the nation s debt-laden students and recent graduates. Student loan debt is more than $1.2 trillion, growing by about 10 percent a year. Student loans are held by 40 million Americans. Earnest is focusing on the more indebted recent graduates. The size of its average refinancing loan is $70,000. The start-up says the average saving, on its refinanced loans, is $18,000, typically over 10 years. Other online lenders, like SoFi and CommonBond, have also done well in the market for refinancing student loans. But Earnest says its approach is particularly data-intensive, which it says allows it to tailor rates to individual circumstances. It asks its customers for digital links to their bank, credit card and retirement and investment accounts, and information on all their loans. They are willing to share their data for a better consumer finance experience, Mr. Beryl said. Earnest says it has read-only access to the information. It pledges not to store personal data or sell it. Earnest has made individual loans of more than $250,000. Traditional credit scoring, Mr. Beryl said, tends to punish high student debt loads. But such Earnest borrowers, he said, are in fields like brain surgery and dental surgery, where education is lengthy and costly. These are people with great jobs, great educations and great earning potential, he added. Earnest borrowers average a bit over 30-years-old young people with slender credit histories and thus charged higher rates by traditional banks. Mr. Beryl said Earnest has had no delinquency problems on its student refinancing loans. And Mr. Beryl, 34, is one of those prompt-paying customers. Having attended Princeton, Harvard Business School and Harvard s Kennedy School of Government, he had $100,000 in student loans at the start of the year. He has paid down some, but still holds student loan debt, he said.',
'Latest Craze for Chinese Parents: Preschool Coding Classes: Wu Pei began teaching her 6-year-old son to code this year, thinking he d enjoy learning a skill that might boost his future job prospects in an increasingly digitized world. Now, she runs classes in Nanjing, China, and is helping more than 100 parents introduce their children to coding. The 35-year-old former computer programmer with Foxconn Technology Group is tapping growing demand from parents intent on preparing their preschoolers for a world in which Oxford University researchers predict half the jobs in some countries may be eliminated by robots and computers. Similar classes are taking off across China. Reynold Ren has taught about 150 primary school-age children in Beijing to use Scratch, a project developed by the MIT Media Lab and Arduino, which enables users to create interactive objects such as robots. In Hong Kong, about 2,500 students have taken courses that Michelle Sun runs at her First Code Academy. Teaching the next generation coding is something that should be elevated to a strategical national importance, said Wang Jiulin, the Xi an-based creator of Kidscode.cn, a website that shares free information and courses. Even today, the majority of programmers in China can only perform very basic-level tasks and there s huge demand for top notch coders. ',
"Lyft executive says on track to hit $1 billion in gross revenue: Ride-hailing app Lyft, Uber's biggest competition in the United States, expects to reach $1 billion in gross annual revenue, the company's co-founder told Reuters. Hitting a $1 billion run rate suggests privately owned Lyft has increased market share in some U.S. cities, despite competition from Uber, a larger and better-financed ride-hailing app. Lyft's net revenue was estimated at $130 million in 2014, according to company financial documents cited by Bloomberg. By comparison, Uber's gross bookings are projected to rise to $10.84 billion this year and $26.12 billion the next, according to a presentation for potential investors seen by Reuters earlier this year. Based on those figures, Uber's 2015 net revenue would be $2 billion. Lyft, founded in 2012, calculated its $1 billion run rate from its gross bookings in October, when the company made about $83 million off of 7 million rides. That did not include Halloween, Zimmer said, which will be counted in November's figures and is one of the ride-hailing industry's busiest nights of the year. Lyft has more than a 40 percent market share in San Francisco, its hometown, and in Austin, Texas, Zimmer said. The majority of rides in San Francisco and New York City are through the Lyft Line service, a carpool feature that brings several passengers together to share a car, Lyft co-counder and Chief Executive Logan Green said last week. However, Lyft's continued growth also hinges on its ability to tap investors for money. A recent pullback in late- and mid-stage investing and the cooling IPO market are expected to make capital tougher to raise for high-priced companies.",
'Microsoft sheds reputation as easy mark for hackers: Microsoft was once the epitome of everything wrong with security in technology. Its products were so infested with vulnerabilities that the company s co-founder, Bill Gates, once ordered all of Microsoft engineers to stop writing new code for a month and focus on fixing the bugs in software they had already built. But in recent years, Microsoft has cleaned up its act, even impressing security specialists like Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer for F-Secure, a Finnish security company, who used to cringe at Microsoft s practices. They ve changed themselves from worst in class to the best in class, Mr. Hypponen said. The change is complete. They started taking security very seriously. Microsoft estimates that it now spends more than $1 billion a year on security-related initiatives, including acquisitions. It acquired three security start-ups in the last year alone, and the number of security employees at the company increased 20 percent during that time. Soon after he became Microsoft s chief executive in February 2014, Mr. Nadella instituted a monthly meeting with security leaders from across the company. They meet to discuss industry trends and analyze threats. He also altered how Microsoft watched the Internet for hacker attacks, an effort that had been splintered among different product groups and other divisions within the company. Microsoft now pays hackers more when they find and turn over a security hole.',
'Chip-Only, or Chip-And-Pin Credit Cards Give Retailers Another Grievance Against Banks: The employee perched on a stepstool by the checkout at Trader Joe s in Union Square in Manhattan is like an air traffic controller: Register 6 for one customer. Register 9 for the next. The routine helps move traffic quickly through the store, where the lines can often snake around the aisles of whole grain cereal, mixed nuts and Fair Trade coffee. Trader Joe s, like many retailers around the country, recently upgraded its payment terminals around the Oct. 1 deadline to accept debit and credit cards with a new security chip. The timing, retailers say, could not be worse. The new terminals are often slower, meaning that the long lines during the busy year-end holiday season will grow longer. The new chip cards are also at the center of a growing dispute that has pitted two of America s most prominent industries banking and retailing against each other, and pulled in attorneys general and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the process. But the debate involves more than whether consumers will be adequately protected during a season that has been rife with security breaches: The battle could affect the long-simmering war over the billions of dollars in interchange fees that merchants pay to process credit and debit transactions. That is the crux of the matter, said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a payments industry publication. The real savings is not about fraud, the real savings is about interchange. Last year, merchants paid about $61 billion in interchange fees, Mr. Robertson said, compared with about $30 billion in fraud losses. The fight involves new payment cards, issued over the last year, that come with a small square security chip that can help make in-person transactions more secure. Retailers complain that they have spent billions of dollars upgrading their payment terminals to accommodate a system that cuts down only on the fraud shouldered by banks, not merchants. Chip and PIN, long the standard in Europe, would help retailers verify not just the card, but the person using it. Writing to their colleagues in October, two attorneys general sounded a warning bell: The new security chip would not go far enough to make transactions safer. Credit cards needed a PIN, too. If we continue to settle for weaker standards here, we will continue to pay the price, wrote Sam Olens, the Republican Georgia attorney general, and George Jepsen, his Democratic counterpart in Connecticut. They urged top prosecutors in other states to sign a separate letter to Visa, MasterCard, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and other institutions, pushing them to adopt the chip-and-PIN technology. Banking groups were swift to issue their own statement, saying that merchants had been spreading an outdated narrative. In November, a spokesman for Mr. Olens confirmed that he had taken his name off the letter.',
'Pandora To Buy Music Streaming Provider Rdio Assets For $75M In Cash, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service: That was fast: just as soon as it was reported that Pandora was in talks to buy Rdio, the two sides have confirmed that an acquisition is indeed taking place. Pandora has acquired key assets from Rdio for $75 million in cash, the company has just announced. But as part of it, the Rdio service as we know it is tanking: the streaming service is filing for bankruptcy. The transaction is contingent upon Rdio seeking protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. Upon approval of the proposed transaction by the bankruptcy court, Rdio will be winding down the Rdio-branded service in all markets, Pandora noted in its statement. Separately, Rdio said in a blog post that it will shut down in the coming weeks. More immediately, however, Rdio will continue uninterrupted. In digital music market with constrained economics, we are likely to see yet more consolidation or outright closures. And with Rdio, there is still a chance that someone could step in right now and buy the company instead of Pandora, Rdio noted in its own statement: While we are filing for bankruptcy, because the planned sale to Pandora is contingent on such a filing, by law Rdio is required to entertain competitive offers during the bankruptcy process that is being managed for us by Moelis & Company, it noted. But, if Pandora s pland does go ahead, it sounds like Pandora s plan will be to create its own flavor of on-demand streaming to exist alongside its radio-style service. The assets it is planning to buy include technology and intellectual property. Additionally it s taking on several members of Rdio s team, but that will not include Anthony Bay, who is staying on with Rdio to wind down the business, Brian McAndrews confirmed on a conference call about the news today.',
"Amazon is the Tiger Global's second-largest public stake at $1.6 billion: Tiger Global Increased Amazon, Cut Back JD.Com in Third Quarter: Chase Coleman s Tiger Global Management boosted its stake in Amazon.com Inc. and cut its holding in JD.Com Inc. in the third quarter, reflecting the disparate performance of the two online retailers. Tiger Global increased its number of shares in Amazon by more than three times in the quarter, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm s position, its second-largest U.S. stock holding, was valued at $1.64 billion at the end of September. The shares jumped 18 percent in the three-month period, extending this year s gains. The asset manager trimmed its stake in JD.com s American depositary receipts by about 18 percent. Even with a 24 percent decline in price for the Chinese company s ADRs and the reduction in holdings, Tiger Global s stake was worth $1.5 billion at the end of September, making it the firm s third-largest disclosed position. The firm s U.S. stock positions were valued at $8.1 billion as of Sept. 30, about 15 percent below its second-quarter level. Money managers who oversee more than $100 million in equities in the U.S. must file a Form 13F within 45 days of each quarter s end to list those stocks as well as options and convertible bonds. The filings don t show non-U.S. securities, holdings that aren t publicly traded, or cash.",
"For Indian tech startups, 'Winter is here and why this is a great time to invest': The horizontal e-commerce Unicorns in India Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, and adding ShopClues and even a more diversified Paytm are in a dogfight with no end in sight. It doesn t help that Amazon keeps on growing from strength to strength and getting more aggressive. The online classified players have even bigger issues. Unlike the e-commerce Unicorns, Quikr, OLX, the real estate and car classified firms and other listing-related ones like Zomato have yet to see a serious revenue jump that matches their astounding valuation surge. They all have a serious dogfight coming with no one being particularly dominant in their segment (well Zomato is, but is revenue growth justifying valuation ). Ola and Uber Ditto, serious dogfight with no end in sight. Ad-tech Tough for InMobi and Pubmatic to claim resilience and justify high valuations when Facebook and Google want to eat it all. Payments Paytm has an extraordinary franchise but is it too distracted with other possibilities Probably the only secure privately-held Unicorn in India is MuSigma no surprise there as it has real profits and real cash generation. All the rest of the Unicorns are work in process. For early-stage startups, good news and very bad news. The good news is that several Series A funds have lots of dry powder Accel, Kalaari, Matrix, Nexus, SAIF, Sequoia, etc. will all continue to invest and there will be some fantastic opportunities as the extraordinary customer adoption, benefits of a hyper-connected world and improvements in broadband infrastructure will continue. This is a great time to invest, much like 2008-2011 when many Unicorns of today were created. Many investors have seen such down cycles before and they will not retreat. We also plan to continue investing at our regular rate of one to two deals per quarter. However, Series A investors have to be prepared to fund fewer deals and fund the winners more as Series B/C will not be easy to come by as the hedgies boosting up this market and valuations are more or less gone. Indian startups are not a good trade anymore! The really bad news is that funding will be available to only a small number of players, as investors get overly conservative. There will be mass closures or scale downs and heavy bleeding for many angel, seed and Series A investors. Capital will vanish for not only the vague and fluffy ideas but even for some good ones as they will get washed away with the tide and sink.",
'The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital: According to a recent study of 27 schools [in the United States], about one-quarter of female undergraduates and students who identified as queer or transgender said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Some felt the incidents weren t serious enough. Others said they did not think anyone would believe them or they feared negative social consequences. Some felt it would be too emotionally difficult. Now, in an effort to give students additional options and to provide schools with more concrete data a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. Students at participating colleges can use its site, called Callisto, to record details of an assault anonymously. The site saves and time-stamps those records. That allows students to decide later whether they want to formally file reports with their schools identifying themselves by their school-issued email addresses or download their information and take it directly to the police. The site also offers a matching system in which a user can elect to file a report with the school electronically only if someone else names the same assailant. Callisto s hypothesis is that some college students who already socialize, study and shop online will be more likely initially to document a sexual assault on a third-party site than to report it to school officials on the phone or in person.',
'As Bubble Deflates, A Cottage Industry Emerges Around Startup Investors Trying to Cash Out: With Silicon Valley startups staying private longer these days, investors, company executives and rank-and-file employees are increasingly eager to cash out early. In recent weeks, growing fears of a bubble have given insiders even more incentive to sell their shares. Typically company founders try to limit such transactions, but a cottage industry has sprung up to help facilitate the sales on the quiet. Selling shares early isn t entirely new. Before Facebook Inc. went public in 2012, a secondary market emerged that helped early employees and investors cash out to buy houses, cars or build a nest egg. A network of brokers helped facilitate the private deals, and firms such as DST Global Ltd., run by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, were eager to amass positions in the growing social network. Many of the current crop of promising startups -- among them Palintir, Dropbox, Flipboard -- have reached or surpassed their fifth year of existence. That s when early employees increasingly need the cash, said Mark Dempster, a partner at Founders Circle, which buys officially sanctioned secondary shares. Adding to the anxiousness among those with equity in startups is a drop in valuations for some high-profile companies. Fidelity cut the valuation of Snapchat Inc. by about 25 percent in the third quarter, BlackRock Inc. trimmed the value of storage-company Dropbox Inc. and payments company Square Inc. is seeking an IPO market capitalization that s significantly lower than its valuation as a privately held company. There s no shortage of eager buyers attempting to buy a stake in a hot startup. Some aspiring investors even cold call insiders asking to buy shares. organized sales clearly aren t meeting all the demand to cash out. Many employees and investors are finding other ways to sell shares on their own. Several companies have sprouted up to help find buyers for their shares. EquityZen, based in New York, offers forward contracts, where an employee trades the rights to their stock in exchange for cash now. The company sends out regular e-mails offering stock in companies such as Spotify, AppDyanmics and Chartboost. The sellers get the cash they are looking for, said Chief Executive Officer Atish Davda said in an interview. More traditional financial institutions also are participating in the secondary market, with mutual funds, hedge funds and asset managers like BlackRock Inc. occasionally buying shares this way. Last month, Nasdaq bought Secondmarket Solutions Inc., the operator of a software platform that helps facilitate the sales of shares in private companies.',
'After Outcry, Ireland Adjusts Its Corporate Tax Draw: While lawmakers often play down its importance, Ireland s 12.5 percent tax rate (versus 35 percent, before deductions, in the United States) has been a mainstay in the country s decades-long strategy to attract the world s largest companies. With few natural and manufacturing resources, Ireland and its politicians instead have turned to one of the world s lowest corporate tax rates as the country s primary competitive advantage in the global economy. In recent years, other European countries have accused Ireland of acting like an unfair low-tax haven. The European Commission, for example, is investigating whether Ireland gave Apple a preferential tax deal that broke the region s tough state-aid rules. While lawmakers and the company have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, the country is already phasing out the most controversial loopholes. Ireland has since turned to a new inducement: a low tax rate on revenue generated from patents and other intellectual property held in Ireland. Such an incentive announced last month to be 6.25 percent, or half of the country s corporate tax rate could be most attractive to patent-heavy industries like technology and pharmaceuticals. But many tax experts say the benefits will be significantly smaller than many had expected, particularly for global tech giants. Because of recent changes to global agreements, Ireland must limit what type of intellectual property can be included in these low-tax structures, known locally as a knowledge development box. Such restrictions have been demanded by several European countries, particularly Germany, which raised concerns that Ireland and other countries would turn to such structures to unfairly bring down corporate tax rates. Under international law, Ireland and other countries like Britain and potentially the United States can offer the tax breaks only on intellectual property derived from research carried out in their national borders. Much of the research and development for technology companies is done outside Ireland. So revenue from global patents like those linked to Google s search algorithm, many of which were developed in the United States, will not be eligible for the reduced tax. Still, for regulators who have tried to limit Ireland s tax advantage, the restrictions placed on the country s knowledge development box represent a victory in the global push to close unfair tax loopholes. Some companies in Ireland had lobbied for a wider definition of what type of intellectual property, especially linked to online advertising and search patents moved from other countries to Ireland, could be included in the tax mechanism. Those efforts, though, failed.',
"Sensor and Chip Makers stand to win as automakers battle for high-tech dominance: Automakers hope semi-autonomous features will, over time, help drivers and regulators get over fears of riding in vehicles that accelerate, steer and stop themselves, making potentially life-or-death judgments. Shorter term, car companies want these features to make driving more convenient - and cars more profitable. Ford's Active Speed Limiter comes at 560 euros ($602.78), and it's too soon to tell how popular it will be. Among the biggest winners for now are the companies that produce electronic sensors, cameras and software that make self-driving features possible. The growing list includes the high-tech units of traditional automotive suppliers such as Germany's Continental AG, Israel's Mobileye Vision Technologies, and consumer-technology giants Google, Apple, Samsung Electronics Co, Sony Corp and more. At Silicon Valley's Nvidia Corp, for example, video games remain the biggest market, but automotive revenue is the fastest-growing segment.",
