Spotify Reportedly Raising $400 Million at $8.4 Billion Valuation

Spotify AB is nearing a deal to raise $400 million, valuing the music streaming service provider at $8.4 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The terms of the funding, Spotify's seventh, have been set and is expected to close in the coming weeks, one of the people told the Journal.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund have agreed to invest in the round and Spotify has also held talks with asset managers and venture-capital firms, the Journal said, citing sources.

Spotify and Goldman Sachs could not immediately be reached for comment.

Spotify was valued at more than $5 billion in September, according to filings by GSV Capital Corp, a private investment fund that owns the shares, the Journal said.

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Microsoft's New Windows 10 Preview for Phones Brings Spartan Browser, More

Microsoft, as promised a week before, has started rolling out the second build (10051) of the Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones to its Windows Insider users on Friday. The highlight of the build is the inclusion of an early version of Microsoft's Spartan browser for phones, along with a number of other features.

Notably, build 10051 of the Windows 10 Technical Preview adds a partition stitching feature which enables it to support nearly all the Lumia smartphones in the market except the Lumia Icon, Lumia 930 and Lumia 640XL devices because of screen scaling issues. Also, Windows Phone devices made by Microsoft OEMs are not supported. The company has provided the full list of supported handsets in a blog post - note, this is a technical preview build, and will contain several bugs and stability issues.

In the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones, the Project Spartan browser "exists side-by-side with IE11". Testers can find it in the All Apps list and will also be able to pin it onto the Start Screen. The new browser notably uses the same Edge engine as its desktop counterpart, as per Microsoft. The Redmond-based tech firm had introduced the Spartan browser, it's new default browser for Windows 10 being built in collaboration with several partners including Adobe, last month in the Windows 10 Technical Preview build for desktops.

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Clinton Wins High Marks for Social-Media Launch

Presidential contender Hillary Clinton tweeted, Facebooked and YouTubed her way through the first official day of her campaign in a social media strategy that earned her high marks among marketers.

Her tweet announcing her candidacy notched almost 90,000 retweets by the end of the day Sunday, her campaign video more than 1 million views on YouTube, and herFacebook campaign page almost 500,000 likes.

Impressive, marketing strategists say, although she did create one or two chinks for Republicans to chisel at.

Her 138-second campaign video featured everyday Americans amid milestones such as starting a business or having a baby, with Clinton first appearing a full 90 seconds in. It broke a million views on Facebook by Sunday evening."It's less "me" and more "us," which I think is very smart," said Marissa Gluck, a director at marketing firm Huge.

That's a really "big difference in tone, ego and professionalism compared to rollout videos from Rand Paul and (Ted) Cruz," said Josh Cook, a former Obama digital director and vice president of digital engagement for the political consulting firm, BerlinRosen, referring to Republican presidential hopefuls.But Republicans pushed back hard and fast.

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'Great Cannon' Expands China Web Blocking: Researchers

China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.

The new strategy, dubbed "Great Cannon," seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the "Great Firewall," according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

"While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the 'Great Cannon,'" the report said.

"The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses."

The report supports claims by the activist organization GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer "mirrored" content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.

The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engineBaidu and using that in "denial of service" attacks which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.

The Citizen Lab researchers said they found "compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the GC (Great Cannon)," despite Beijing's denials of involvement in cyberattacks.

Because the Great Cannon is located in proximity of the Great Firewall, this "strongly suggests a governmental actor," said the report, which included collaboration from researchers at the University of California and Princeton University.The researchers said that deploying the Great Cannon "is a major shift in tactics," and that it would likely "require the approval of high-level authorities within the Chinese government."

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SpaceX to Send Cargo Ship on Sixth ISS Supply Mission on Monday

SpaceX is sending its unmanned Dragon cargo ship on its sixth official supply mission to the International Space Station on Monday, should the weather behave itself.

The US space transport company will also seek to recycle the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket by landing it on an ocean platform soon after launch, set to take place from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:33 pm (2033 GMT).

The latest weather forecast is for a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions at liftoff time. If it does not launch Monday, the next chance will be Tuesday at 2010 GMT.

After the launch, SpaceX will make another attempt to guide the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back to a controlled landing on an ocean platform, part of the California-based company's goal of making rockets one day as reusable as planes.In January, the rocket attempted a controlled maneuver to land on a barge in the Atlantic, but collided with it instead and broke into pieces.Since Nasa retired its Space Shuttle, Russia's Soyuz is the only spacecraft that can ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting International Space Station. Private company Space X's Dragon is the only re-entry cargo craft.

Boeing and SpaceX are developing reusable astronaut carriers for Nasa, which is also working on the Orion craft it hopes will take humans to Mars.

If all goes well, Dragon will make it to the ISS Wednesday. It should be guided into the station by European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

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Chinese Hackers Target India, Southeast Asia: FireEye

Hackers, most likely from China, have been spying on governments and businesses in Southeast Asia and India uninterrupted for a decade, researchers at Internet security company FireEye Inc said.

In a report released on Monday, FireEye said the cyber espionage operations dated back to at least 2005 and "focused on targets - government and commercial - who hold key political, economic and military information about the region."

"Such a sustained, planned development effort coupled with the (hacking) group's regional targets and mission, lead us to believe that this activity is state-sponsored - most likely the Chinese government," the report's authors said.Bryce Boland, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific at FireEye and co-author of the report, said the attack was still ongoing, noting that the servers the attackers used were still operational, and that FireEye continued to see attacks against its customers, who number among the targets.

Reuters couldn't independently confirm any of the assertions made in the report.

China has always denied accusations that it uses the Internet to spy on governments, organisations and companies. Neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Internet regulator, immediately responded to written requests for comment on the FireEye report on Monday.

