10 Things In Tech You Need To Know This Morning
1. Baidu may be investing $600 million in Uber, Bloomberg says. It wants to compete with Alibaba in China. The pair will cooperate on map and mobile-search functions.
2. A bunch of Snapchat emails leaked late last night from the Sony hackers. The most amazing one was this discussion of why Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel rejected Facebook's acquisition offer of around $3 billion. It would have made Spiegel a billionaire.
3. Snapchat acquired Addlive for $30 million, those hacked emails say. The tech startup handles video for the messaging app.
4. Snapchat also acquired a competitor to Google Glass. Vergence Labs' main product is Epiphany Eyewear, a product that subtly records video with the press of a button on the side of the frame. You can imagine what people will use this for.
5. Snapchat blew off a round of investment funding from Tencent. The round would have netted CEO Evan Spiegel $40 million.
6. The premier of Sony's "The Interview" has been cancelled in NYC. Hackers are demanding the movie be canned and are making bomb threats. Yes, the terrorists are winning.
7. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has sold more than 500,000 shares. The sale is worth $5.32 million. Costolo still has 36,028 Twitter shares and 509,828 unvested RSUs.
8. Facebook is kicking Google's backside on mobile display advertising. Google still does more than twice as much revenue as Facebook on mobile advertising overall, thanks to search. But when it comes to graphical and video ads on mobile devices, their positions are reversed: Facebook does three times as much revenue as Google there.
9. Instagram is dominating Twitter when it comes to engagement for advertisers. Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly has the data.
10. Apple halted online sales in Russia. The ruble is so unstable it cannot trade there.