'Cisco quarterly forecast misses expectations, shares down 5%: Network equipment maker Cisco forecast adjusted profit and revenue growth for the second quarter below analysts\' estimates, citing a slowdown in order growth and weakness in its enterprise business outside the United States. Shares of Cisco, considered a bellwether for the performance of the broader network gear industry, fell 5 percent to $26.41 in extended trading on Thursday. Revenue rose 3.6 percent to $12.68 billion, while analysts were expecting $12.65 billion. Net income rose 33 percent to $2.43 billion, or 48 cents per share, in the first quarter ended October 24. Needham & Co analyst Alex Henderson attributed Cisco\'s disappointing forecast to its exposure to emerging markets. "It has a much higher percentage exposure to those emerging markets than most companies," Henderson said. Cisco is beefing up its enterprise and wireless security businesses to counter lower spending by telecom carriers, its traditional customers, and nimbler rivals who are quickly grabbing market share through their software-focused networking products. In August, Cisco teamed up with Apple to improve the performance of iPads and iPhones on its network.',
'Uber Signs Digital Mapping Deal With TomTom: Uber, the ride-hailing service, agreed on Thursday to use digital maps provided by the Dutch technology company TomTom in its smartphone applications. The move is the latest foray into digital mapping for Uber, which had offered to buy Nokia s mapping business for around $3 billion early this year but lost out on the deal to a consortium of German automakers. Uber, which is increasingly using digital maps to run its fast-expanding global operation, has also acquired a portion of Microsoft s map technology and hired a number of engineers from Microsoft s mapping team. As part of the latest deal, Uber will license TomTom s mapping and traffic management services in the more than 300 cities where it operates. Uber did not say how much it would pay for the licensing rights. The agreement represents a lift for TomTom, which also provides the core mapping services used in Apple s Maps app, as well as in its own mapping products. TomTom has faced stiff competition from the likes of Google Maps and Nokia s former mapping unit, called Here, which is now owned by Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler. Both of those competitors have greater financial resources to invest in their mapping services, though analysts said the Dutch company could benefit as people who do not want to rely on Google or the German carmakers look for alternatives. That appears to be the case with Uber, which has shown increased interest in developing its own mapping operations despite maintaining close ties to Google. In February, for instance, Uber announced plans to open a research and development center in Pittsburgh, where the company said it would study autonomous cars.',
'Facebook Is Now Selling Virtual Reality-Like Video Ads: Facebook will start publishing more 360-degree video content into your News Feed and it s also going to start including 360-degree video ads. You don t need a virtual reality headset to watch these videos, but they simulate what it s like to look anywhere in a scene. Facebook first launched 360-degree video in News Feed back in September you can see how it works down below and now it s bringing that functionality to iOS devices and opening it up to advertisers for the first time. It s also creating tools to make it easier for people to share 360-degree content to their profiles. It added a resource hub so people can learn more about how to upload 360-degree videos, and it s partnering with camera manufacturers like Theta and Giroptic to add publish to Facebook features directly into the camera. It also poached three Microsoft researchers last month to handle this very challenge to get people sharing more VR-like content to Facebook.',
'Apple is working on a person-to-person payments service that may give iPhone owners another reason to use their Apple Wallets. The company is in talks with banks about the new service, which would let people use their smartphones to send money to one another as easily as they send messages, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The service, which could be ready as soon as next year, would compete with PayPal s peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, and Square s Square Cash. Apple started Apple Pay, a mobile payments service, in October 2014. This summer it combined payments with Passbook, an app that stored digital tickets and airline boarding passes, as the rebranded product Wallet. Apple has said that it wants a bigger slice of the payments industry. Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said at the company s annual developer conference in June that Apple s goal was replacing the wallet. Peer-to-peer payment services, which can foster consumer loyalty, are growing. This year, users of Facebook Messenger were offered a payment service akin to one that users of China s popular messaging app WeChat use to send payments to friends. Google has also experimented with payments in its messaging service. Banks are trying to create peer-to-peer payment products within their own mobile banking apps using a bank-owned digital payments network called clearXchange, which covers about 80 percent of all of the banks. And Square Cash has processed more than $1 billion in money transfers since the peer-to-peer program was introduced about two years ago, according to Square s recently filed prospectus for its initial public offering. Venmo, the money transfer app owned by PayPal and popular among younger users, processed nearly $2.4 billion in 2014. To date, few of these efforts are direct moneymakers for the companies. Square Cash and Venmo are free to use when linked to a customer s checking account, and consumers are charged only a small fee when using a credit card. For companies like Apple and Facebook, peer-to-peer payments are a way to involve customers more deeply with their products and to encourage them to leave their wallets at home.',
'Amazon might export delivery model from India: E-commerce giant Amazon.com is taking lessons learnt from its daily battles with India\'s choked roads and cramped cities to some of its largest developed markets, exporting a model of cheaper deliveries and reduced warehousing costs. Online shopping is booming in India, where millions of consumers are newly able to access the Internet thanks to cheap smartphones. For Amazon, it is already the largest contributor of new customers outside the United States. More than two years on from its arrival in India, Amazon says it is now ready to apply some of the innovations applied here to markets including the United States, Mexico and Brazil. Britain, for example, could get a delivery service called Easy Ship, where orders are picked up by Amazon\'s crew directly from sellers, cutting out the time and cost of sending goods to a warehouse and the need for more space. Launched in India in 2014, Easy Ship, for example, cuts out costs of storing, packing and separately shipping goods. "This probably cuts your overall transportation cost at least by half," said Samuel Thomas, Amazon India\'s director of transportation, adding that it trains sellers to provide the service, now used by 30,000, or more than 75 percent of them. Another service introduced in India in May and considered for export to other markets, Seller Flex, allows sellers to have the flexibility to store goods and ship them to customers on their own, instead of routing them through Amazon. Amazon provides technology and training to ensure goods are packed, labeled and delivered as the company would. While Amazon in developed markets may not want to tweak its model for best selling goods, analysts said, it could consider the made-in-India seller solution to cut down on warehousing and delivery costs for thousands of "non core" products which are offered, but infrequently bought.',
'After Square and DropBox, possible decline in Snapchat valuation signals trouble for unicorns: The worth of hot technology start-ups seemed for years to go in only one direction: straight up. Now there are signs of growing unease over the dizzying valuations of some of the most richly priced private companies. The latest sign has emerged with one such favorite, Snapchat, being discounted 25 percent by one of its more recent investors, Fidelity, the mutual fund giant. Another start-up, Dropbox, the widely used file storage service, was devalued by the giant asset manager BlackRock this year. The funds markdowns may tap the brakes on a fast-growing market. Investors, in the hopes of getting a piece of the next Facebook or Google, have been pouring billions of dollars into young private companies. Yet the public stock market has cooled for new technology companies: witness the current effort by Square, a mobile payments company, to go public at a valuation lower than what its last private investment gave it. The moves by Fidelity and BlackRock reflect how mutual funds can create challenges for technology s favored start-ups, just as they helped inflate valuations in the first place. Over the last few years, mutual funds fought to buy pieces of appealing venture-backed companies like Snapchat and Dropbox. The idea was that public investors wanted to own these start-ups because their value was growing faster than that of many publicly traded companies. By owning the private shares, the large mutual funds would also get to know the start-ups and be well positioned to buy their shares when they went public. As mutual fund and venture capital investors jockeyed with hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds to invest, their abundant capital pushed prices for private shares into the stratosphere. Snapchat, for example, is valued at more than $16 billion and Dropbox at around $10 billion. The biggest prize of them all, Uber, is now seeking a round of investment that would value the company at $60 billion to $70 billion. Uber s success with that round would be a further test of investors appetite. The competition among investors also helped create a herd of dozens of unicorns, a term for private companies valued above $1 billion, coined when such a phenomenon was still considered rare. Yet unlike venture capital firms, mutual funds are legally obligated to value each of their portfolio holdings every day, including hard-to-value assets like shares in private companies, and they must report these values at least every half year. A spokesman for the Investment Company Institute, one of the largest mutual fund associations, said that the process was a good faith determination of what an owner could get in a sale of the asset.',
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'Hands-On With Facebook Notify, A Push Notification News App And Twitter Alternative: Facebook released Notify, an app for reading customizable breaking news, info, and entertainment push notifications right on your lock screen. Notify lets you select from over 70 publishers and customize your alerts to only send you news about specific companies, cities, sports teams, music genres and more. Each is sent as a push notification and shown in the Notify app s feed for 24 hours, and can be clicked through to read an associated link. Today Notify becomes available on iOS in the US. It doesn t offer the real-time discussion and independent voices of Twitter, but could provide an alternative for Twitter lurkers who just wanted real-time information and aren t interested in building another audience to broadcast to. Though Notify won t feature any ads for now, there are certainly opportunities to offer sponsored suggestions for accounts to follow. As long as Facebook can get enough of its 1.55 billion users on Notify to justify the work publishers are putting in to produce content there, it could create the real-time, urgent, high-signal information channel the News Feed could never be. I spent some time with the Notify team and played with the app myself, and here are my hands-on thoughts. What s really special about Notify is the granularity of alerts you can get. While general Twitter accounts feature a broad range of content that might not all be interesting to you, Notify lets you subscribe only to the very specific sub-topics that are relevant. Facebook has worked with 70 launch partners to create Notify stations, including The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Techmeme, Fox Sports, Epicurious, Comedy Central, Fandango, BandsInTown and The Weather Channel. Many offer both general news stations and ones with options to follow specific sub-topics. Tapping a station lets you preview its content by showing the last 20 notifications it sent. Publishers use a special interface to write notification text, select a link, and then publish or schedule their alerts. There s also an API for programmatic distribution of weather forecasts, sports scores and other structured data. Working out these partnerships is what led to the leaks about Notify this summer from The Awl and Financial Times.',
'Alibaba Sites Sold More Than $14 Billion of Goods in a Single Day: Alibaba s consumer shopping sites sold more than $14.3 billion of products on its biggest shopping day of the year, called Singles Day, marking around a 57 percent increase over last year s total. The total for the last 24 hours, to be precise, was $14,341,847,366.00, according to a spokesman. To give you a sense of how big this sale is, the $14.3 billion figure is just 27 percent less than the $19.6 billion worth of goods that eBay sellers sold in July, August and September combined. The number also dwarfs the $2 billion Americans spent on Cyber Monday desktop shopping in 2014.',
'With a Mobile Website Like an App, Flipkart Takes a Swipe at Apple: India s e-commerce start-up Flipkart has worked with Google to make a new mobile website that could eliminate the need for apps, in a move that takes a swipe at Apple s grip on the mobile experience. On Monday, Flipkart unveiled the website, which it created with the Google team that focuses on the mobile web browser Chrome. The two made a site that supports push notifications, the ability to search for and read information while offline, location-based data and access to hardware features like a smartphone s camera. While such features have long been available in apps that people download to their phones, they typically have not been prevalent on mobile websites. Flipkart plans to show other companies what it took to build the website including the hurdles it had to overcome and the weaknesses it found at Google s Chrome Developers Conference this month. Google s parent company is Alphabet.',
'Match Is Seeking $3.1 Billion Value in I.P.O.: The Match Group is seeking a valuation of about $3.1 billion as it prepares for an initial public offering. The company, which owns the online dating brands OkCupid and Tinder, said on Monday that it planned to sell 33.3 million shares for $12 to $14 apiece. Those terms indicate an offering size of $433 million and a market valuation of $3.1 billion at the midpoint. In setting these terms, Match begins a roadshow, meeting with investors who will help the company set an official I.P.O. price in a few weeks, based on demand. The media conglomerate that owns Match, IAC/InterActiveCorp, whose chairman is Barry Diller, has been acquiring a number of dating sites over the last few years. As the online-dating industry increased in popularity, legacy sites like Match.com started facing more competition from free models like OkCupid. Mr. Diller s strategy was to build scale by acquiring a portfolio of brands now 45 in all and eventually spin them off under the Match umbrella.',
'Google Offers Free Software in Bid to Gain an Edge in Machine Learning: A race is underway toward the future of computer technology with advances in a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. Machine-learning software is trained to handle vast amounts of data, and then learns as it goes, often on its own. Machine learning has been around for a long time, and it has been a crucial technology in the success of Internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook used in the development of search, ad targeting and product recommendations. But in the last few years, machine learning has made huge improvements in computer vision, language translation and speech recognition, largely by applying the techniques of deep learning, which is inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns. Every major technology company is investing aggressively in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And not just computer companies. Last Friday, Toyota announced it would spend $1 billion for research and development on artificial intelligence in the United States over the next five years. Google announced on Monday a bold step to establish its leadership in the field of machine learning, accelerate the pace of innovation in the field and potentially strengthen its business. It is making the software of its new machine-learning system, TensorFlow, which was developed over years, open-source code. The software will be freely available for outside programmers to use and modify.',
'How Pinterest Got the Full Attention of Ad Agency Execs: Better features for marketers and consumers: Pinterest is getting serious about becoming a formidable digital advertising player, and agency executives are taking notice. "What Pinterest has accomplished in the last nine months is the most evolution of any platform," said Chris Tuff, evp and director of business development and partnerships at 22Squared. For comparison, Tuff said it took Facebook four and a half years to build the same kind of sophisticated ad tools that Pinterest is pitching. On Monday, the site launched a search feature that uses photos to comb through millions of product images. For example, someone looking at a picture of a table can zero in on finding similar tables by tapping on the Pin to start a search result without typing a word. Up until now, people have only been able to search on Pinterest with text queries. Marketers won\'t be able to buy visual search ads like they\'ve been able to with text search ads, which debuted in early 2014. Pinterest hasn\'t said whether visual search ads were part of its future plans, but that scenario seems likely. The visual-search move should prove popular to users which will help maintain marketers\' attention for the Pinterest ad products that currently exist. In January, Pinterest opened its Promoted Pins advertising business to all U.S. advertisers. Then in May, the San Francisco-based company started offering more targeting and video promos.',
'Rackspace Announces Better-Than-Expected Q3 Results, Including Revenue of $509M, Plans $350M Debt Offering: Following the bell, Rackspace announced its third-quarter financial results, including revenue of $509 million and earnings per share of $0.26. The market had expected Rackspace to report $0.20 in per-share profit off revenue of $503.08 million. Down nearly four points in regular trading, the company has swayed both positive and negative following its earnings announcement; investors, it seems, are not entirely sure at the moment how to parse the results. The company s top line expansion clocked in at 10.7 percent, compared to the year-ago quarter. On the product side of things, Rackspace recently announced, and I ll quote here to avoid butchering the truth, Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers. It has been rumored that Rackspace could entertain the possibility of going Full Dell, and heading private.',
'Square Takes an IPO Bullet for All of the Overpriced Unicorns: Square announced plans on Friday morning to price its IPO at $11 to $13 a share, meaning an IPO in that range would value the company at much less than the valuation it secured in its last round of private financing. If the company prices at $13, Square would carry a value of about $4.2 billion based on the approximately 323 million shares it says will be outstanding. Square, Jack Dorsey s payments company, was valued by private investors at about $6 billion in its last round of private financing, according to insiders. To be sure, Square s bankers could increase the price range before the IPO if they get feedback from investors that demand is higher than expected. But the range would have to jump a fair bit to even match what Square thought it was worth in its last round of funding.',
'Verizon Says Time Is Right for Kids to Get Smartwatches: While smartwatches have yet to really become a hit for adults, LG and Verizon say the time is right to strap them onto little kids. Verizon has started selling two new GPS-connected wearables that allow parents and kids to stay in contact and also to alert parents when their children leave a predefined area.The $125 GizmoGadget aims to mimic the look of adult smartwatches and has a touchscreen interface, apps and a choice of different themes and watch faces. It also features a pedometer and the ability for kids and parents to exchange text messages with emojis, voice clips or preset messages. GizmoGadget allows kids to call one of nine preset phone numbers. The more basic GizmoPal 2, which sells for $55, has LED lights to alert kids when a caregiver is calling.',
'NYT VR: How to Experience a New Form of Storytelling From The Times: Today, The New York Times takes a step into virtual reality. NYT VR is a mobile app that can be used along with your headphones and optionally a cardboard viewing device to simulate richly immersive scenes from across the globe. To start, The Times Magazine presents three portraits of children driven from their homes by war and persecution an 11-year-old boy from eastern Ukraine named Oleg, a 12-year-old Syrian girl named Hana and a 9-year-old South Sudanese boy named Chuol. This new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own, writes Jake Silverstein, editor of the magazine.',
"Why There's Still a Market for Online Ads No One Sees: Earlier this week the ad tech company AppNexus announced what it described as a major innovation: It would allow advertisers to pay only for those digital ads that are actually seen by people. To those uninitiated in the ways of programmatic advertising, this might seem like table stakes. Given all the talk about sophisticated tracking and targeting associated with digital ads, finding out which ones get viewed should be simple. But most industry studies estimate that only about half of digital ads are seen by real people. AppNexus is not the only company trying to change that. Last month Google said advertisers using the Google Display Network wouldn t be charged if their ads weren t seen by people, and this week it began allowing third-party auditors to double-check Google s own claims about the viewability of ads on YouTube. Facebook recently made a similar move. With the ad tech companies getting in line, it would seem the days of paying for digital ads no one sees are almost over.",
'Google Acquires Fly Labs To Join Its Google Photos Team: Today, Google acquired Fly Labs to join its Google Photos team. The company aimed to help people edit videos and photos and it sported 3 million downloads over the past 18 months. Their suite of apps (Tempo, Fly and Crop) will be made available for the next three months. You ll still be able to use them, but there will be no more updates.',