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Indian Mobile Commerce Market to Hit $19 Billion by 2019: Study

As smartphone sales continue their journey north surging by 51 percent every three months, the mobile commerce (m-commerce) market may grow by 55 percent from its present size of $2 billion to $19 billion (roughly Rs. 12,476 crores to roughly Rs. 1,18,530 crores) by 2019, a study said on Friday.

According to a study released by market research firm, Zinnov, "right from user research to product anytime and anywhere, smartphones are an emerging point of purchase and to address the demand from upcountry markets and changing consumer shopping pattern, e-commerce companies are increasing their focus on mobile commerce".

The survey found over 91 percent of the consumers had researched a product or service on their phone while online transactions on the smartphone platform rose between 30-50 percent in the upcountry areas.

Further, it said 54 percent of the consumers have purchased either a product or a service from their smartphones.It opined that major e-commerce players like Flipkart and Quikr are serious about their plans to augment the m-commerce platform.In 2014, 81 million smartphone units were shipped to the country.

"Smartphones are already outpacing the growth of feature phones and are expected to show a massive 36 percent CAGR over the next five years making it to the 651 million mark by 2019... The unstoppable surge of smartphones in India continues with 29 percent of urban population with a base of 409 million users adding to its adoption," the research firm said in a statement.

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Microsoft Revamps Bing Website for Android and iPhone

Microsoft on Friday revamped the Bing.com mobile homepage for iPhone and Android smartphones with a number of enhancements.

Starting Friday, users on iPhone and Android smartphones will notice a completely new Bing homepage optimised for mobile devices. The homepage has got a new translucent colour scheme with swipe up option to see the various sections.

Users will now see a new image of the day (IOTD) card which on tapping will reveal more information about that particular image. Microsoft has also brought the desktop's news carousel experience to mobile. The 'Popular Now' section shows the selected top trending stories for a user, and is updated throughout the day.

"News consumption is a common activity on mobile devices. We also know that on Bing.com desktop, the homepage news carousel at the bottom of the page is one of the most highly engaged features, connecting users to news stories across the web. With that in mind, we are bringing the desktop's news carousel experience to mobile. We select the top trending stories for you and update them throughout the day. Moving forward, we will continue to make these stories even more relevant and personal," noted the Bing Team on Microsoft Bing blog.

Lastly, the Bing.com homepage also includes three more cards - Bing Rewards for points tracking, Settings card, and Footer card that allow users to send feedback.

On Thursday, the company had revamped its Bing Image Search on Web and mobile. Microsoft said that the experience will be rolling out worldwide to Bing.com on PCs, tablets and smartphones as well to its iPhone and Android apps over the coming weeks.

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Twitter Sees New Value in Its 'Fire Hose' of Data

Late Friday, Twitter announced that it would no longer license the full stream of half a billion daily messages on its service to third-party resellers. Anyone who wants access to the stream, known as the fire hose, will soon have to license the data from Twitter directly.

On the surface, the announcement affects just the two remaining buyers of Twitterdata, DataSift and NTT, and also suggests that Twitter no longer wants to sell its data wholesale, just retail. But it's also a deeper sign of the company's intention to compete with - and perhaps cut out - many middlemen that profit from helping marketers make sense of the flood of tweets to run their businesses more intelligently.

In a blog post, Twitter said the decision was a natural outgrowth of its purchase of Gnip, the leading reseller of Twitter data, about a year ago.

"Direct relationships help Twitter develop an understanding of customer needs, get direct feedback for the product road map and work more closely with data customers to enable the best possible solutions for the brands that rely on Twitter data to make better decisions," wrote Zach Hofer-Shall, head of the company's ecosystem program.

What he didn't say is that Twitter also thinks direct relationships will make more money. Last year, the company generated $147 million (roughly Rs. 917 crores), or roughly 10 percent of its revenue, from data licensing and other services, and its leaders see data as an area they have only begun to mine.

Chris Moody, the former chief of Gnip and now Twitter's vice president for data strategy, sketched out the data vision at a November meeting with Wall Street analysts. "In the future, every significant business decision will have Twitter data as an input, because why wouldn't you?" he said. "Why wouldn't you add into your business decision-making, 'What does the world think about this topic at this particular time or at a previous moment of time, maybe last year when we ran this campaign,' that type of thing?"

Twitter primarily works with dozens of data analysis and software companies, such as Adobe, Spredfast and Salesforce.com, as a data supplier.

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China's Tencent Hits $200 Billion Market Cap for First Time

China's Tencent Holdings Ltd for the first time hit a market cap of more than $200 billion on Monday, making it more valuable than U.S. tech firms like Amazon.com Inc, IBM Corp and Oracle Corp.

The country's biggest social networking and online entertainment firm rose 5.38 percent to close at HK$170.50 ($22) in trading in Hong Kong, giving it a market valuation of $206 billion (roughly Rs. 12,85,116 crores). This is higher than Oracle's $190 billion, Amazon's $178 billion (roughly Rs. 11,10,440 crores) and IBM's $161 billion (roughly Rs. 10,04,387 crores).

Tencent's shares have rocketed 52 percent from the beginning of this year, bringing its valuation close to those of U.S. peer Facebook Inc's $230 billion (roughly Rs. 14,34,838 crores) and Chinese arch rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's $210 billion (roughly Rs. 13,10,070 crores).

The surge in the Shenzhen-based company's share price comes as Hong Kong stocks hit fresh seven-year highs on Monday. China recently allowed mutual funds to buy stocks on the Hang Seng Index under the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect scheme, fuelling the jump in already-rising Tencent shares.

More money is expected to pour in as investors hunt for bargains.

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