Apple Campus 2: The Hub Of Innovation

Apple Campus 2 becomes a new buzzword in tech fraternity

Apple Inc. is on the verge of coming up with Apple Campus 2. The company is striving hard to come up with a state of the art campus thus; for the same reason they have also revealed the architectural renderings for some buildings within the campus. The company also surfaced the footage for the building, which will be in ring shape. The drone footage depicts the extensive measures taken by the company to complete construction by 2017.

The architectural renderings for the upcoming campus highlights about the construction of various food shacks, maintenance sheds, and reception centers within the premise. The tech giant has presented this to the Cupertino City Council where they are optimistic about getting the approval during the hearing.

The company is constructing the reception buildings, one of which is at Tantau Avenue and the other will be at Wolfe Road. The idea behind constructing this is to promote the remaining ring shaped campus. Two food centers and maintenance shed spanning an area of 5,776 square feet will be made. These facilities will be devoted to guests and employees. The recent initiative is in accordance to its strategy of having similarity in all its buildings.

The campus will also boast of an on-field theatre service, an underground auditorium that is 120,000 square foot, new glass panes for windows, circular outbuilding, a massive parking space, a fitness center spanning 100,000 square foot, outdoor dining area and a lot more. All this clearly indicates that the campus will be a pleasant addition to the company’s stature. People will be kept in consideration and all the steps of completion will be promptly delivered to Apple fans via Mr. Sinfield’s drone footages.

Now, the development of the 2.8 million square foot campus continues. Mr. Tim Cook believes that the first batch of employees to move to the campus will begin in 2017. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the City Council has demanded two changes in the campus which is the movement of the fence that can be seen from the reception building at Tantau Avenue and a redesigned fence.

It is quite evident that Apple is particular about all the details regarding its campus. This campus is expected to be an architectural wonder equipped with futuristic technology. The company does not just care about the aesthetics of its campuses but it can also been seen in the way Apple Stores have been designed. Mr. Jony Ive and Ms. Angela Ahrendts, the retail chief need to be given credit for their precision and eye for details. The company wants to remain ahead of all its competitors and the same devotion can be seen in the way they care about the smallest details. Apple Campus 2 is looked forward by the entire tech fraternity. 

Aliaba Invests $1 Billion In Lazada Group

Alibaba has announced to invest $1 billion in the Singaporean e-commerce firm to expand its international footprints

Alibaba Group Holding has said to not stop investing in the South Asian markets. The online retailing giant realizes the importance of the new lucrative consumer markets in which it is constantly making deals and acquisitions to strengthen its position. On top of that, the company wants improve its international market presence as at this moment it is currently very low or negligible. Alibaba holds an 80 percent market share in China but it has now switched its mind towards the international markets specifically India, South Korea, and United States of America.

For that matter, the company has announced to agree a deal for buying a controlling stake in Lazada which is a Southeast Asian online retailer. The move comes as a part of its vigorous international market expansion plans. It is believed that the agreed deal is worth at a massive $1 billion from which the newly issued shared in Lazada worth half the investment and the remaining half would be used in acquiring shares from the existing shareholders. Michael Evans, the President of Alibaba, said in a statement that this investment will assist the company to expand its footprints in the Southeast Asia.

He said, “With the investment in Lazada, Alibaba gains access to a platform with a large and growing consumer base outside China, a proven management team and a solid foundation for future growth in one of the most promising regions for e-commerce globally.”

The CEO of Lazada Group, Max Bittner, is also excited with this opportunity and said that he is thrilled with the deal offered by Alibaba Group. He said that the transaction would help Lazada to move closer towards its goal of providing access to more than 560 million customers in the region to the ‘broadest and most unique assortment of products’.

Rocket Internet of Germany had a 17.9 percent stake in Lazada of which it has agreed to sell 9.1 percent stake for $137 million in cash only. It will still keep a hold to the remaining 8.8 percent of its stake in Lazada. Apart from this, Tesco which is one of the supermarket giants in the UK decided to sell 8.6 percent equity stake in the e-commerce firm for $129 million. It keeps the remaining of 8.3 percent stake.

The reason behind buying Lazada is that the e-commerce giant Alibaba wants the buyers and sellers on its platforms to expand their reach of products in the Southeast Asian market. And Lazada has acted quickly acted upon the deal. Reportedly, it has already set up a delivery service, payment options, and supply chains in the regions in which it is doing business.