'Indian startups cut jobs as funding slows down: I don t know what is going to happen now, said Ankit Agarwal (name changed), a TinyOwl sales person who was sacked last week. His words summarise the predicament of around 1,700 persons who lost jobs in the Indian startups in the last three months. We got a mail on Tuesday saying there will be a meeting to discuss future plans. We first thought it had something to do with our half-yearly appraisals, Ankit explained how he and 24 others at TinyOwl s Pune office lost jobs. He did not want to reveal his real name, fearing it would affect his future job prospects. After much publicised 36-hour drama involving gherao of a co-founder, police intervention and local politicians entry into the startup s premises, the sacked employees managed to get their full and final settlement that 15 of their colleagues who were fired in the previous month have not got yet. However, all of them will have an uncertain Diwali since their frantic job searches are met with stoic we-will-get-back-to-you responses. The actual number of job cuts could be even higher than the estimated 1700 lay-offs across well-known internet startups such as Housing, Zomato, TinyOwl and LocalBanya, as many such cases go unreported. Firings and shutdowns happen rather routinely among many 50-100 employee startups.',
'Why Health Care Start-Ups Like Theranos Need Investing Expertise: The Silicon Valley start-ups that often grab headlines are typically in the Internet and consumer technology world. But there s another part of start-up land that is also highly active: health-related technology, which includes biotech, health care services and medical devices. Venture capitalists have been pouring money into health-related start-ups, with funding jumping 34 percent to $9.4 billion in 2014 from a year earlier, according to the National Venture Capital Association. What s often left unsaid about these companies is that they behave very differently from the typical consumer start-up or business software company. The health-related start-up sector has produced fewer unicorns, which are the private companies with $1 billion-plus valuations, largely because it takes a long time to develop new medical tests, drugs or insurance systems. Regulators often weigh in. Even if an idea behind a start-up is truly great, it s bound to fail if the science doesn t work out, if the regulators don t like what they see, or if insurers and the government won t pay for the product.',
'The High Price of Delivery App Convenience: When Emily Yang, a San Francisco tech worker, is running out of cat food, she taps an app called Instacart to order a new bag of kibble to be delivered to her door within hours. For dinner, she often orders through Sprig and Munchery, app-powered services that bring fresh organic meals to her home. Her experience highlights how a proliferation of instant-delivery apps has turned the smartphone into a sort of magic remote control that can almost beam items straight to your door: a burrito, a tennis racket, even a week s worth of groceries. There are now so many of these apps, especially serving cities like San Francisco and New York, that you can tap an app even to do your laundry or mail packages. But instant gratification has a price. With the delivery apps, tech companies act as a middleman connecting merchants and couriers with customers, and they pass the service charges on to the consumer. The fees are also more obfuscated and complex than you might expect when you, say, order a pizza. The receipt for the pie would clearly state its cost and the delivery fee.',
'People doing crazy things with Tesla s autopilot are spoiling it for everybody: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is warning that some new limits may be coming to the company\'s autopilot feature because of "some fairly crazy videos on YouTube" showing drivers behaving dangerously while the car is in control. Tesla doesn\'t recommend taking your hands off the wheel while the car is in autopilot mode. Yet that\'s exactly what some people are doing, leading to things like near-misses with other vehicles:Even the New York Times\' video review made a big deal out of being able to drive hands-free. "This is not good," Musk said on an earnings call this week. "We\'ll put on some constraints on autopilot to minimize people doing crazy things with it." Musk didn\'t elaborate on what kinds of new restrictions autopilot users could soon face, though it\'s likely that they would show up in the form of another software update.',
'In a first, the FCC is fining a major cable company for getting hacked: In the first such case against a U.S. cable company, federal regulators are slapping Cox Communications with a $595,000 fine after Cox allowed hackers from Lizard Squad to penetrate its systems and steal private customer information. By posing as an IT administrator and tricking a couple of Cox employees into giving up their login credentials, a hacker known as "EvilJordie" broke into Cox\'s databases and gained access to customer names, addresses, password recovery information and even "partial" Social Security numbers and driver\'s license numbers, according to the Federal Communications Commission. They also got hold of some customers\' telephone records. As many as 61 current or former Cox customers were affected by the breach, which occurred between Aug. 7 and Aug. 14 of 2014. The hackers changed 28 of these customers\' passwords, locking them out of their own accounts, and posted eight people\'s personal information on social media.',
'YouTube to support virtual reality video on its app: The Youtube app now supports VR video - a format that gives viewers what the company says are more realistic 360-degree perspectives of films. To view it, a user would call up a virtual reality video on the YouTube app, click a button on the video for VR mode, and place the phone in Alphabet Inc\'s "Cardboard" device, a handheld gadget made from the standard box material that creates a VR viewing experience. Makers of virtual reality content can upload VR videos compatible with the Cardboard viewer directly to YouTube. YouTube said there are about a dozen VR videos, including one stemming from the "Hunger Games" movies.',
"Add a Fund to Amazon Cart You Have Indian Regulator's Support: Indians are estimated to spend about $9 billion this year shopping online for everything from smartphones to cupcakes. The nation s stock market regulator wants them to add another product to their shopping cart: mutual funds. The Securities & Exchange Board of India plans to change its regulations to allow online marketplaces such as Flipkart Online Services Pvt. and Amazon.com Inc. to offer funds alongside other products, Chairman U.K. Sinha said in an interview at his office in Mumbai. Mutual funds have gained popularity among Indian savers, receiving more money in the past 17 months than they did in the preceding 12 years. Yet just 3 percent of the nation s 1.2 billion people invest in them, with majority preferring bank deposits or gold, according to the Association of Mutual Funds in India. Allowing e-commerce sites to sell funds will help money managers reach out to young investors accustomed to shopping online, providing the industry with a new distribution channel, Sinha said.",
'In India, Tiny Owl Founder Reportedly Detained for Two Days By Laid-Off Employees and the Police: Well that was strange and scary. Hours ago, one of six cofounders of Tiny Owl, a two-year-old, Mumbai, India-based food ordering software startup, was released after being held captive for two days by disgruntled former employees at the company s office in Pune. Tiny Owl had earlier this week announced $7.67 million in fresh funding from earlier backers Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital. But the funding came with the understanding that Tiny Owl would follow through on a major restructuring to control its burn rate.As part of that restructuring plan, the company is shutting down its operations in four cities, including Pune. Which leads us to what happened to company cofounder Gaurav Choudhary. Choudhary had traveled to Pune earlier this week to oversee the office s closure, while his fellow cofounders all of whom are graduates of IIT Bombay traveled to sites in Gurgaon, Chennai and Hyderabad to do the same. But according to various media accounts, soon after Choudhary informed Tiny Owl s Pune-based employees of the layoffs, he was asked to pay them immediately. When he said he couldn t, they reportedly refused to let him leave the building and return to Mumbai.',
'Facebook Revenue Surges 41%, as Ads and Users Keep Growing: It takes money, the adage goes, to make money. And Facebook is spending a lot of dollars to do just that. The social media giant on Wednesday posted another quarter of robust revenue growth up 41 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, to $4.5 billion fueled by its mobile advertising business and an increase in daily users. Net profit rose to $896 million, up 11 percent from a year ago. The revenue and profit increases came alongside a surge in spending. Facebook s expenses totaled more than $3 billion in the third quarter, a 62 percent leap from a year earlier, meaning that spending growth is outpacing sales growth. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., emphasized that it had no intention of slowing that down as it invested heavily in hiring, marketing, new technologies and other initiatives.',
'Airbnb and Uber Mobilize Vast User Base to Sway Policy: Over the last few years, so-called sharing companies like Airbnb and Uber online platforms that allow strangers to pay one another for a room or a ride have established footholds in thousands of communities well before local regulators have figured out how to deal with them. Now, as cities grapple with the growth of these services and try to pass rules for how they should operate, the companies are fighting back by turning their users into a vast political operation that can be mobilized at any sign of a threat. Airbnb offered the latest and most vociferous example of this on Wednesday. Fresh off defeating a San Francisco measure that would have severely curtailed the company s business in its hometown, Airbnb staged a news conference that functioned as a warning shot to other cities thinking about proposing new regulations. The event was billed as a debriefing to discuss the defeat of Proposition F, which would have toughened existing rules for the service by, among other things, cutting the number of nights people could rent out rooms in their homes. In this city of about 840,000 people, roughly $8 million was raised by groups opposed to Proposition F about eight times the amount raised by the proposition s backers, according to records filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission. Airbnb is preparing for more fights. Mr. Lehane said the company was working to organize voting blocs in other cities where it operates. By the end of next year, he said, the company has a goal of creating 100 clubs made up of Airbnb home-sharers sort of like local unions. Companies like Airbnb and Uber have become multibillion-dollar companies by employing a kind of guerrilla growth strategy in which they set up a modest team of workers in a city and immediately start providing their services to the public, whether local laws allow them to or not.',
"Jet.com to Raise Funds Valuing the Amazon Rival at $1.5 Billion: Jet.com, the much-hyped Amazon.com competitor, is close to raising $500 million to $550 million in a funding round led by Fidelity Investments, according to a person familiar with the plans. The investment would give the year-old online shopping startup a valuation of at least $1.5 billion, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal isn't finalized. Founded by a former Amazon executive, Jet is aggressively trying to undercut its chief rival s prices and attract customers quickly. To achieve that goal, it had raised $220 million before selling a single product and abandoned its subscription membership fee a few months after opening its doors in July. Jet is attracting a loyal following by offering customers unique ways to save on orders, including discounts for paying with a debit card or waiving their right to return products they buy, said Scot Wingo, chairman of ChannelAdvisor. Customers can also amass savings by loading up their carts with more items, which minimizes the number of shipments.",
"Alibaba, Baidu Turn `Kingmakers' as China Sees Dealmaking Surge: To understand why China is in the midst of a surge in dealmaking and why that won t slow down anytime soon, consider the arranged marriage of two of the country s largest travel websites. Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd. and Ctrip.com International Ltd. were bitter rivals for years, bickering in public and sacrificing profits to grab customers in the growing China market. Then Qunar s largest shareholder, Baidu Inc., forced it into a deal that gave Ctrip control over the combined entity, according to a person familiar with the matter. Qunar s management learned their fate only two days before the announcement, the person said. China s Internet market, after a surge in startups and record venture-capital investments, is entering a new phase of consolidation as investors grow weary of money-losing battles for customers and push for profitability. Acquisitions by Chinese companies rose 75 percent this year to $413.2 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, with domestic deals in the Internet industry nearly quadrupling to $55.6 billion.",
'Facebook Hits 8 Billion Daily Video Views, Doubling From 4 Billion In April: Facebook video viewership is growing by leaps and bounds. It now sees 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users. That s up from just 4 billion video views per day in April. Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on the call to investors followingFacebook s blockbuster Q3 2015 earnings report. Some might contend that this stat isn t totally accurate since Facebook counts just 3 seconds of watching as a view . But the 100% growth in seven months shows that even when controlling for this limitation of the metric, users are still voraciously consuming videos. Even at just 3 seconds per view, Facebook is generating 760 years of watch time each day. That means there s a ton of space for Facebook to lure in TV commercial dollars that are shifting to digital. It also has an opportunity to grow viewership further with an ongoing test where it pays a revenue share to top video creators.',
'Gmail s Inbox app will now write (some of) your e-mails for you: Google just gave a little bit of help to anyone tired of typing out the same reply to e-mails over and over again. Now, software will do some of the work for you. An updated version of Inbox, one of Google\'s mail apps, will "read" your e-mails and offer up suggested replies. In a company blog post, Gmail software engineer B lint Mikl s said Tuesday that the feature "uses machine learning to recognize emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly." The goal is to have options good enough that a user will send short messages in just two taps. And the suggestions are designed to get better as you use the feature more often, and Inbox learns your personal quirks.',
'Tesla s autopilot will soon become an in-app purchase, Elon Musk says: Tesla owners will soon be able to add autopilot functionality to their vehicles if they weren\'t able to sign up for it earlier, company chief executive Elon Musk said Tuesday. Drivers will be allowed to unlock Tesla\'s autopilot with a $3,000 payment, Musk told investors. That\'s about $500 more than what early adopters paid for autopilot\'s most powerful capabilities. "That\'s something we\'ll be allowing people to do at some point in the coming months," said Musk. "Sort of like an in-app purchase, I guess." All Tesla vehicles already benefit from some autopilot safety features, thanks to a recent software update. Automatic emergency braking, collision avoidance and collision warning have now rolled out across the fleet, Musk said. But only about 40,000 Teslas have autopilot enabled, he added. Those vehicles are collectively logging a million miles of driverless driving a day, giving Tesla valuable usage data. The decision by Tesla to allow "in-app purchases" of a sort highlights the company\'s growing habit of using software to upgrade its vehicles, equipping them with new powers on a rapid update cycle.',
"Uber's China Rival Says Cash Burn Has Slowed With Lower Payouts: Didi Kuaidi, the ride-hailing service competing in China with Uber Technologies Inc., said it has slashed the subsidies it pays out to drivers and riders since the middle of this year, reducing its cash burn as the rising number of orders reduce the need for enticements. The level of financial incentives last month were about a third of the level in June and July, Stephen Zhu, vice president of strategy and head of taxi services at Didi Kuaidi, said in an interview in Beijing on Tuesday. Some of its services like taxi-hailing are close to breaking even, he said. The decline in subsidies comes as the transport ministry released draft guidelines that prohibit Internet ride-booking companies to offer their services below cost in order to gain market share, describing such tactics as disruptive to normal market order. The proposed regulations also codify requirements that vehicles used in hailing services must be registered for commercial use and that drivers have to obtain qualifications before being allowed to ferry fares.",
'Amazon Opens Its First-Ever Physical Store, Selling Books on Paper, With a Side of Irony: Amazon, bookstore slayer, meet Amazon, bookstore owner. The e-commerce giant known in many circles as the archenemy of brick-and-mortar stores and bookstores, specifically plans to open its first physical storefront in its history on Tuesday. The store s name Amazon Books. Yes, Amazon is opening a bookstore in its hometown of Seattle. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Amazon said that the physical store would use online customer reviews and other digital data to inform some of its inventory decisions. Amazon will display a review or rating for each of the 5,000 or so books on display. Prices will match those on Amazon.com.',
'Snapchat s new Terms of Service freaked people out because no one reads them: Snapchat updated its Terms of Service last week, and the Internet freaked out a little bit. Some users interpreted changes to mean the company could now hang on to users\' private messages, broadcast them publicly and sell them to third parties. The pushback grew so loud that Snapchat took to its blog Sunday to explain itself, saying that private Snaps and Chats are still automatically deleted from its servers once viewed or expired. But, Snapchat said, its new Terms of Service granted the company "broad license" to user content. The company said those clauses are meant to apply to images and videos users share publicly for its "Live Stories" feature, which may be syndicated across other platforms. The new policy was also expanded to account for its Replay feature, which charges users who want to rewatch videos more than once, the blog post said.',
"Instagram is jumping into the curation business, too: Over the weekend, Instagram took a page from the playbook of social media competitors and made a curated stream, based around Halloween videos, that pulled together clips submitted by its users. As Twitter and Snapchat have done before it, Instagram used the stream to highlight unique content on its network that users may not catch if they were just scrolling through their own apps. The trend toward curation makes quite a bit of sense. Sure, part of the fun of being on a real-time social network is being able to jump into the stream at any time and get plugged in to whatever's happening at that moment. But that can be overwhelming for new users, and even more experienced ones who want to zero in on a particular topic. On days such as Halloween where everyone is posting similar videos for comparison it seems like a smart thing to do to briefly bring the whole network together.",
"Dell eyes $10 billion asset sales ahead of EMC merger: Dell Inc is preparing to sell around $10 billion in non-core assets, including software and services, to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy EMC Corp (EMC.N), according to people familiar with the matter. Dell, which will assume $49.5 billion of debt once the merger with EMC is completed, has communicated the plan to credit rating agencies in recent days, the people said on Monday. Assets Dell could sell include Quest Software, which helps with information technology (IT) management; SonicWall, an e-mail encryption and data security provider; back-up solutions unit AppAssure; as well as IT services provider Perot Systems, the people said. The divestitures will not include Dell's hardware assets such as servers, which are crucial in its quest to dominate the large enterprise market through its merger with EMC, as well as compete more effectively with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), the people added.",
'Fitbit Crushes Expectations In Q3, But A Follow-On Equity Offering Drags Its Shares Down: Following the bell, Fitbit announced its third-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $409.3 million, and earnings per share using normal accounting methods of $0.19. The company s adjusted profit totaled $0.24 per share. The results are notably strong. Investors had expected the company to report a far-slimmer $0.10 adjusted per-share profit off of revenue of just $350.97. Shares in the company, however, are sharply lower in after-hours trading, off nearly 9 percent as of the time of writing. What is going on Despite a smashing quarter, Fitbit s equity is getting whacked by what, so far as TechCrunch can tell at current tip, is planned liquidity for current shareholders, a newly announced follow-on offering, and legal friction. Starting with the legal point, Jawbone and Fitbit have a legal back and forth going, with the latest news being a counterclaim filed by the former. Fitbit has a pending patent infringement case on the books, but Jawbone has denied all allegations using the fun word frivolous. ',
'Google Says Chromebooks and Chrome Operating Systems Aren t Going Away: Rumors of the demise of the Chrome operating system have not just been exaggerated but are simply untrue, Google said on Monday in a rare public response to an earlier report. A report on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal claimed Google is preparing to merge its Chrome OS, which powers the Web-centric Chromebook laptops, with its mobile OS Android. After the story landed, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google s SVP who runs both Android and Chrome, pushed back on it, tweeting that the company is very committed to the desktop operating system.',
