Business news in brief

Match.com, Tinder seek IPO guidance

NEW YORK -- Match.com and Tinder are looking for a Wall Street connection as their parent group prepares to establish them as a separate, publicly traded company.

IAC/InteractiveCorp, which is controlled by billionaire Barry Diller, has approved a proposal for an initial public offering.

Diller said June 25 that it's "healthy" to give companies "independence from a mother church."

He laid the groundwork for the IPO two years ago when he formed the Match Group, which also includes OKCupid, Chemistry.com and other dating sites and apps.

IAC said it expects the Match Group to issue less than 20 percent of its shares in the IPO. That means IAC will still be majority owned by its parent. The IPO is planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

With the IPO, "Match will be able to unlock value, a topic that has been in the forefront with the dating business for the last 2-3 years," said Cowen and Co. analyst John Blackledge in a note to investors.

Instagram adds two 'trending' features

Instagram hopes two new features will make its service a little easier to use: trending tags and the option to search for photos by location.

The updated app, which rolled out to users' phones last week, will let people get a quick look at the hashtags that are shaping the conversation on the service that day.

"With the introduction of Trending Tags and Trending Places, the new Explore page connects you to events and conversations in real time, nearby or around the world," the company said in a blog post.

The second feature, Places Search, lets users search through public photos by location.

The new features make Instagram a little more real-time than it has been -- to this point, the service has been more of a lean-back experience than a network you have to monitor all the time. Some of the updates mirror steps that Facebook, which owns Instagram, has taken to compete with more real-time social networks such as Twitter.

-- The Washington Post

Google wristband to stream health data

Google Inc.'s life sciences group has created a health-tracking wristband that could be used in clinical trials and drug tests, giving researchers or physicians minute-by-minute data on how patients are faring.

The experimental device, developed within the company's Google X research division, can measure pulse, heart rhythm and skin temperature, and also environmental information like light exposure and noise levels. It won't be marketed as a consumer device, said Andy Conrad, head of the life sciences team at Google.

Doctors, researchers and drugmakers have long sought a way to continuously track patients' vital signs outside of a lab. Yet creating a device that's easy for patients to use, while also capturing rich, accurate data has been a challenge, said Kara Dennis, managing director of mobile health at Medidata, a New York-based firm that specializes in data analytics.

Google will collaborate with academic researchers and drugmakers to test the wristband's accuracy and seek regulatory clearance to use it in the U.S. and Europe. Trials to test the band will start over the summer, said Google spokesman Jacquelyn Miller.

-- Bloomberg News

Parts maker: Driverless cars a ways off

The technology to make cars fully autonomous probably won't be established until at least 2030, according to the top supplier for the world's biggest automaker.

The auto industry will take intermediate steps toward that future, first with safety systems that can prevent or mitigate crashes, Koji Arima, president of Denso Corp., said in an interview. The supplier to Toyota Motor Corp. will debut its first such system later this year with the automaker.

Denso's assessment of the prospects for self-driving cars is less optimistic than that of companies including Google Inc. and Ford Motor Co., which have predicted them hitting roads by 2020. For now, Denso is playing a role in semi-autonomous cars by supplying radar and image sensors first to Toyota, then potentially other automakers as early as next year, Arima said.

Toyota has said the "Safety Sense P" system that Denso helped develop will alert drivers before they collide with a car or pedestrian. The system either provides additional braking force or automatically reduces the vehicle's speed if the driver fails to brake.

-- Bloomberg News

Facebook pitches immersive ad formats

CANNES, France -- Facebook previewed a number of new ad formats for its mobile-phone platform, developed with advertising agencies in a bid to lure more users to push products on the site.

Facebook chief creative officer Mark D'Arcy demonstrated a number of campaigns the company helped develop for brands such as J. Crew, Amazon, Coke and Poland's Lot Airlines.

"We live in a world with personalized feeds and we like to think when we look at them they are built for us," D'Arcy said at a news conference at the Cannes Lions advertising festival last week.

Facebook, which registers 4 billion video views daily, is touting its site, and that of its Instagram platform, as a canvas on which ad agencies can tell stories and experiment with brand-sponsored photography, videos that allow users to swipe for panoramas, funny short films and spectacular still photos.

-- Bloomberg News

Hulu customers offered Showtime for $9

LOS ANGELES -- The price of Showtime is being trimmed to $9 a month for Hulu subscribers in a deal that will make it the first premium pay TV service offered through Hulu.

That's less than the $11 a month it costs to access Showtime's app on its own and would raise the price of Showtime plus Hulu Plus to $17 a month.

Showtime shows will be integrated into the Hulu platform and be available ahead of the July 12 premiere of Season 3 of Ray Donovan.

Showtime, owned by CBS Corp., has been pushing distribution of its service separate from traditional cable and satellite TV packages in the last month, similar to rival HBO. Earlier this month, Showtime announced its app would be available on Apple TVs, Roku streaming equipment and Sony's PlayStation Vue online TV service.

Showtime is also available from traditional cable and satellite TV providers for $10 a month to existing TV subscribers.

Showtime CEO Matt Blank said that prices are set by retailers. He told The Associated Press in an interview, "Hulu is in fact subsidizing the price difference."

He also said he wasn't worried about the lower price causing existing Showtime customers on other platforms to switch. "I don't think someone is going to drop a big package of video services to save a dollar on Showtime."

Showtime has nearly 24 million existing subscribers while Hulu Plus has nearly 9 million.

Tim Connolly, Hulu's senior vice president of distribution and strategic partnerships, said the price cut was a way to "reward our existing subscribers and attract new ones."

SundayMonday Business on 06/29/2015

Upcoming Events