Marie Sun, who is a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said in an interview to CNBC that she believes that the e-commerce market in the Southeast Asia is still at an infancy stage and is not developed as of yet if compared to the likes of China and United States. She added, “So if they can dominate the market when the mobile internet penetration increases in the region, Alibaba can benefit in the longer term.”

Alibaba Completes Acquisition Of Youku Tudou

Alibaba has paid $4 billion for the outstanding shares in order to complete the acquisition of the Chinese video giant, Youku Tudou

Alibaba Group Holding is constantly looking for opportunities to expand and improve its media division by making deals and acquisitions. The company was said to acquire the YouTube of China in order to not only bolster the media presence but also generate more traffic to its e-commerce marketplaces. This is not only being done from the video sector but the company expects its financial subsidiary and its movie and film subsidiary to bring more traffic to its online platforms one way or another.

Youku Tudou is known as the YouTube of China which is leading the online video site which has the majority market share of China. Alibaba Group already had a stake in the video platform and it was expected to either buy more stakes or go for a takeover in the coming times. The Chinese e-commerce giant recently revealed that it has completed the takeover of ‘Youku Tudou’. 

Youku Tudou is the result of a merger of the two Chinese firms happened back in 2012 which initially formed the online video platform. Ever since then, it is the number one destination for all Chinese users to stream content.

The negotiations as well as the deal were private which it revealed in November last year. The shareholders of Youku approved the sale of the video streaming giant in March. Youku Tudou was valued at $5.40 billion in the market and Alibaba had to pay $27.6 per New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listed ads. Alibaba and its owner ‘Jack Ma’ previously owned close to a fifth of company through the funding of Yunfeng fund. Hence the online retailer paid for the outstanding shares only which accounted to $4 billion via YK subsidiary.

The online video streaming platform defines itself as a “leading multi-screen entertainment and media company in China” and as “China’s leading Internet television platform.”

The streaming businesses in China are constantly striving to build and gain market share by improving technology one way or another. Their main aim is to capitalize the mobile market but the revenue growth has ‘outstripped’ profitability. Variety reported, “For the 2014 calendar year Youku Tudou reported losses of $135 million (RMB837 million), up from a loss of $92 million (RMB600 million) in 2014.”

Youku does face competition from a domestic rival named iQIYI, which is experiencing loss in the market. Due to not keeping up with the market pace, the company might be subject for a buyout proposal in the coming times, which would see the founder Gong Yu and Robin Li (founder of Baidu) to pay $2.8 billion in order to remove it from the parent company. iQIYI’s parent company is Baidu.

Alibaba Group is increasing its status in the media division and its product portfolio is expanding day by day. The company’s interests include Alibaba Pictures Group, which is a producer and investor in films domain, stake in Wasu Media, and Hong Kong’s leading newspaper South China Morning Post.

Boeing Gets New Orders For 747

Boeing has managed to receive four new orders for 747, worth $1.5 billion

Boeing Corporation manages to get order for its 747 jumbo jets worth $1.5 billion, which is a major step it as it was struggling to attain sales for its products. The airplane maker has not disclosed who the client is for this jumbo aircraft but it can be assumed that this mystery customer might be an airline, it made confirmation of these orders on April 8.

The aerospace company has made huge job cuts recently in order to save costs, reduce the prices of its products, and beat its major rivals in the market such as Airbus. Boeing confirmed the good news of receiving orders on Thursday, which is big for the company as it could not deliver the jet a year before. The first new order was disclosed of the 747-8F in December, it leased this product to a Russian firm, AirBridgeCargo, which signed for 20 of the airplane makers jets.

Boeing Co. website has the data of the order and it can be accessed bot the customer is not mentioned yet. This is a major step forward for the company for the 747-8, which has been in the market since the 1970s. In 2015, it only received two orders for this product at a price of $379 million. It has even reduced the production for this product at rate of six planes each year, as the company was not getting the right amount of orders to mass-produce the jet.

The commercial airplane, 747 has now managed to receive 23 orders since March out of which two of these jumbo jets have been manufactured for Transaero Airlines. Next week will mark this jumbo jets birthday, it had made it in the market for 50 years. The US jet maker managed to deliver 121 of its plane, 737 in the first quarter, which was the same as last year. It has reported 139 orders rather than 116; it is now focusing on making the deliveries on time.

Boeing was manufacturing 12 '747' jumbo jets each year, the number has gone down to 6 per year now. It has received numerous orders from the US Air Force as it focuses to renew its fleet and fighter planes. The US jet manufacturer is now expecting orders and trades globally within this year increasing the air cargo demand by 4% according to the marketing vice president of the organization, Randy Tinseth. It is now hoping to increase the power of its management and make the decision making as efficient as possible. It is facing its competition head to head, making efforts to lower its prices and attract as many customers as possible. 