'Meg Whitman Seeks Reinvention for HP as It Prepares for Split: When HP splits in two on Sunday after a year of planning, what is left will bear little resemblance to the engineering-driven company founded more than 75 years ago in a garage not far from Stanford University. On one side will be HP Inc., which will largely consist of personal computers and printers. On the other, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell the computer servers, data storage, networking, software and consulting services that run a modern company. Each company is expected to have annual revenue of about $50 billion and will be among America s 500 largest public companies. Neither will have the standing as one of the most innovative operations in the world that the old HP enjoyed for decades.',
'With Instagram s Boomerang, making gifs is easier than ever: It s a gif world, and we re just living in it. Those short, looping (often loopy) animated files pop up just about everywhere on the Web and in social media. Now, it s easier than ever to make them yourself. Instagram s new app, Boomerang, makes it very easy to make your own 1-second gifs for sharing on Instagram, Facebook and your phone s camera roll. The process couldn t be simpler. Just find something moving that you want to shoot, hit the capture button and keep as still as you can for a second or so. You can shoot from either rear-facing or front-facing camera. To work, the app will need permission to access those cameras, as well as your phone s storage. Free, for iOS and Android.',
'Uber Germany retreats to Berlin, Munich: Taxi-hailing service Uber Technologies is making a retreat in Germany to the cities of Berlin and Munich as it grapples with a ban from using unlicensed cab drivers. Uber will for now suspend services in Hamburg, Frankfurt and Duesseldorf, it said in a statement on Friday, citing a difficult regulatory environment. A German court in March banned Uber from running services using unlicensed cab drivers and set stiff fines for any violations of local transport laws by the pioneering online taxi firm. The company in Germany has since limited itself to drivers that hold a passenger transport license, among other legal requirements, through its UberX and UberBlack smartphone apps, but it has run into a shortage of suppliers of ride services.',
'Zomato CEO warns may not meet revenue goal, pulls up sales team: Zomato, the restaurant listing and services company which is valued around $1 billion, might fail to meet its sales target for the current financial year, according to an email co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal sent to the staff on Friday. In a long mail that Goyal first sent to the company s sales team and later forwarded to all employees, he talked about the underperformance of the sales team and how it might result in the company missing its revenue targets. We are far behind the numbers that we promised our investors for this financial year (year ending March 2016) our investors have said that so far, we have always delivered what we have promised. We are close to not living up to that for the first time in the last 5 years, Goyal said in the email. The email came a fortnight after the company sacked about 300 employees globally, or 10 per cent of its total workforce. Zomato has also been facing difficulties in retaining top-level staff as a number of senior executives have left the company after short stints.',
'Alphabet Edges Toward Settling the Android or Chrome Question: For years, Google, now known as Alphabet, has supported two operating systems on two very different tracks: Android and Chrome. But now the company is nodding in the direction of Android. Google is working toward allowing its low-cost Chromebook computing devices to work on the popular Android operating system. The work will take place over the next year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Google is not indicating it plans to stop development of Chrome OS, but making Android work on Chromebooks opens the door to one of the few products that Chrome OS, the lesser-known operating system, had to itself. Chrome OS should not be confused with Google s popular Chrome web browser. The first Android operating system for mobile devices was introduced about seven years ago as a direct competitor to Apple s iOS mobile operating system. Since then, it has become the most widely used operating system in the world. Its development was led by an executive named Andy Rubin, who went on to lead much of the company s robotics efforts before leaving Google last year. Google introduced Chrome OS about a year later, surprising some who wondered why the company needed two operating systems. Interestingly, its early development was led by Sundar Pichai, who is now the chief executive of the part of Alphabet that is still called Google. Chrome OS has gained a following in academia but very few other places. According to IDC, a market research firm, about 3.9 million Chromebooks were shipped to the American education sector last year. If Google should drop the Chrome OS, it will follow in the footsteps of Microsoft. The latest version of Microsoft s flagship Windows operating system is meant to run on both PCs and mobile devices. Apple still supports separate operating systems for mobile devices and PCs.',
'Amazon Launches Pay With Amazon Buttons for Mobile Apps: Amazon says it is finally ready to turn its huge customer base into a big payments business outside of Amazon. For real this time. The e-commerce giant is bringing its Pay with Amazon buttons to mobile apps, while tripling down on placing its Pay with Amazon buttons on websites in overseas markets like Japan. The moves are the latest in the company s on-again, off-again efforts to take advantage of the more than 200 million customer accounts it has on file by processing payments on websites outside of its own walls. Earlier this year, Amazon hired PayPal vet Patrick Gauthier to lead a newly created team dedicated solely to building a payments business across the Web and app world. The payments industry is watching closely. For years, it has been waiting for Amazon to become a real player, perhaps challenging PayPal along the way.',
'Baidu s Profit Tops Estimates Even as Spending Rises - Revenue up 36%, Shares pop 7%: Baidu Inc. kept spending under enough control to report a third-quarter profit that topped projections, giving the Chinese Internet search provider more room to boost a share buyback program to $2 billion. Revenue climbed 36 percent to 18.4 billion yuan ($2.89 billion), matching estimates. The board authorized a new block of share repurchases, after completing a $1 billion buyback program in the latest quarter, the Beijing-based company said in statement Friday. Chairman and Founder Robin Li is betting new services including home delivery and online video will drive growth beyond the company s mainstay search advertising business. Baidu said this week its Qunar travel site will form an alliance and swap shares with rival Ctrip.com, the latest move toward consolidation in China s Internet industry. Baidu Inc. kept spending under enough control to report a third-quarter profit that topped projections, giving the Chinese Internet search provider more room to boost a share buyback program to $2 billion. Adjusted earnings per ADS was $1.43 a share, exceeding the $1.28 average of analyst projections, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue climbed 36 percent to 18.4 billion yuan ($2.89 billion), matching estimates. The board authorized a new block of share repurchases, after completing a $1 billion buyback program in the latest quarter, the Beijing-based company said in statement Friday. Chairman and Founder Robin Li is betting new services including home delivery and online video will drive growth beyond the company s mainstay search advertising business. Baidu said this week its Qunar travel site will form an alliance and swap shares with rival Ctrip.com, the latest move toward consolidation in China s Internet industry. Baidu s three major new businesses, video service iQiyi, online commerce site Nuomi and travel site Qunar, remain loss-making, dragging on profit generated by its core search advertising business. By taking a 25 percent stake in Ctrip, in return for 45 percent of Qunar, Baidu intends to cut costs and benefit from reduced competition. That may affect Baidu s revenue.',
"Microsoft Sells $13 Billion of Bonds in Month's Busiest Day: Microsoft tapped the bond market for $13 billion Thursday, its biggest sale ever, in the busiest session of the month for high-grade issuers. The seven-part deal eclipsed a mark set just eight months ago by the tech giant as it raises money to repurchase stock and repay existing debt. It sold its longest portion, a 40-year bond, at a yield that was 1.8 percentage points more than comparable government debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company sold $3 billion of 10-year notes at a spread of 0.18 percentage point more than its similar maturity debt in the secondary market on Wednesday. This is a banner year for tech issuance, so they needed to price wide to get people to take down $13 billion, CreditSights Inc. analyst Jordan Chalfin said in an interview. For Microsoft, an extra five-10 basis points doesn t really matter. Their debt-funded share buybacks are very accretive for equity holders. Microsoft, one of only three non-financial companies with top AAA credit ratings, said in a filing on Thursday that it will use the proceeds for anything from working capital to stock repurchases and repayment of existing debt.",
'LinkedIn Earnings Beat Expectations With $780M In Revenue, Stock Jumps 9%: LinkedIn handily beat analyst expectations today with revenue of $780 million and earnings of 78 cents per share. Analysts were expecting earnings of 45 cents per share on about $756 million in revenue. LinkedIn shares promptly spiked as much as 8 percent in extended trading. In total, the company s revenue grew 37 percent year-over-year, up from around $568 million in the third quarter last year. The company s Talent Solutions division was its fastest growing segment, up 46 percent year-over-year to $502 million in revenue. Marketing solutions grew 28 percent to $140 million in revenue, while subscription revenue grew 21 percent year-over-year to $138 million to round out the rest of the company s revenue report. LinkedIn s domestic growth continues at a healthy clip, up to $484 million in revenue from $343 million in the third quarter last year, up 41 percent. Its international segment is still not quite as large as its domestic business, but was still up from $225 million to $295 million, a jump of 31 percent. Basically, its domestic business is performing stronger than its international business which is not all that surprising given the big presence and brand it has in the U.S. So, as expected, the company s recruiting segment continues to be one of its fastest-growing. LinkedIn has basically become the go-to service for what are effectively a more modern form of resumes, making it a gold mine for recruiters seeking new talent. So it s not all that surprising that recruiting and the company s Talent Solutions division is one of its most important and getting a lot of attention. The company has two new launches coming up its referrals product in November, and a new revamped Recruiter platform coming early next year. Both those products are geared toward better automating the process, and eliminating redundant tasks, of searching for new recruits.',
"Flipboard's Fanfare Fades as Executives Exit, Sale Talks Stall: Flipboard Inc. debuted in 2010 with the kind of fanfare any startup would envy. The news-reading app piggybacked perfectly on the debut of Apple s iPad tablet and Steve Jobs s promise of a new era for digital media. Critics loved Flipboard s magazine-like layout, created by one of the first software designers of the iPhone, and investors poured money into the company. Almost five years later, Flipboard is struggling to live up to the praise. Several senior executives have departed, including co-founder Evan Doll, and talks to sell the company haven t reached the finish line, according to people familiar with the plans, who asked not be named discussing private matters. Flipboard s woes are indicative of a larger malaise gripping startups across the technology landscape as questions emerge about the sustainability of the tech-investment boom. Flipboard is performing well enough -- and, after raising more capital earlier this year, is at no risk of going out of business -- but is no longer a breakaway hit. People are finding media through their Facebook or Twitter feeds, limiting the need for a stand-alone application like Flipboard. Meanwhile, advertising rates -- the company s main revenue stream-- have been in decline. While Flipboard s reading app was a showpiece for the iPad five years ago, the company is now working to adjust to a changing digital-news market and live up to its $800 million valuation. Other companies facing similar questions about whether they can make good on early investor expectations -- and lofty private-market valuations -- include online storage service Dropbox Inc., note-taking company Evernote Corp., music-streaming service Deezer SA and blood-testing company Theranos Inc., said Anand Sanwal, chief executive officer of CB Insights, a firm that tracks startup investing. The companies face a challenge in that they could be too expensive for another company to buy, yet may not have the business fundamentals to justify their valuations to public investors through an initial public offering, he said.",
'Samsung Deploys Cash Pile With $10 Billion Buyback, Capex Boost, As Phones Fail To Revive Growth: Samsung Electronics is tapping its $50 billion cash pile to buy back shares and invest in its components business after struggles in the smartphone division battered investors. Shares surged. The company will buy back and cancel 11.3 trillion won ($10 billion) of shares and boost capital spending by 14 percent this year, Samsung said Thursday. The announcements came after the company posted profit that trailed analyst estimates. Capital expenditure will rise to 27 trillion won this year as the company invests in chips and display plants. Samsung is struggling for an answer to Apple Inc. in high-end smartphones, trying price cuts, a $120 rebate program and new models to tempt consumers from buying iPhones. That has prompted a renewed focus on making components for earnings growth, with new semiconductor and display plants to get its parts into other vendors devices. Samsung said it will increase capital spending after posting profit that missed analysts estimates as price cuts on new Galaxy S6 smartphones failed to sway consumers from buying iPhones. Capital expenditure will rise 14 percent to 27 trillion won ($24 billion) this year, the company said Thursday. Net income, excluding minority interests, was 5.31 trillion won ($4.7 billion) in the third quarter with profit to fall in the current period, Samsung said. Increased marketing spending, including a $120 rebate program, hasn t sparked sales of the premium devices that generate fatter profit margins. Samsung is investing in computer chip plants as it tries to revive Galaxy smartphone demand through a new mobile payment service and by releasing larger devices at least a month before the new iPhones to recapture market share from Apple Inc. Shares of Samsung rose 4.9 percent in Seoul, the highest since May. The rally erased their decline for the year.',
'Ebay Exceeds Expectations While Paypal Flops: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman defended his strategy of inking deals with big merchants and smartphone applications and offering free peer-to-peer payments as investors sent shares down on concerns the efforts are hurting the company s quarterly profit. PayPal, in its first quarter as a stand-alone company separate from EBay Inc., said it added 4 million accounts to reach 173 million users. Its total payments volume gained 20 percent to $69.7 billion from a year earlier. But investors reacted to the company s declining take rate, a measure of how much money PayPal keeps from each payment made on its platform. That metric fell to 3.24 percent in the third quarter from 3.39 percent a year earlier, the company reported Wednesday in a statement, and shares dropped as much as 7.8 percent in extended trading. The goal of the July split with EBay was to make sure that each company could focus on their main businesses. EBay last week reported quarterly profit and sales that topped analysts estimates and raised its outlook, sending shares up the most in 10 years. PayPal s strategy is to attract more customers and merchants and offer them expanded services as competition in the payments industry intensifies with startups Square Inc. and Stripe Inc. as well has Apple Inc. and Google Inc. who are trying to create digital wallets. Even JPMorgan Chase & Co., entered the digital payments race Monday. PayPal is processing more payments in stores like Macy s and on popular smartphone applications like Uber and Airbnb. But PayPal keeps less money from each transaction because the clients that bring bigger volume to the payments company also have the leverage to negotiate lower rates. The downside of that strategy was on display when Square disclosed its money-losing relationship with Starbucks Corp. The challenge for Schulman is to differentiate PayPal as competition intensifies. Among the additional services the company offers is a merchant cash advance program called PayPal Working Capital, which gives preapproved loans to businesses that process payments through PayPal. PayPal also is getting into the international money-transfer business by purchasing Xoom Corp. for $890 million in a deal announced in July.',
"Yelp - struggling so far this year - beats Street expectations on revenue sending shares up 7%: Yelp reported a bigger-than-expected 40 percent jump in quarterly revenue as more local businesses advertised on Yelp.com, its consumer review website. Shares of the company, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, rose about 7 percent after the bell on Wednesday. To Wednesday's close of $22.07, Yelp's stock had fallen nearly 60 percent this year. San Francisco-based Yelp, which gets about four-fifths of its revenue from local advertisers, said the number of local advertising accounts rose about 37 percent to 104,200 in the third quarter. Yelp has been investing to grow its website beyond user reviews by investing in services such as restaurant reservations, food ordering and delivery. The company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $8.1 million, or 11 cents per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a profit of $3.6 million, or 5 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $143.6 million from $102.5 million.",
'Verizon says Internet of Things revenue at $500 million year-to-date. Aimed at connecting to the Internet everything from household devices to industrial machines, the business is growing at a "double-digit" rate, Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon said at an event in San Francisco. "A large portion of our revenue comes through connectivity but a significant part of it comes from the application layer already," he said in a phone interview after introducing a platform to help customers develop applications in healthcare, agriculture, utilities and connected cars. Last year, Verizon\'s annual revenue from the business totaled $585 million. The global Internet of Things market is expected to grow to $1.7 trillion in 2020 from $656 billion in 2014, according to market research firm IDC. Examples include Verizon\'s fleet management tracking application and a partnership with Intel Corp (INTC.O) to provide water management sensors in vineyards, Lanman said. At the event, Verizon also unveiled a chip that Lanman said halves the cost of connecting low data usage devices like dog trackers to high-speed networks. AT&T has also been working on growing its "Internet of Things" business and previously launched initiatives such as a cloud-based data-analytics platform for companies and a global SIM card for connected cars. AT&T said last week it added 1.6 million connected devices including 1 million connected cars in the third quarter of 2015.',
'Alphabet, Indonesian companies to expand Web access via balloons: Alphabet, the new holding company for Google, has teamed up with three Indonesian telecommunications companies to expand Internet access in that country using solar-powered balloons. Alphabet officials, including co-founder Sergey Brin, and representatives from Indonesian companies Telkomsel, XL Axiata Tbk PT (EXCL.JK) and Indosat Tbk PT (ISAT.JK) signed an agreement Wednesday to bring so-called Project Loon to the nation of 250 million people. The project sends solar-powered balloons 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) into the air to deliver Internet access through radio frequency signals to antennae connected to buildings on the ground. The balloons use algorithms to find the best winds to carry them along their charted course. Project Loon is part of Alphabet\'s secretive X division, where the company experiments with far-off technologies dubbed "moonshots" such as its self-driving car technology. Alphabet and its partners will deploy hundreds of balloons in 2016 over the country of more than 17,000 islands in an effort to determine where gaps in service lie as part of the tests before full-scale service is launched. The U.S. tech company has already tested the project in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia but with only a single carrier. Project Loon Vice President Mike Cassidy said the Indonesian partnership marks the first time it will send signals from multiple telecommunications companies through a single balloon, and that it will be the service\'s largest deployment to date and could eventually reach 100 million users. Cassidy said the effort is also a model for how Alphabet will move the product into the commercial market. He said the telecommunications companies will use the trial period to determine pricing and billing while Google works out technical issues.',
'GoPro Plunges 15% After-Hours Following Q3 Earnings Miss: GoPro took a dive Wednesday after releasing Q3 financials that disappointed street expectations. At the market s close, GoPro reported a miss on its Q3 earnings, posting an adjusted $0.25 per share on $400.3 million non-GAAP revenue during the period. Those figures compared to street expectations of a $0.29 per-share profit, and revenue of $433.6 million. The action camera maker s $400.3 revenues represented a 43% year-over-year increase from $280.0 in Q3 2015, with EPS also up significantly from $0.12 in the corresponding quarter last year. The company shipped 1.6 million camera devices in Q3, up 46% from Q3 2014, but still less than the street had expected. Interestingly, GoPro emphasized how important foreign markets, specifically China, had been to the company s growth. Sales outside of the U.S. reportedly made up more than 50% of the company s revenue. The company said China was the fastest growing market in GoPro s history. ',
'Apple Profit Is Up 31%, Revenue Up 22% as iPhones Sell Briskly, but Its Forecast Is Muted: Apple on Tuesday turned in another quarter of enviable revenue and profit growth, fueled by sales of the iPhone. But the results raised a perennial question for the world s most valuable company: How can it keep its growth streak alive The issue was stoked by Apple s muted forecast for its all-important holiday quarter, as well as the unwillingness of Timothy D. Cook, the company s chief executive, to go into detail in an earnings conference call about how Apple plans to rev up sales next year. Over all, Apple posted a profit of $11.1 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, up 31 percent from a year ago. Revenue was $51.5 billion, up 22 percent from last year. The results exceeded Wall Street estimates. Yet while the performance was bolstered by sales of the iPhone Apple said that it sold 48 million iPhones in the quarter, up from 39 million in the same period last year the company was more cautious about sales for the key holiday sales period. Apple projected revenue of $75.5 billion to $77.5 billion for the end-of-year quarter. While the sheer numbers are huge, the low end of the forecast fell below Wall Street estimates and would amount to anemic growth of less than 4 percent from a year ago. The last time Apple s quarterly sales fell below 4 percent was in mid-2013. New Products: Apple is going into 2016 with a full slate of refreshed products. In late September, the company introduced its newest iPhone models, the 6s and 6s Plus. It also announced a larger iPad, the iPad Pro, and will begin shipping a new Apple TV this week. IPad Struggles: While the iPhone continues to grow, the iPad has been facing declines. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Apple said iPad sales dropped 20 percent from a year ago, making it the seventh consecutive quarter that sales of the tablet have slipped. The company is increasingly positioning the iPad as a business device. Apple Watch: The company did not break out sales of the Apple Watch, which debuted in April. But the category called other products which includes the watch posted $3 billion in revenue in the quarter, up from $2.6 billion in the previous quarter, which was the first quarter that included sales of the device. Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that the numbers for the other category were in line with his expectations, and implied somewhere between 3.5 million and four million watches were sold over the quarter. China: One of Apple s fastest-growing markets China continued to grow. Sales in the region that Apple calls Greater China jumped 99 percent in the quarter to $12.5 billion. The region remained the company s second-largest market after the Americas, accounting for 24 percent of sales in the quarter, compared with 13.7 percent a year ago. Investors have been scrutinizing the China business given that the country has been cutting interest rates to shore up a slowing economy. Apple Pay: Apple said it has partnered with American Express to bring its Apple Pay mobile payments service to global markets. Chief Executive Tim Cook said the credit card company will bring the service to customers in Australia and Canada, then expand to Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2016.',
'Dismal Twitter Forecast and Flat User Growth Send Its Stock Lower: On Tuesday, Twitter gave a dismal forecast for its fourth-quarter revenue and profits. Shares in Twitter, a social media company, plunged as much as 13 percent in after-hours trading as Mr. Dorsey and his lieutenants offered little explanation for the gloom in a conference call with investors. In a similar call three months ago, Mr. Dorsey s pointed critique of Twitter s product failings sent the stock down 11 percent. Twitter also reported revenue of $569 million for the quarter, up 58 percent from $361 million a year ago. Its net loss was $132 million, or 20 cents a share, compared to a loss of $175 million, or 29 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. For the fourth quarter, usually the strongest thanks to holiday advertising, Twitter warned that revenue would be $695 million to $710 million, well below the $740 million that Wall Street had been expecting. The new projections, delivered as the company exceeded analysts expectations for its third-quarter results, provided fresh evidence that Twitter is failing to win over advertisers, the source of most of its revenue, as it confronts stiffening competition from Facebook, Instagram and Google. The company is finding real challenges gaining traction with advertisers, said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, citing the new forecasts and an advertiser survey his firm conducts twice a year. Mr. Mahaney, who has a neutral rating on Twitter s stock, said he was struck by the contrast between the upbeat tone of Twitter s executives on the call and the company s deteriorating outlook. Everything sounds so good, yet you reduced your forecast pretty materially. Why Mr. Dorsey didn t answer that question, although Adam Bain, the company s former ad chief and new chief operating officer, offered a clue: Ad prices plunged 39 percent in the third quarter, which he said was partly because of improved efficiency of video ads.',
"Alibaba Revenue Up 32%, Sends Shares up 4%; Cloud Computing Revenue Doubles Y/Y; Overseas Sales at 8%; GMV growth sinks to lowest in 3 years: China's Alibaba is squeezing more money from online shopping than expected, beating analyst forecasts for revenue growth, as mobile shopping grows. The company wrung out higher-than-expected revenue growth of 32 percent year-on-year, even as gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of goods transacted across its platforms, sank to its slowest annual growth rate in more than three years. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares closed about 4 percent higher on Tuesday, after rising as much as 8.4 percent during market hours. Alibaba is trying to replace decelerating volume growth in online shopping with new kinds of online buying, mirrored in its latest investments. For instance, Alibaba invested $4.6 billion in Suning during the quarter. It also offered $3.5 billion to become sole owner of Youku Tudou, known as China's YouTube. Online video users in the country are beginning to cough up money for high-quality online streaming services. But the majority of Alibaba's revenue still comes from China's online shoppers buying from domestic businesses, a business driven by growth in GMV. For the latest quarter, growth came mostly from Tmall, an Amazon-like website allowing businesses to sell to customers, where GMV rose 56 percent. Gains at Taobao, more akin to eBay and by far the company's biggest contributor to GMV, showed signs of slowing at just 15 percent. Alibaba's revenue rose to $3.49 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30. Net income attributable to shareholders reached $3.58 billion, or $1.40 per share. International Expansion: The proportion of revenue Alibaba gets from abroad reached 8 percent, compared with 9 percent in the previous quarter. Co-founder Jack Ma has said he wants half of the company s sales to originate outside China. The company named Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs partner, as president in August to spearhead a global expansion into regions such as Russia and Brazil. The company is also looking to make forays into Italy, France, Australia and New Zealand, Evans said in October. Cloud Business: Revenue from cloud computing more than doubled from a year earlier. The e-commerce giant is betting on Internet-based computing and big data to boost growth for the next decade thanks to demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. AliCloud could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba s revenue by 2018",
'IBM says SEC investigating company\'s books, shares fall: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) recognized revenue for certain deals in the United States, Britain and Ireland, IBM said on Tuesday, news that sent its shares down 4 percent. Shares of IBM fell as much as 4.4 percent to a five-year low of $137.33 and closed down 4 percent. News of the SEC probe came a week after the company posted lackluster quarterly results and cut its 2015 profit forecast. "It couldn\'t come at a worse possible time because now the stock is at another 52-week low as a result of this," said Belpointe analyst David Nelson. He said, however, that the probe "doesn\'t look like a massive smoking gun." "The investigation could be into warranty reserves, they could have recognized an item at the wrong time," Nelson said.',
"PayPal says makes $1 billion in small-business loans in first two years: PayPal Holdings, the online payment processor, said on Tuesday its small-business lending program has processed $1 billion in loans in the first two years of its launch and more than doubled loan growth in that span. PayPal Working Capital is extending short-term loans totaling more than $100 million per month, or $3 million per day, to a mix of sellers on eBay and standalone small- to medium-sized merchants, the company said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. PayPal separated from eBay earlier this year, and Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman has stated he is looking to use PayPal's size to offer affordable financial services widely.",
'Even As Oracle and AWS Circle Each Other, Oracle Will Not Build a Giant Cloud System Like AWS: Counter to the expectations of many industry watchers, Oracle, the world s largest maker of software for businesses, is not planning a global computing system to rival Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the other big global cloud companies. While it has built out a network of 20 data centers, largely filled with Oracle equipment, it now plans to go after customers by offering faster updates of its core products, new ways of customizing applications and a much younger, retooled sales force. We ve made our investments, Mark Hurd, co-chief executive of Oracle, said in an interview. Compared with A.W.S., he said, the place we like is one of higher profit margins. Besides applications, Amazon sells raw computing and data storage, which are generally lower-margin businesses. Oracle is expected Tuesday to announce better security inside its cloud because of changes from its proprietary hardware, but won t sell access to the machines on their own. Oracle s better margins, Mr. Hurd said, will come from selling large-scale software that can be customized by its buyers to suit local markets and products. He hopes to lower his sales costs and bring in younger companies with salespeople recruited straight from college and given crash courses in selling Oracle cloud products. In the last four years, he said, the company has hired 1,000 graduates a year. We train them in products, sales skills and processes, said Mr. Hurd. They re selling within a year, with a much lower cost of sales. Oracle s sales force, some 30,000 people globally, is considered among the most aggressive and highly compensated in the tech business. Now, Mr. Hurd said, we have to do some branding to entice the kind of smaller companies and start-ups the new sales team is chasing. The ease of modification and the faster sales force illustrate how, while still far apart, Oracle and A.W.S. are becoming more like each other as cloud computing goes mainstream. For its part, a few weeks ago A.W.S. dropped all pretense and made a direct bid for Oracle s customers. A.W.S. even put up a thinly disguised picture of Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison.',
"Japan's Carmakers Proceed With Caution on Self-Driving Cars: At this week s Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan Motor Co. will display a concept car with retractable steering wheel and message-flashing windshield, joining Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. in exhibiting vehicles with autonomous modes for changing lanes and avoiding collisions on highways. But while Tesla deployed its Autopilot system this month and Google aims to have fully self-driving cars on the road by 2020, Japan s automakers see a wait for such vehicles, with introductions coming only after 2025. The unwillingness to take a software-testing approach -- with beta versions used for trial periods and ongoing updates -- and apply this to car-making divides traditional auto companies and tech-industry challengers, said Tatsuo Yoshida, an auto industry analyst with Barclays Plc. Whereas Tesla beamed Autopilot into Model S sedans with the promise the system would continually learn and improve itself, Japan s automakers view such an approach as putting features on the road before they re ready. They re also wary of exposure to liability if they introduce safety features that fail. Each of Japan s three biggest automakers have set targets to start deploying the technology around 2020. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told reporters this month the company can probably develop a completely self-driving car in about three years, while Google has forecast about a five-year time frame.",
'Rackspace Launches Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers: Rackspace is getting deeper into the container game. The company today announced the beta launch of its Carina container service. Carina gives developers access to a fully managed container environment that offers bare-metal performance and still allows them to use the same native Docker tools they are used to from their local development environments. Right now, the service which will remain available for free during what the team expects to be a long beta period focuses on Docker s tooling, but over time, the idea here is to use the flexibility of Magnum and OpenStack to give developers the ability to use other container orchestration engines like Kubernetes and Mesos, as well. The team believes that the combination of a multi-tenant environment and (near) bare-metal access will allow it to deliver the right mix of a high-performance system and low cost. Otto acknowledged a multi-tenant system may not be the right choice for workloads that are highly security sensitive, but the service also gives users the choice to also run containers on Rackspace s private cloud service. The service provides users with a set of defaults based on the company s experience, but users can then tweak these as necessary. Otto believes most users will opt to stay with Docker Swarm as the container orchestration engine, simply because it gives users more control (and in an imperative way) than Kubernetes, which is far more opinionated. Because of the way the company architected the service without using a traditional hypervisor (using libvirt/LXC instead), containers will start significantly faster than on a similar service that uses more traditional virtual machines. Because there are still some advantages to running containers on virtual machines especially when it comes to security Rackspace also plans to support virtual machines. It s no secret that large public cloud vendors like Google, AWS and Microsoft now all offer their own container services. The Rackspace team believes that it has an advantage over them in terms of speed, but also because they don t abstract away the containers from developers. In addition and this is no surprise coming from Rackspace the company believes it can offer a level of service that is significantly higher than its competitors. Rackspace already worked with a number of partners to test the service in a private beta. These include O Reilly Media, which is using containers to power parts of its online learning tools, as well as the Drupal and WordPress hosting service Pantheon, which has long used containers at the core of its platform.',
'Reuters Exclusive: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery, pickup: Wal-Mart applied Monday to U.S. regulators for permission to test drones for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories, a sign it plans to go head-to-head with Amazon in using drones to fill and deliver online orders. The world\'s largest retailer by revenue has for several months been conducting indoor tests of small unmanned aircraft systems the term regulators use for drones - and is now seeking for the first time to test the machines outdoors. It plans to use drones manufactured by China\'s SZ DJI. In addition to having drones take inventory of trailers outside its warehouses and perform other tasks aimed at making its distribution system more efficient, Wal-Mart is asking the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to research drone use in "deliveries to customers at Walmart facilities, as well as to consumer homes," according to a copy of the application reviewed by Reuters. The move comes as Amazon.com, Google and other companies test drones in the expectation that the FAA will soon establish rules for their widespread commercial use. FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said in June that the agency expected to finalize regulations within the next 12 months, faster than previously planned. Commercial drone use is currently illegal, though companies can apply for exemptions.',
"'Bottomed Out' Alibaba Set for Best Month After Post-IPO Crash: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. looks like it may be bottoming out after suffering the worst post-IPO crash ever. Shares are heading for their best month ever, and analysts have raised their sales projections in the past four weeks. Results due Tuesday are expected to show revenue growth of 27 percent in the September quarter, while in the background China s leaders draft plans for stimulating the economy during the next five years. Chairman Jack Ma pulled off a record initial public offering as investors backed his bet on e-commerce and Alibaba catapulted to the top of the market in China. Then the domestic economy slowed to its weakest growth in 25 years, prompting the billionaire to calm investor fears that at one point erased $150 billion from its market value -- the equivalent of an International Business Machines Corp. The stock fell to a record low of $57.20 on Sept. 29, or 16 percent below its IPO price. Since then it has surged 33 percent, closing Monday at $76.35, up 1 percent for the day. That has come as at least four analysts covering Alibaba raised estimates. Sales in the September quarter are expected to be 21.4 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), with adjusted earnings-per-share of 3.44 yuan, according to estimates. New cloud-based services for merchants to reach consumers and an expansion of entertainment and local-services businesses are central tenets of Ma s growth strategy. Increased promotions on Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace are driving e-commerce ahead of next month s Singles Day, the country s biggest shopping event. The company also offered $4.6 billion for the rest of Youku Tudou Inc., a YouTube-like website, to add content it can stream to Internet users and to bolster revenue beyond e-commerce. Alibaba is expanding its London office to serve as its European hub and opening up in France and Germany.",
'JPMorgan Chase says it is building a rival to Apple Pay: JPMorgan Chase said on Monday it will soon launch its own competitor to Apple Pay that will allow consumers to pay retailers using their smartphones in stores, and it has already won the endorsement of a major group of merchants. The largest U.S. bank is the latest company to try to profit from the prevalence of smartphones, which many financial executives believe will one day be consumers\' preferred way to pay for everything from milk and eggs at the supermarket to a rental car at an airport. The companies that figure out how to convince consumers to stop pulling credit cards out of their wallets and start paying with their phones stand to earn vast sums by taking a percentage of the trillions of dollars that consumers spend annually. No clear front-runner has emerged in the business yet. Chase believes its smart phone application, known as Chase Pay, has one key advantage: the caliber of retailers it has brought on board, Gordon Smith, chief executive of the bank\'s consumer business, told Reuters. Chase has signed a deal with the Merchant Customer Exchange, a group of major retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc, (WMT.N) the largest U.S. retailer, and Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) to accept payments through the bank\'s technology. Retailers included in the Merchant Customer Exchange ring up more than $1 trillion of sales per year and have over 100,000 outlets. Rivals like Apply Pay have struggled to sign up retailers to accept their payments. In June, Reuters interviewed the top 100 U.S. retailers and found that two-thirds said they did not plan to accept Apple Pay this year. Apple Pay\'s website lists Best Buy in its "Coming Soon" section but has no mention of Wal-Mart. Chase signed up the Merchant Customer Exchange mainly by promising to cut retailers\' costs, Smith said. Whenever a consumer pays for something with plastic, the retailer pays fees to banks and credit card networks to process the transaction. Chase is willing to accept a lower fee for Chase Pay transactions than for other transactions, and hopes to make up the difference by getting more volume over its network, Smith said.',
'Big headlines from last week: Smashing earnings from Alphabet (the new Google), Amazon and Microsoft. Markets loved Google for lower spending and a share buyback; and Microsoft and Amazon for gushers of cash from their cloud businesses. Amazon Posts an Unexpected Profit, and Its Shares Soar; Microsoft Earnings Climb, Lifted by Strong Growth in Cloud Computing; Google Announces Stock Buyback as Earnings Rise. ',
"Twitter's Jack Dorsey gave back a third of his stock to Twitter employees to lift morale. ",
"Google's first earnings amid a change of guard led to this headline: The New Google: All the Assholes Have Left ",
'Zuckerberg Flies to India, Where Facebook s Web Access for All Has Been a Tough Sell: The Internet.org suite, rebranded last month as Free Basics, is now in 25 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. Mr. Zuckerberg is also determined to win over the Indian public. Last month, he hosted a live-streamed chat with India s prime minister, Narendra Modi, from Facebook s Silicon Valley headquarters. And this week, Mr. Zuckerberg will be in New Delhi, where he will take questions from some of Facebook s 130 million Indian users. Internet.org s free services which include news articles, health and job information and a text-only version of Facebook are deliberately stripped down to minimize data use and the cost to the phone company. Facebook says the primary goal is to show people what the Internet is all about. But many Indians want more and complain that, contrary to its altruistic claims, the project is simply a way to get them onto Facebook and to sign up for paid plans from Reliance. Internet activists have also attacked Facebook, accusing it of cherry-picking partners to include in its walled garden rather than simply offering a small amount of free access to the whole Internet. Their concerns have struck a chord with the Indian government, which is considering new rules that would govern such free services. The magnitude of the task ahead was apparent during a reporter s visit in August to Dharavi, home to as many as a million of Mumbai s poor. Several billboards advertised Freenet, Reliance s version of Internet.org. But in the neighborhood s narrow alleys, where rivulets of raw sewage competed with sandaled feet, there was little evidence that anyone had taken notice. At Yahoo Mobilewala, a nearby phone shop named in honor of the American Internet company, the owner, Rizwan Khan, offered service from every major carrier. But his stack of Reliance chips each in a blue Freenet envelope that said Go free Facebook was gathering dust in its display case.',
'Rumor: Uber Refueling Its Warchest Yet Again, At A Valuation Of Up To $70B: Another month, another billion for Uber The ride-hailing business is reportedly raising yet again planning to raise close to $1 billion in new investment according to the NYT citing people close to the matter , with investors looking at a valuation of between $60 billion and $70 billion for the six-year-old startup. If the NYT s report is on the money, it comes mere months after the WSJ reported Uber had raised almost $1 billion in new financing, with a valuation then, in July, of more than $50 billion.',
'Facebook updates its search feature to drive more conversation: On Thursday, Facebook announced that it\'s making a few updates to the way search works on the site to make it easier than ever to find conversations running through your social circle. In a company blog post, Facebook said that it wants to make search a better tool for sparking conversation on the social network. For example, public posts or posts made by your friends will begin showing up in search results, as will what Facebook calls "public conversations." Basically, that enables Facebook to become a place where people can more easily dip into discussions about the topic of the day. "When a link gets shared widely on Facebook, it often anchors an interesting public conversation," the company said in a post. "With one tap, you can find public posts about a link, see popular quotes and phrases mentioned in these posts, and check out an aggregate overview of sentiment." So if you found yourself completely perplexed by "pizza rat" or "pirate cat" or, you know, "Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearing," you should be able to hop into Facebook and look up what your friends and others are saying about it. The updates to search will start rolling out for its U.S. English users Thursday, Facebook said, with more plans for search in the pipeline.',
'YouTube has a new music service... What is YouTube Music YouTube Music is a new app from Google that lets you specifically search for music on the site. That means you get more focused results a search for "Prince," for example, won\'t bring up videos about royalty. Well, not of the non-musical variety, anyway. The app will also suggest other songs that you may like, based on your preferences. Doesn\'t YouTube already have a music service You may remember that YouTube previously launched a service called YouTube Music Key, which was in an open beta, and seems to have been discontinued in light of the new service. how does this work with YouTube\'s new subscription service, YouTube Red Subscribing to YouTube Red, Google\'s new ad-free subscription service, will get you access to ad-free versions of YouTube, YouTube Gaming and YouTube Music, plus Google Play Music. That will cost you $10 per month if you\'re an Android user and $13 per month if you\'re on iOS. You will be able to use the YouTube Music app for free, but those who don\'t pay will still see ads and not have access to some of the more advanced features. How does this stack up against other services You could always listen to YouTube, with ads, for free, so why would you pay for that There are a few perks that may convince you. For one, you no longer have to leave the soundtrack of your day up to the whim of the auto-play algorithm or take the time to actually make your own playlists. Plus, on mobile, you couldn\'t just keep it running in the background if you wanted to listen to YouTube, that was all you were going to do. YouTube Music fixes all of these problems. Can I download it now Not yet. You will have to wait a little while. Although YouTube Red will launch next Thursday, the Music portion of it is scheduled to be out only by the end of the year.',
'..and that caused Disney\'s ESPN to withdraw content from YouTube: Walt Disney Co\'s sports network ESPN said it will not make its content available on YouTube, due to the recently announced ad-free subscription-based offering coined YouTube Red. ESPN would not be part of the subscription service at launch due to "rights and legal" issues, a YouTube spokeswoman told Reuters.',
'Microsoft Goes Upscale With Fifth Avenue Flagship Store: Most of the luxury brands on the storefronts of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, one of the world s most famous shopping thoroughfares, seem to belong together, like the notes of a song. There are Tiffany & Company, Gucci, Armani, Valentino, Rolex and cue the sound of a record needle sliding off vinyl Microsoft Yes, the company that brought us Windows and Office is opening a store on the street that brought us $5,000 handbags and $20,000 watches. The doors of the striking new flagship Microsoft Store will open to the public on Monday. It s an expensive gamble on a retail strategy that is still a long way from paying off. It does not take a detective to see that the foot traffic is often light at the Microsoft stores the company has opened the Fifth Avenue store will be its 113th over the last six years. That s a contrast with the jamborees usually found over at Apple s stores, inevitably a few blocks away or across the mall from Microsoft s electronics boutiques. I got a preview tour of the store last week. It s clear the building renovation cost a fortune, though Microsoft executives wouldn t say how much. The company gutted a building from the 1930s that was previously a Fendi store, replacing all but the top of its facade with huge sheets of glass. Walking into the store, what hits you first are the Microsoft devices arrayed on large open tables in the middle of the room. There is a collection of Surface Books, the company s first laptop, which has received positive reviews and goes on sale Monday. Nearby is the Surface Pro 4, the latest version of the company s popular tablet computer. An Xbox set up in the front corner of the store an area Microsoft calls the living room lets people play Halo 5: Guardians, the science-fiction shooter game that goes on sale Tuesday. Microsoft s chief executive, Satya Nadella, is showing more patience with the company s stores than he has with other unfulfilled initiatives begun under his predecessor, Steven A. Ballmer. Mr. Nadella shut down a Microsoft group that made television shows for people with Xboxes, and he cut the staff working on Microsoft s phone hardware to a fraction of its former size. Why do Microsoft Stores survive The bricks-and-mortar alternatives for showing new Microsoft products in their best light are not great. The number of electronics stores has dwindled, leaving just one giant in the United States, Best Buy. And while the stores of wireless carriers are good for putting smartphones in front of the public, category-bending tablets and laptops often require explanations from more-trained specialists.',
'Hackers Demand Ransom From TalkTalk, British Telecom Firm ...BAE Hired to Investigate: The chief executive of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications provider, said on Friday that she had received a ransom demand from hackers who had claimed responsibility for stealing data on some of the company s four million customers. TalkTalk, which offers cable and fixed-line services in Britain, said local authorities had opened a criminal investigation into the widespread data breach. The hackers may have gained access to personal data on the company s customers, including sensitive information like credit card details, dates of birth and addresses. TalkTalk s shares fell as much as 11 percent in morning trading in London, but recovered by the afternoon and were down 2.3 percent in midafternoon trading. Despite the claims of responsibility, it remained unclear whether the group that had contacted TalkTalk was behind the breach or whether the ransom demands were credible. Yet TalkTalk s data breach the third successful attack on the company in the past 12 months is the latest in a number of online hackings that have affected a wide range of companies, including Target, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase. It also potentially represents a high-profile example of hackers efforts to ransom stolen online data to companies or individuals. Such tactics, commonly known as ransomware, have often involved hackers encrypting people s computer data and holding it hostage until a fee is paid. In certain instances, hackers have also stolen data directly from companies and demanded payment for not publishing the material online.',
'Netflix falls 9% as weak subscriber additions at odds with lofty valuation: Investors questioned Netflix Inc\'s premium valuation after the video-streaming service reported U.S. subscriber additions below its own expectations, a sign that competition from the likes of Hulu is intensifying. Netflix shares fell more than 9 percent to $100.11 in early trading on Thursday. While Netflix blamed the disappointing numbers on the mandated transition to chip-based debit and credit cards, some analysts said the reason seemed unconvincing since these cards have been around for a while. "The Netflix excuse is laughable," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who is rated four stars on a scale of five on StarMine for the accuracy of earnings estimates of Netflix. "Credit cards expire all the time, and people know how to deal with it. Netflix is seeing declining demand, and churn is a part of that," he said. Netflix doesn\'t disclose churn or subscriber attrition numbers. The video-streaming service provider had forecast a net addition of 1.15 million subscribers in its home market in the quarter, but ended up with just 880,000. Netflix\'s stock has more than doubled this year. It trades at 356.6 times forward 12 month earnings, versus a peer median of 12.9.',
'Tesla Adds High-Speed Autonomous Driving to Its Bag of Tricks: It is not every day you get to open a door and step into the future. But to pull the handle on a newly updated Tesla Model S this week and slide into the driver s seat was to catch a glimpse of the auto industry s plans to soon let cars drive us, rather than the other way around. The updated Tesla, an already high-tech electric car that starts at about $75,000, was equipped with what the company calls Autopilot a semi-autonomous feature that allows hands-free, pedal-free driving on the highway under certain conditions. The car will even change lanes autonomously at the driver s request (by hitting the turn signal) and uses sensors to scan the road in all directions and adjust the throttle, steering and brakes. It is the first time that a production vehicle available to consumers will have such advanced self-driving capabilities. Or more to the point, the first time they will be unleashed for driving 70 miles per hour along twisty, though clearly marked, highways for long stretches. (Other manufacturers like Volvo and Mercedes-Benz recently introduced their own semiautonomous features, but limit the functions to lower speeds or require the driver to constantly touch the wheel.) And it s perfectly legal. Among the states, only New York has any law prohibiting hands-free driving.',
'Yahoo Mail Eliminates Passwords as Part of a Major Redesign: Seven months after replacing traditional passwords with single-use SMS codes, Yahoo is taking the next step toward blowing up the password altogether. The company today announced Yahoo Account Key, which links your account to a mobile device and then asks you to approve new logins through push notifications. It s part of a broad redesign of Yahoo Mail designed to make the service faster and easier to search, and also lets you use the app with accounts from Outlook, Hotmail and AOL for the first time. (No Gmail, though, at least not yet)',
"Twitter Courts Direct-Response Advertisers With New Reporting Tools (Claims early tests show Promoted Tweets lift conversions) Twitter today unveiled an analytics feature called Conversion Lift that lets marketers regularly measure how Promoted Tweets perform in terms of conversions, which entail clicks, app installs or sign-ups for services. Interestingly, the feature also susses out if the ads persuaded someone to switch phone carriers, something T-Mobile's social team is likely particularly interested in. To determine how effective an ad is, Conversion Lift splits a marketer's target audience into two groups: people who saw a news feed-style ad and those who didn't. The reporting then compares the conversion rates of both groups, including whether the action took place on desktop or mobile. Twitter said the tests, utilizing Conversion Lift, revealed that people who see Promoted Tweets are 1.4 times more likely to interact with a brand than those who don't see an ad. What's more, it said people who visit a brand's website after seeing a Promoted Tweet are 3.2 times more likely to convert than those who visit the website without seeing one. Based on the data, Twitter then recommends ways for advertisers to more effectively target. For example, Twitter may advise an athletic brand that initially only zeroed in on sports enthusiasts to also target casual sports fans. The Conversion Lift represents Twitter's latest step toward convincing direct-response advertisers that it's a good place to spend money. Late last month, Twitter rolled out its 'Buy' button to all retailers and added video to its conversion-driving app installs in July.",
'Google Express Loses Another Exec as Wildfire Co-Founders Exit: Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, the couple behind social ad startup Wildfire, are leaving Google three years and three months after the search engine scooped up their company. Talented people leave, join and stay at Google all the time. But Ransom s departure is noteworthy because hers marks the third major exec exit from Google s commerce arm in the past year. Ransom took over product duties at Google Shopping Express, its delivery service, after its director, Tom Fallows, decamped for Uber last November. Their boss, Sameer Samat, left for Jawbone in May. Then, in August, Google reshuffled the deck again, appointing its business development lead, Brian Elliott, as general manager for the entire Express operation, which has since expanded service across the Midwest as it aims to compete with Amazon and other delivery companies. The married couple arrived at Google in 2012 to some fanfare with the purchase of Wildfire, a startup that helped marketers manage spending on social platforms. It came amid Google s feverish push to compete with Facebook on social. (The price tag was between $250 million and $350 million, depending on whom you asked.)',
'Dropbox Announces Paper, A Google Docs Competitor: Dropbox is going head-to-head against a very popular web app, Google Docs. Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document editing platform in your browser. It lets you edit a document in real time with your Dropbox contacts. Here s how it works. Paper users can create a document and type text right away. Compared to Google Docs or Quip, it has very few rich-text editing features. If you want to format your document, you ll have to use another word-processing app. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Etherpad. What if you want to add images and videos You can browse your Dropbox and add a Dropbox link directly in the document. Paper will automatically change these links into images and videos. It also does the same with other web content, such as YouTube videos, SoundCloud songs and more. You can write todo lists, @mention people in the document to notify them when you need someone else s feedback and also leave comments next to a specific paragraph. I called Paper a Google Docs competitor, even though it seems quite different with the smart embeds and mostly plain text approach. It looks like a white board more than a document creation platform. But then again, many Google Docs users already use the service to quickly draft something. So it s unclear whether Google Docs users will switch to Paper to do something they can already do with Google Docs without the nice embeds. Paper isn t available just yet. You have to sign up to a waiting list first.',
'Music-streaming site Deezer files for $345M Paris IPO: Deezer SA is seeking at least 300 million euros ($343 million) in a Paris share sale, valuing the music-streaming site at as much as 1.1 billion euros as it tackles Spotify Ltd. s bigger and better-known service and Apple Inc. s more recent products. The initial public offering would value the French company at 900 million euros to 1.1 billion euros. Started in 2007 by Marhely, who quit school at 16 to work as a developer for Internet startups, Deezer had 6.3 million subscribers at the end of June, according to the IPO filing. The company, whose largest shareholders also include Leonard Blavatnik s Access Industries, is smaller than Swedish rival Spotify, which has more than 20 million paying subscribers and was said to be valued at $8.5 billion in its most recent financing round. As the competition in music streaming intensifies, companies are branching out into events and merchandising to make their services more appealing to consumers and artists. Last week, Pandora Media Inc., the world s leading online radio service, paid $450 million for Ticketfly, a ticketing service. Deezer said Thursday it will partner with BandPage Inc. to include concert listings in artist profiles and alert fans to upcoming offers.',
'Square, the Mobile Payments Company, Discloses I.P.O. Plans - Lost $77M on revenues of $561M in H1 2015: Jack Dorsey is about to get even busier. On Wednesday, one of the companies Mr. Dorsey runs, Square, the mobile payments start-up, made its initial public offering prospectus public, indicating it is close to a road show to sell stock to investors. The move follows an action-packed 10 days for the technology executive, who was named permanent chief of Twitter last week and who on Tuesday announced that he was laying off 8 percent of the staff at the social networking company as he tries to attract more users to the service. The disclosure of Square s I.P.O. prospectus is set to quicken the pace for Mr. Dorsey. While the filing revealed that Square s revenue jumped to $850 million last year, up 54 percent from a year earlier, losses increased to $154 million in 2014, more than in 2013. For the first six months of this year, Square lost $77 million on revenue of $561 million. That means Mr. Dorsey, 38, will need to sell a money-losing Square to investors when I.P.O.s including recent technology offerings like Pure Storage have been met with a lackluster reception. In addition, Mr. Dorsey faces questions about whether he can juggle his chief executive roles at Twitter and Square. Taking a company public and navigating the turnaround of another are each tall tasks on their own. Some critics have said Square s core business does not make enough money to justify the lofty $6 billion valuation that it received from private investors. While Square said that more than two million merchants accepted five or more Square transactions last year, the company s revenue is not as large as some other technology giants that it is often mentioned alongside. The filing also presented a rocky picture of a key partnership with Starbucks, the global coffee giant, which the two companies entered into in 2012. Square ended up losing tens of millions of dollars on the countless credit card transactions it processed for Starbucks customers, the filing showed. The deal, which is expected to wind down in 2016, will winnow away a significant portion of Square s transaction volume.',
'Square s IPO Filing: It s Complicated: Square recorded revenue of about $560 million in the first half of the year, a 51 percent increase over the first half of 2014. For the same period, losses were about flat year-over-year at about $78 million. That doesn t look great. But a more nuanced look at the numbers, stripping out the Starbucks deal, tells a story of a healthier core business with even a path toward, yes, profitability. As a result, Square is making the case that that deal doesn t reflect its core business, and it is right: Square loses money on Starbucks transactions, while Square makes money on the transactions it processes for all the other brick-and-mortar businesses it works with. Additionally, the metric subtracts other costs associated with things like stock-based compensation that fast-growing tech companies often argue don t reflect the health of their main business. In the first half of the year, Square narrowed its Ebitda losses to $19 million from $44 million in the same period last year. And in the second quarter of this year, Square actually recorded an adjusted Ebtida profit, even if just barely. That s a good sign.',
'Jack Dorsey owns 24.4% - i.e. a lot - of Square: No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company\'s chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square\'s registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14. Dorsey\'s sizable stake indicates that he was savvy enough to keep control of the company he co-founded. Dorsey\'s high-flying reputation as a Twitter co-founder helped him negotiate more favorable terms for Square than an untested entrepreneur trying to raise money could. Contrast Dorsey\'s position with that of, say, Box CEO Aaron Levie. When the file-storage company filed for an IPO in January, the 30-year-old Box co-founder owned 4 percent. While that still makes for a nice payout, six venture-capital firms owned more shares than Levie when the company went public. Or look at Dorsey\'s first venture, Twitter. Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder along with Dorsey, provided the company with early financing, which helped him maintain a 12 percent stake by the time it went public. Meanwhile, Dorsey had 4.9 percent. This month, Dorsey was named "permanent CEO" of an ailing Twitter at the same time Square was prepping for an IPO. He\'s said he can handle both jobs, but investors are wondering how that will play out. In terms of ownership, he\'s got a lot more eggs in Square\'s basket. "There are so many incentives for him to just spend all his time on Square," Lemkin said.',
'Amazon Shutters Hotel-Booking Site After Six Months: Amazon.com Inc. has shuttered its hotel booking site "Amazon Destinations" six months after its start, signaling the world s largest e-commerce company couldn t persuade many of its customers to book weekend getaways. The Seattle company introduced the site in April hoping to expand on its Amazon Local initiative connecting shoppers with deals close to home. The destinations site featured maps, lodging offers and information about restaurants at popular weekend getaways near Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. Amazon Destinations stopped selling reservations on Tuesday, according to an announcement on the website. "If you have a reservation, your reservation is valid and will be honored by the hotel," the site states. We have learned a lot and have decided to discontinue Amazon Destinations, the company said Wednesday in a statement. The business pitted Amazon against Web travel businesses Priceline Group Inc., Expedia Inc., startup Airbnb Inc. and others for a piece of the online hotel booking market. ',
"Shopify partners with Uber to ensure same-day delivery: Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify said on Wednesday it was partnering with taxi-hailing service Uber to help merchants deliver goods to customers on the same day in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Shopify said the UberRUSH delivery service will be available to its merchants in the three cities immediately. U.S. department stores such as Kohl's and Macy's Inc offer same-day delivery services via a tie-up with Deliv, an Uber-like startup that contracts drivers to pick up ordered items from stores and deliver them to customers. The agreement with Uber is the latest in a series of major tie-ups announced by Ottawa-based Shopify. Last month, it inked a tie-up with the U.S. Postal Service, making it more attractive for smaller U.S. retailers to use its software to power their e-commerce sites. Just prior to that, Amazon.com also made Shopify its preferred partner for smaller vendors that are seeking to sell their goods via the online retailing giant. Although the rapid delivery services appear to compete with Amazon's own speedy shipping options, the tie-ups with Uber and USPS will not put Shopify on a collision path with Amazon said Brennan Loh, Shopify's head of product partnerships, who added that smaller vendors would still look to sell their products via Amazon due to its much broader reach, in comparison to their own portals.",
'Behind the Failure of Leap Transit s Gentrified Buses in San Francisco: Leap, which raised $2.5 million from some of the industry s best-known investors, charged riders $6 to get across San Francisco, nearly three times the cost of riding a city bus. Its primary draw was luxury. Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app. The luxury vehicles were up for auction; Leap filed for bankruptcy in July. The end for Leap apparently came so suddenly that its founders didn t have time to remove much from the vehicles. Inside each bus, sitting in an out-of-the-way parking lot near Oakland, Calif., was a state registration form pinned to the wall, a bundle of iPhone and HDMI cables, and a display case full of snacks. Among the choices were packages of That s It vegan, gluten-free, non-G.M.O. fruit bars and organic, paleo Simple Squares. Leap is one of at least several dozen tech companies that have failed this year. Their deaths are illuminating; dead start-ups show us which investors theories are bogus, which technologies aren t ready for prime time and which common ways founders overextend themselves. In particular, Leap s death suggests one emerging cause of start-up doom, a problem that also did in the anonymous social network Secret: too close an association with Silicon Valley s tech-bro sensibilities. Start-up deaths often go unstudied. Silicon Valley stands out for the way it embraces failure, and it s true that the We Failed! start-up post-mortem note has become a staple on publishing sites like Medium. By the time of its bankruptcy auction earlier this month, which attracted only a handful of bidders, Leap was all but forgotten. In its bankruptcy filing, Leap reported that it made nearly $21,000 in the two months during which it offered service. That turned out to be less than two of its buses which officials told me could no longer start fetched at auction: One sold for $11,100, and another for $12,100.',
'Twitter has appointed Omid Kordestani, who until recently was Google s chief business officer, as its executive chairman. Mr. Kordestani, who has a reputation for affability and business acumen, could bring a level of calm and stability to Twitter, which has been plagued by management chaos it its nine-year history. A company spokesman said Mr. Kordestani was unavailable for an interview but said he would play an active role in operations, supporting the leadership team and helping with recruiting. His appointment is the latest in a series of quick decisions by Mr. Dorsey, who announced on Tuesday that Twitter would cut up to 8 percent of its staff. Mr. Kordestani was the 11th employee hired at Google. He joined in 1999, when it was a year old, and helped create its primary business of selling the ads that appear in Google searches. His original title was business founder and he oversaw Google s first dollar of profit and built its first sales team. That model has since generated hundreds of billions of dollars and still accounts for more than half of Google s annual revenue. Mr. Kordestani left the company in 2009 but came back last year after his successor, Nikesh Arora, quit to join SoftBank. As chief business officer, he was Google s highest-paid executive in 2014, with a $130 million pay package that consisted mostly of stock vesting over four years. Mr. Kordestani does not appear to be a regular user of Twitter. Before his appointment, he had sent just eight tweets on his personal account. Some Twitter investors, most notably Chris Sacca, have complained that Twitter has too many board members who don t use the product. ',
'Twitter to Cut More Than 300 Jobs: Twitter announced on Tuesday that it was laying off as many as 336 employees, or 8 percent of its work force, to streamline and refocus as it tries to find ways to attract new users to its social network. We are moving forward with a restructuring of our work force so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow, Mr. Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, wrote in an email to employees. We feel strongly that engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our work force. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel. The cuts, one of the first major moves by Mr. Dorsey since he was named chief executive, received a mixed reaction from Wall Street. News of the impending layoffs leaked out Friday, after the market closed, and Twitter s shares fell nearly 7 percent on Monday. After the staff cuts were announced Tuesday morning, the stock rebounded briefly and ended the day at $29.06, up 1 percent. Cutting 8 percent of your work force is a little jarring, said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets. You don t normally see job cuts at this early stage for growth companies unless there is something materially going wrong with the operations or the strategy. Twitter s work force has grown quickly in recent years, through acquisitions and hiring. As of June 30, the company, which is based in San Francisco, had about 4,100 employees, an increase of more than 800 people, or 24 percent, from the previous June. Twitter said Tuesday that revenue and adjusted profit for the third quarter would meet or exceed previous forecasts. The high end of the company s previous forecast predicted revenue of $560 million and adjusted earnings of $115 million. The company said it would provide generous exit packages to those who are losing their jobs, including 60 days of pay for San Francisco employees, which is required under a provision of state law governing large layoffs. Twitter intends to take a pretax charge of $5 million to $15 million in the fourth quarter in connection with the layoffs. Demand for software engineers is intense in Silicon Valley, and former Twitter employees were quick to reach out to those laid off and urge them to join them at other companies.',
'It s not just Twitter: Snapchat is laying off workers, too: Snapchat, the app that\'s best known for its disappearing messages, is stepping back from creating Netflix-style original content. You might not have realized Snapchat was even in the business of creating scripted shows. But in a move that likely reflects its poor performance, the effort has been shut down and now the 15-member team responsible for it is being disbanded. Among those leaving Marcus Wiley, a former Fox comedy executive whom Snapchat hired to run its program planning and development. Snapchat\'s "Snap Channel" was one of a number of content streams available on the company\'s app. It appeared on the Discover tab, running alongside partner channels from CNN, BuzzFeed and ESPN, among others. As those companies ran their content on their Snapchat feeds, Snapchat itself produced shows such as "Literally Can\'t Even" and "Pillow Talk," a casual talk show set in a bedroom where the host and guests appeared on camera in their pajamas. Unfortunately for Snapchat, these shows weren\'t enough to keep the channel going. After less than a year, the company made the decision to shut down the Snap Channel, a move that convinced Wiley it was time to go.',
'Starbucks Is Testing Coffee Delivery to Office Workers in the Empire State Building; Opens a \'secret\' kitchen on the ground floor: ree weeks after rolling out mobile ordering in its U.S. stores a service that lets people pay for drinks in a branded app and pick them up in stores Starbucks is bringing coffee delivery to the office door. Today, the coffee chain launched its first foray into food delivery with a store on the bottom floor of New York\'s Empire State Building, which houses 12,000 workers. The program dubbed "Green Apron Delivery" lets staffers in 150 offices order food and drinks through a website that only tenants in the iconic building can utilize, meaning that tourists will not be able to participate in the program. The new store isn\'t your typical Starbucks, though, mainly because you can\'t walk inside. Instead, it\'s more of a kitchen where baristas whip up a small menu of drinks and food. Once someone places an order, a barista makes the drink and delivers it to an office within 30 minutes. Through October, the delivery option is free, and it will cost $2 per coffee run starting next month. Starbucks was quick to emphasize its project in the skyscraper is only a test, but it\'s the latest example of how the company wants to make digital ordering mainstream. Last month, the coffee chain launched mobile payment at 7,400 stores, and later this year, it will launch another pilot program in its Seattle hometown as part of a partnership with on-demand app Postmates. ',
'In Boost to Uber, Ola, India Said to Issue Guidelines for Ride-Hailing Apps: The rules, which aren t binding, if implemented by the states will be a boost for Uber Technologies Inc. and its bigger competitor Ola that have faced bans in some cities such as capital New Delhi. This month China also proposed rules for ride-booking services that also ask operators to obtain licenses from local authorities and offer cars that are registered for commercial use. The guidelines, prepared by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, mandate ride-hailing companies obtain permits from respective state transport departments to operate in a region, the people said asking not to be identified before a public announcement. The states may set the maximum fares to be charged to provide a level playing field with taxis, according to the advisory. The vehicles to be offered must be equipped with a location tracking device as well as an emergency safety button. Drivers, who offer their services on multiple platforms, will need to have a commercial license and the company will have to obtain a police verification certificate.',
'Intel s Earnings Beat: $14.5B Revenue Despite Shrinking PC Market Reflect Move to Cloud Computing; Shares Flat: Intel s net income for the third quarter was 64 cents a share, above the projections of Wall Street analysts. According to a survey by Thomson Reuters, analysts thought Intel would make 59 cents a share, down from 66 cents a year ago. Revenue was $14.5 billion, down slightly from $14.6 billion a year ago, and above projections of $14.2 billion. Intel shares were down about 3.5 percent in after-hours trading, in part because of a projected fourth-quarter dip in demand from cloud companies. Intel became the world s biggest producer of semiconductors thanks mostly to personal computers, which eventually led to chips for server computers. Now, the new hot trend of cloud computing data centers filled with tightly connected servers is remaking Intel. On Tuesday, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., said that in the three months that ended Sept. 26, PC chips brought in $8.5 billion and chips for servers in cloud computing data centers brought in $4.1 billion. A year ago, PC chips brought in $9.2 billion and data center chips brought in $3.7 billion. Making PC chips is still a big business, but not the way it once was. The data center group also has much higher profit margins: Operating profit from PC chips was $2.1 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago, while data center chips had an operating profit of $2.1 billion, up 9 percent. Intel s mix of cloud-computing customers shows how much influence is wielded by just a handful of big operations. Of 200 cloud company customers that Intel tracks, just seven take one-third of those chips: Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent of China. While the rest are now growing at twice the rate of the top seven, Ms. Bryant said, the big companies are unusually demanding customers, even designing their own chip modifications to make their global clouds work better.',
'Facebook Is Building Its Own YouTube Inside Facebook: Facebook has started serving up billions and billions of videos to its users by placing the clips in their feeds, between pictures of your friends kids and stories about people who don t have kids. But what if you wanted to watch a video on Facebook, without looking at kids or reading about them Like you can on YouTube Now Facebook is going to let you do that, too: The social network says it is testing a dedicated place on Facebook for people to go when they exclusively want to watch video, which will help people discover, watch and share videos on Facebook that are relevant to them. Just like you can do on YouTube, the world s biggest video site. The parallels between the two platforms aren t a coincidence, and Facebook s announcement is one that video industry insiders have expected for at least a year, starting when Facebook began its video push in earnest: If Facebook was going to really take on YouTube for video viewers time and, eventually, advertisers dollars then it would have to offer an experience like YouTube, where you could go look for things you want, instead of waiting for Facebook to show you something you didn t know you wanted.',
"Apple loses patent lawsuit to University of Wisconsin, faces up to $862M in damages: Apple Inc could be facing up to $862 million in damages after a U.S. jury on Tuesday found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices. The jury in Madison, Wisconsin also said the patent, which improves processor efficiency, was valid. The trial will now move on to determine how much Apple owes in damages. Representatives for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Apple could not immediately be reached for comment. WARF sued Apple in January 2014 alleging infringement of its 1998 patent for improving chip efficiency. The jury was considering whether Apple's A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, as well as several versions of the iPad, violate the patent. Cupertino, California-based Apple denied any infringement and argued the patent is invalid, according to court papers. Apple previously tried to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to review the patent's validity, but in April the agency rejected the bid. According to a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge William Conley, who is presiding over the case, Apple could be liable for up to $862.4 million in damages. He scheduled the trial to proceed in three phases: liability, damages, and finally, whether Apple infringed the patent willfully, which could lead to enhanced penalties.",
"Facebook adds dedicated shopping section in continued move into e-commerce: Facebook Inc (FB.O) wants its users to shop for clothes and other products from their mobile phones without ever leaving its app. In an effort to move further into e-commerce and compete with Amazon Inc s (AMZN.O) retail offerings, Facebook announced Monday it is testing several ad features that allow users to shop directly through its app. Few users make purchases on mobile phones because it is slow and cumbersome, but Facebook hopes to win over more ad dollars by smoothing the process. Mobile purchases make up less than 2 percent of all retail sales, according to research firm eMarketer. Among the new features are ads that take a user through a specific brand's products without redirecting them to another site. For example, a user who clicks on an ad from a boutique could see an expanded page that displays numerous clothing items. Businesses on Facebook will also be able to display products for purchase directly on their own pages. And users will be able to purchase products directly on Facebook through a buy now button that will be more widely available. The 1.5-billion-member social network has also added a new section on its app that takes users directly to a shopping page where they can browse among numerous brands from a select group of small businesses that will gradually expand. From Facebook s perspective, they re addressing a pain point for retailers, said Catherine Boyle, an analyst at eMarketer. They will attract serious ad dollars with this offering. ",
'Dell buys EMC for $67 billion in largest deal in tech history: Dell announced Monday it had reached a deal to acquire cloud computing giant EMC for $67 billion -- the largest acquisition in the history of the technology industry. The deal signals that Dell believes it is best to go big at a time when many older technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard are paring down and becoming smaller, nimbler companies. Traditionally known as a personal PC-maker, Dell has more recently set its ambitions on the high-tech business world and portrayed itself as an all-in-one provider of equipment and services. Dell and equity firm Silver Lake Partners said in a press release Monday that buying EMC, a major data storage company, broadens its appeal to those lucrative corporate customers. In 2007, Dell returned to run the company he founded and took the company private again in 2013 with backing from Silver Lake Partners. The EMC transaction is expected to close in the middle of next year, executives said on a call with analysts Monday morning. It will take time for Dell and EMC to integrate their businesses if the deal closes, Hewitt said. For one, he noted that EMC has carved its niche by offering comprehensive and not inexpensive software solutions to businesses, which is where Dell wants to go. But, he noted, Dell\'s philosophy is deeply rooted in providing cost-efficiency. As Dell has struggled to adapt its PC business for the modern age, EMC has also been under pressure from activist investors to spin off its cloud and virtualization business called VMWare for more than year as its faced heavy competition from flash storage and cloud storage firms. It has also faced pointed questions about its "federated" business structure, which strung together three firms -- its traditional business, VMWare and its software development firm Pivotal. Analysts had formerly counted Dell, as well as HP, Cisco and Oracle, as potential buyers for the firm. ',
"SAP third-quarter operating profit beats estimates on mature markets: SAP said third-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose to 1.62 billion euros ($1.84 billion), beating the most optimistic estimate among 14 analysts, with individual estimates ranging from 1.45 billion to 1.59 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters data. Third-quarter total revenue of 4.98 billion euros was slightly ahead of the average expectation of 4.93 billion. Europe's largest software maker said it was sticking to its outlook for the full year for non-IFRS operating profit of 5.6 billion euros to 5.9 billion euros at constant currencies, which represents flat growth to a rise of as much as 5 percent from 5.6 billion euros last year.",
'Financing in the Dell-EMC Deal: Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, EMC has negotiated a "go-shop" provision in the preliminary deal that gives it the opportunity to seek out other buyers. Yet analysts say that while the Dell deal may slightly undervalue EMC shares, it\'s still a good deal. Shares of EMC rose about 1.5 percent during regular trading Monday. While the company will be a private concern after the deal is closed, a portion of its shares will continue to trade publicly. EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC s economic interest" in VMWare. Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC s prize holding, software maker VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share. EMC s stock climbed 1.8 percent Monday to $28.35. Dell will add almost $50 billion to its debt load to complete the purchase, people familiar with the matter said, on top of the $11 billion it already is carrying. The combined company will be run by Michael Dell, the chief executive officer of the company he founded and took private for about $25 billion two years ago. He is financing the takeover with his MSD Partners investment vehicle, Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings. He also is using debt, the VMware tracking stock and cash on hand. The deal will combine EMC s dominance in devices that store data with closely held Dell s No. 2 position in servers, the powerful machines that help companies handle big computing challenges.',
'Implications for the Data Center Business: The deal will help Dell raise its profile in data centers, the modern factories of the digital age that house servers, networking gear and storage systems. EMC had 21 percent of the storage market last year, about twice what Dell had, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While Dell has been outperforming some of its rivals, the company is grappling with sagging demand for personal computers. During the third quarter, overall shipments declined 7.7 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Still, Dell was able to post a small gain of 0.5 percent while larger rivals declined.',
'Implications for VMWare: EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC s economic interest" in VMWare. VMware declined 8 percent to $72.27 on Monday amid concern that the creation of a tracking stock will weigh on the company s valuation. Analysts at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. lowered their target price for VMware to $75 from $95. EMC rival Pure Storage Inc. rose 8.8 percent to $18.06, exceeding its public offering price of $17 for the first time since shares began trading Wednesday.',
'Silver Lake Had Explored Sale of Dell s PC Business Ahead of EMC Deal: Private equity firm Silver Lake, co-owners of Dell, last week approached Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Huawei to explore the possibility of selling off Dell s personal computing business, sources familiar with the matter told Re/code. But by Monday, Dell proposed to pay a combined $67 billion to acquire the data storage company EMC and its subsidiary VMware in what is the largest proposed technology M&A deal in history. It was not immediately clear if Silver Lake acted alone or if Dell was consulted. It is also unclear if Silver Lake or Dell would continue to explore a sale at this point. The approach comes as the once thriving PC industry grapples with declining sales. That s partially why none of the parties that were approached engaged further. Nearly half of Dell s annual revenue come from the PC business, or about $27 billion, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.',
'Twitter Is Planning Company-Wide Layoffs for Next Week: Twitter is planning company-wide layoffs next week, according to multiple sources. It s unclear how much of the staff will be culled, but insiders say it will likely affect most, if not all, departments. The downsizing comes at the same time Twitter is restructuring its engineering organization to make it leaner and more efficient, these sources say. It s likely that many of those impacted by the layoffs will be engineers, which make up about half the staff. Those close to the company have argued for years that Twitter has become too bloated. It reported roughly 4,100 employees last quarter, more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO. Twitter s user base has grown less than 50 percent in that time. Of course, some of the growth has come via acquisitions Twitter has made plenty over the past two years. But still, the feeling from those close to the company is that Twitter s engineering team is much larger than it needs to be. The reorg also aligns with what Dorsey has been preaching for the last four months: That Twitter needs to be more focused. In June he told Re/code that the company needed to do a better job of clarifying ownership around projects, and he restructured Twitter s product team in August to do just that. Now, it appears, the rest of the staff will be reshuffled, too. Update: Twitter stock is down more than 3 percent in after-hours trading on the news.',
'Apple Is Said to Deactivate Its News App in China: Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there. The Apple News app, which the company announced in June, is available only to users in the United States, though it is being tested in Britain and Australia. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas but they have found that it does not work in China. Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user s preferred media, instead see an error message: Can t refresh right now. News isn t supported in your current region. Greater China is now Apple s second-largest source of revenue after the United States, with sales of more than $13 billion in the third quarter. That means the company is most likely taking a careful approach to delivering new content, like that on its news app, within China. Beijing generally insists that companies are responsible for censoring content inside China. In Apple s case, that would mean it would probably have to develop a censorship system most Chinese companies use a combination of automated software and employees to eliminate sensitive articles from feeds. For now, Apple seems to be avoiding the problem by completely disabling the service for users in China.',
'How Do You Value A Company Like Uber I became interested in Uber after reading a news story in June 2014, which reported the company was being valued at $17 billion in its latest venture capital round. I posted my first valuation of Uber in June 2014, viewing it as an urban car service, with local (but not global) networking benefits. Assuming that it would increase the size of the urban car service market by about 40%, while preserving its low capital-investment business model, I valued Uber at just under $6 billion. While some in the VC community were quick to dismiss the valuation, I will remain grateful to Bill Gurley for a post where he took me to task for having too narrow a vision of Uber s business model. In his counter narrative, he argued that Uber was not just urban (it could create inroads in suburbia), not just a car service (it was in logistics & transportation) and that it was working with other businesses to create global networking benefits. Since Bill, as an early investor in Uber with access to its internal workings, clearly knew far more about the company than I did, I revalued Uber using his narrative and arrived at $54 billion as the value that reflected the narrative. I was wrong about Uber s value in June 2014, when my estimate of $6 billion was below the $17 billion assessment by venture capitalists then. Correcting for both my cramped vision and the changes that have occurred since June 2014, my estimated value today is $23.4 billion. I know my estimated value lags the $51 billion value that VCs are attaching to the company today. This may very well be a reflection that my vision is still too cramped to capture Uber s possible businesses, but it is what it is.',
'SingPost Doubles Down on E-Commerce With U.S., European Services: Singapore Post Ltd., which counts Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. as its second-biggest shareholder, plans to expand freight services and warehouses in the U.S. and Europe as Asia s emerging middle class drives online purchases from overseas. The move comes as other postal companies in Asia also are looking to reinvent themselves. Japan Post Group, a $2.5 trillion behemoth that also function as a bank and insurer, is preparing an initial public offering and looking to expand internationally after buying Australian logistics company Toll Holdings Ltd. earlier this year. SingPost holds a monopoly on mail delivery in its home base, which accounts for about 80 percent of its operating profit, but is looking for new areas of growth as more people use mobile phones and access the Internet. Worldwide business-to-consumer sales could grow 34 percent to $675 billion in 2016 from last year as the global middle class grows, SingPost said, citing data from researcher eMarketer.',
"DocuSign CEO resigns as company heads toward IPO: source. The chief executive officer of DocuSign has resigned, according to an internal memo, signaling a leadership change for a well-funded tech company that is on the brink of an initial public offering. Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign, a San Francisco company that makes software to add legally compliant electronic signatures to documents, told employees in a memo the company would begin a search for his successor. Krach became CEO four years ago and has been chairman for seven. Sources familiar with the company say Krach will continue to have a significant presence there. He will stay on as chairman for at least three more years. He is also one of DocuSign's largest individual shareholders. Krach will remain CEO until a replacement is named. A search has begun, and the board is looking at both internal and external candidates. The next logical step for the company is an IPO, according to the source who asked not to be named because the plans are confidential. DocuSign, valued at $3 billion, aims to replace one of the final paper-and-pen aspects of business transactions: the signature. It is available in more than 40 languages and about 188 countries. DocuSign recently closed a Series F funding round that exceeded $300 million and now has well over $500 million in financing.",
'Amazon plays a long game with AWS: Amazon Web Services doesn t just want to dominate the global business in selling computing online. It also wants to be the rarest thing of all in the technology industry: a long-lived company. Its strategy hinges on an unprecedented level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match. The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional vendor lock-in of hooking customers on proprietary technology, but by making itself the center of the styles and habits of cloud computing. At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, the chief information officer of General Electric, said, A.W.S. will be the trusted partner that will run our company s information technology for the next 140 years. That s how long G.E., founded by Thomas Edison, has been around. Mr. Fowler was talking at the annual A.W.S. conference, during a session in which the company indirectly made the case that it would go after all of the existing customers of some of the biggest technology companies around. Among other offerings, A.W.S. plans to send customers machines that will extract an Oracle database, say, and send it to A.W.S. to be transformed to a cheaper cloud product. G.E. had at one point thought of building its own cloud, but it went with Amazon in part because of this know-how. A.W.S. also introduced a range of new technology products, including automated creation of mobile software applications, automated large- and small-scale data analysis systems in real time, and ways of building software that can be managed easily across the globe from a single location. There were, of course, also ways to make these parts fit together, mostly in automated forms that configured and managed most of the underlying technology. To work with it all, last week A.W.S. published a 56-page manual on how to build and run software in A.W.S. Cloud is the new normal, Werner Vogels, Amazon s chief technology officer, said to a roomful of several thousand software engineers on Thursday. This is how you will build your applications. Certainly, a good part of A.W.S. software is open source, which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud business, created more than 500 new features and services last year, as A.W.S. did. That raises an interesting prospect. A.W.S. does not have a lot of the proprietary technology or onerous contracts that have traditionally held captive the customers of big enterprise software companies. Amazon may be creating a kind of casual lock-in of its own: All this automation, features and standardization of practices could mean that in several years most young engineers will know how to work in the A.W.S. system, but none other. That s not exactly a hostage situation, but it would hold companies.',
'Facebook to Test Emoji as Reaction Icons: Despite the billions of likes bestowed on Facebook posts every month, something has been missing: an option to express a different emotion. On Thursday, Facebook announced it will begin testing six new emotional reactions that you can convey with a simple emoji, similar to the thumbs-up like icon that the social networking service has made so famous. The six new emoji depict various expressions, from an open mouth to express surprise to a scowling red face for anger. The other four emotions are love, laughter, sadness and a supportive cheer. The new reaction icons will be available to most Facebook users in Spain and Ireland by the end of this week. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Facebook s news feed, said the company would evaluate how people in those two countries use the new buttons and refine them, before expanding the rollout to the company s 1.5 billion users worldwide later this year.',
'Facing China Slowdown, Alibaba and JD Find Solace in Russia: Russia s plunging currency hasn t weened consumers off foreign goods. Instead, cash-strapped shoppers are turning to online retailers for imported smartphones, jewelry and clothes, giving an unexpected boost to Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. Alibaba s AliExpress site posted a 40 percent increase in Russian visitors to 22 million in July compared with a year earlier, according to researcher TNS. JD.com, which gets more than half its sales from electronics and home appliances, started its first international site in June in Russia, exclusively offering devices such as Xiaomi Corp. smartphones for about $214. That s less than half of what an IPhone or Samsung Electronics Co. model with similar technical specifications costs locally. Millions of Russians are sinking into poverty as the collapse in crude prices drags down the economy of the world s biggest energy exporter, sends the ruble into a tailspin and cuts government revenue. In August, wages fell 9.8 percent in real terms and Russians now face significantly lower disposable income than a year ago. While the economy may be in recession, Russians are embracing deliveries from China. Some 80 million people go online in Russia, making it Europe s largest Internet market by users, according to East-West Digital News. However, the number of Web shoppers is still about a third of that, compared with 70 percent to 90 percent in the U.S. and western Europe.',
...]
In [41]:
#Clustering (Machine Learning Starts)
#Clustering = {Maximize intra-cluster similarity + Minimize inter-clutser similarity}
#Feature extraction from text
# Features: Create a list representing the universe of all words that can appear in any text
# "Hello this is test" is sample
# (hello, this, is , the, universe, of, all, words, in, any, text, a, an, test, goodbye) = bag of features
# now their frequency is (1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, ..)
# Note that in this model, order is not preserved.
# Term Frequency: Weight the term frequencies to take the rarity of a word into account
# weight = 1/(#documents the word appears in) = Tf-IDF representation
#TF = Term frequency adn IDF = Inverse document frequency
# Then we apply the ML algorithm (k-means clustering is popularly used)
# 1. Initialize a set of points
# 2. Assign each point to the cluter belonging to the nearest mean
# 3. Find the new means/centroids of the clusters
# 4. (Convergence) Rinse and repeat steps 2, 3 until the means don't change anymore.
# 5. If not converging, give a fixed number of iterations after which it could terminate
In [ ]:
#convertys text to TF-iDF representation
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
In [42]:
vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(max_df=0.5,min_df=2,stop_words='english') #make a vectorizer object
In [43]:
X = vectorizer.fit_transform(doxyDonkeyPosts) #fit_transform method takes a list of strings returns a 2D array
X #2465 rows(=>2465 articles)
#each row has 12428 columns (=> Number of distinct words)
Out[43]:
<2465x12428 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.float64'>'
with 247984 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>
In [44]:
X[0] #X[0] represents an article where it has 12428 words
Out[44]:
<1x12428 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.float64'>'
with 125 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>
In [45]:
print X[0]
(0, 738) 0.0700267614388
(0, 10286) 0.0590460757607
(0, 4212) 0.0614734464037
(0, 11180) 0.0552777195907
(0, 2421) 0.0780548982722
(0, 11160) 0.0592684209687
(0, 9723) 0.0559448996494
(0, 6406) 0.0511721887506
(0, 678) 0.0506034325452
(0, 10190) 0.104789906333
(0, 8144) 0.0951615283425
(0, 11477) 0.0803047144103
(0, 7409) 0.0866082133073
(0, 8717) 0.0753013458579
(0, 3593) 0.0552777195907
(0, 3890) 0.118536841937
(0, 10030) 0.0700267614388
(0, 3105) 0.0830582668246
(0, 8402) 0.0830582668246
(0, 11708) 0.0916115818598
(0, 8133) 0.0837689595714
(0, 1625) 0.0719646227776
(0, 7525) 0.117226110017
(0, 7241) 0.035646969416
(0, 2964) 0.0530549941883
: :
(0, 5749) 0.0914234747621
(0, 90) 0.0493366982297
(0, 9847) 0.0717513993752
(0, 3110) 0.0332219620451
(0, 9957) 0.0556068010977
(0, 10509) 0.0361534628868
(0, 12148) 0.0421617908983
(0, 4813) 0.0464038715942
(0, 9618) 0.0450563714211
(0, 11759) 0.0592684209687
(0, 8280) 0.0554411633733
(0, 6082) 0.168877570039
(0, 7461) 0.072384349661
(0, 1091) 0.431380369415
(0, 1028) 0.0816048447549
(0, 8474) 0.115185307382
(0, 10840) 0.0561174874303
(0, 9760) 0.0395435944136
(0, 6132) 0.115185307382
(0, 5358) 0.0916115818598
(0, 4755) 0.0816048447549
(0, 6081) 0.0963759573654
(0, 7455) 0.129368593949
(0, 7158) 0.069501583237
(0, 8931) 0.0495389949764
In [46]:
#K-means clustering
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
km = KMeans(n_clusters = 3, init = 'k-means++', max_iter = 100, n_init = 1, verbose = True)
#Instantiating a KMeans object
#n_cluters = number of clusters
#init = Method of choosing initial centroids in such a way that we can find the clusters in minimum number of iterations
#max_iter = maximum number of iterations (in case of no convergence)
In [47]:
km.fit(X) #we take documents which are in tf-idf format(which's x)
#after this every doc in x will have a number which indicates teh cluster to which it bgelongs(km.labels_)
Initialization complete
Iteration 0, inertia 4615.041
Iteration 1, inertia 2359.133
Iteration 2, inertia 2350.761
Iteration 3, inertia 2348.676
Iteration 4, inertia 2347.730
Iteration 5, inertia 2346.988
Iteration 6, inertia 2346.534
Iteration 7, inertia 2346.219
Iteration 8, inertia 2346.034
Iteration 9, inertia 2345.942
Iteration 10, inertia 2345.873
Iteration 11, inertia 2345.804
Iteration 12, inertia 2345.751
Iteration 13, inertia 2345.732
Iteration 14, inertia 2345.712
Iteration 15, inertia 2345.703
Iteration 16, inertia 2345.684
Iteration 17, inertia 2345.665
Iteration 18, inertia 2345.642
Iteration 19, inertia 2345.603
Iteration 20, inertia 2345.577
Iteration 21, inertia 2345.551
Iteration 22, inertia 2345.531
Iteration 23, inertia 2345.514
Iteration 24, inertia 2345.505
Iteration 25, inertia 2345.495
Iteration 26, inertia 2345.476
Iteration 27, inertia 2345.474
Converged at iteration 27
Out[47]:
KMeans(copy_x=True, init='k-means++', max_iter=100, n_clusters=3, n_init=1,
n_jobs=1, precompute_distances='auto', random_state=None, tol=0.0001,
verbose=True)
In [48]:
import numpy as np
np.unique(km.labels_, return_counts=True)
#km.labels_ = every doc in x will have a number which indicates teh cluster number to which it bgelongs [0, 1, 2]
#return_counts: repre how many articles are there in each cluster [1505. 416. 544]
Out[48]:
(array([0, 1, 2], dtype=int32), array([1505, 416, 544]))
In [49]:
text={}
for i,cluster in enumerate(km.labels_): #enumerate function converts the list of labels(cluster nos) into tuples (i, cluster)
#Aggregate text in each cluster
oneDocument = doxyDonkeyPosts[i]
if cluster not in text.keys():
text[cluster] = oneDocument
else:
text[cluster] += oneDocument
In [50]:
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.probability import FreqDist
from collections import defaultdict
from string import punctuation
from heapq import nlargest
import nltk
In [51]:
_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english') + list(punctuation)+["million","billion","year","millions","billions","y/y","'s","''","``"])
In [52]:
#will take text from each cluster and find out the top 100 words from each text
keywords = {}
counts={}
for cluster in range(3):
word_sent = word_tokenize(text[cluster].lower())
word_sent=[word for word in word_sent if word not in _stopwords] #filters out stopp words
freq = FreqDist(word_sent) #computes teh frquency distribution of the words
keywords[cluster] = nlargest(100, freq, key=freq.get) #picks teh top 100 words from teh frequency distribution form each cluster
counts[cluster]=freq #stores the complete frequ distri which will keep the words along with their counts in the dictionary
In [53]:
#Now lets find top 10 keywords which are unique to each cluster
unique_keys={}
for cluster in range(3):
other_clusters=list(set(range(3))-set([cluster]))
keys_other_clusters=set(keywords[other_clusters[0]]).union(set(keywords[other_clusters[1]]))
unique=set(keywords[cluster])-keys_other_clusters
unique_keys[cluster]=nlargest(10, unique, key=counts[cluster].get)
In [54]:
unique_keys #Here we get top 3 clusters with top 10 keywords in each cluster
Out[54]:
{0: ['amazon',
'quarter',
'customers',
'microsoft',
'price',
'profit',
'cloud',
'inc.',
'analysts',
'chief'],
1: ['uber',
'round',
'capital',
'raised',
'funding',
'valuation',
'investment',
'private',
'lyft',
'venture'],
2: ['facebook',
'twitter',
'ads',
'video',
'ad',
'search',
'apps',
'social',
'advertising',
'youtube']}
In [55]:
article = "Facebook Inc. has been giving advertisers an inflated metric for the average time users spent watching a video, a measurement that may have helped boost marketer spending on one of Facebook’s most popular ad products. The company, owner of the world’s largest social network, only counts a video as viewed if it has been seen for more than 3 seconds. The metric it gave advertisers for their average video view time incorporated only the people who had watched the video long enough to count as a view in the first place, inflating the metric because it didn’t count anyone who didn’t watch, or watched for a shorter time. Facebook’s stock fell more than 1.5 percent in extended trading after the miscalculation was earlier reported in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook had disclosed the mistake in a posting on its advertiser help center web page several weeks ago. Big advertising buyers and marketers are upset about the inflated metric, and asked the company for more details, according to the report in the Journal, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The Menlo Park, California-based company has kept revenue surging in part because of enthusiasm for its video ads, which advertisers compare in performance to those on Twitter, YouTube and around the web."
In [68]:
#By now, we've classified using clustering (i.e we've trained the data)
#Now starts Training
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
classifier = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=3) #Instantiate a KNeightborsClassifier object. If you call KNeighborsClassifier() without passing n_neighbors argumnet, n_neighbors is taken as 5 by default
classifier.fit(X,km.labels_) #train the classifier object
Out[68]:
KNeighborsClassifier(algorithm='auto', leaf_size=30, metric='minkowski',
metric_params=None, n_jobs=1, n_neighbors=3, p=2,
weights='uniform')
In [69]:
test=vectorizer.transform([article.decode('utf8').encode('ascii',errors='ignore')]) #converting the article into a TF-IDF form
In [70]:
test
Out[70]:
<1x12428 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.float64'>'
with 85 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>
In [71]:
classifier.predict(test) #Test phase
Out[71]:
array([0], dtype=int32)
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Content source: iitjee/SteppinsMachineLearning
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