Amazon Inc. Is On A Role

Amazon's cloud computing division has crossed 1 million users and will soon become $10 billion business

Amazon Inc. is on a roll. It does not matter whether it is the main e-commerce business or the cloud computing business or even the streaming service, Amazon is killing it in all the divisions. The company is already the uncrowned king of the online retail industry and it is thriving and striving to become the biggest and largest cloud computing division in as well in the tech sector. Last year, the CEO of the company Jeff Bezos said that its cloud computing business known as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a $5 billion business.

Being a $5 billion business in the cloud market is a huge achievement and a company whose main business is e-commerce is giving a very tough time to the likes of the companies including Microsoft and Google etc.  However, Amazon’s businesses are significantly thriving in the market. For that matter, it is believed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon be a $10 billion business this year. Jeff Bezos wrote this in a letter to shareholders.

According to the note written by Bezos, it is believed that “While Amazon as a whole "became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from organizations of every size across nearly every industry.”

Amazon Web Services was launched back in March 2006 hence it is now a 10 years old cloud computing division which has prospered well enough to become one of the main businesses of the company. It initially began as Simple Storage Service (S3) provider and then later expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) months later. Its basic task was to allow the clients to give access of the virtual machines over the internet on rental basis. Furthermore, AWS’ services also allowed developers to obtain enough computing capacity without operating their own servers. Numerous startups have also built their businesses on Amazon’s cloud only.

However it is not just small companies to which Amazon Web Services offer its services to but the big name of today’s industry such as Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix, and Pinterest.

Bezos added, “Today, AWS offers more than 70 services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, and enterprise applications. We also offer 33 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, with another five regions and 11 Availability Zones in Canada, China, India, the US, and the UK to be available in the coming year.” 

End-to-End Encryption Implemented on WhatsApp

WhatsApp now has advanced security, any communication done on the platform is completely secure.

Amid all the debates circling around privacy and data encryption that most of the technology companies have been caught up in, Facebook Inc. has rolled out advanced encryption for its mobile messaging app, WhatsApp. To ensure maximum security in its data encryption initiative, the social media network has taken almost one and a half year to roll out the perfect update.

Strong end-to-end encryption has been activated on the mobile messaging app across all mobile platforms. In order to get this latest update, WhatsApp users are required to upgrade their WhatsApp version to the latest one. All content, communication and media that will be shared on the messaging platform will now be protected by default. By protection here, we mean that even the company itself will not be able to access the data shared across the platform.

Facebook’s subsidiary has crossed the one billion user’s mark earlier this year, so it is safe to say that over one seventh of the world’s population is active on the mobile messaging app now – and all these users now have strong encryption security which means that it’s a milestone achieved in both the tech industry as well as the US authorities.

The encryption status is usually seen by a user at the top of the chat since the apps client makes the user aware of the chat’s encryption status. This will serve as a transitional phase for all the users since the encryption message will be right in their face on the chat. However, it should be mentioned that all those users that do not have the latest version of WhatsApp, they will not be able to access the new end-to-end encrypted security.

With the help of this latest development, any content exchanged via communication on the platform is not being stored on the company’s servers. Furthermore, the company does not even hold a decryption keys for these chats. It’s quite evident what the company has tried to do, they don’t want to be able to give any data to the authorities even if they have a warrant for it.

Recently, there was dispute between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the technology giant over an iPhone that belonged to one of the suspects in the San Bernardino Attack back in December. There was dispute because the government wanted the company to unlock the iPhone so that the authorities can get access to the data on the suspect’s smartphone however the company decline to comply. Apple helped the authorities as much as it could however when it came to creating a backdoor in the encrypted data stored on the device, the tech giant declined to do so.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp came up with it’s on advanced encryption software, it is the latest method of securing all forms of communication done on the platform. Many companies were in the favor of Apple during that showdown between the two. 

Qualcomm Up's Its Virtual Reality Game a bit

The chipmaker is advancing its chips to enhance the Virtual Reality experience for the customers

2015 was not that bad of a year for the smartphone industry as some might suggest otherwise. It should be mentioned that even though the previous year was not as bad as expected; the growth is likely to come across pressure in the future. Gartner, an IT research firm suggests that after skyrocketing years of growth in the smartphone industry, the industry will grow by only 2.6% in sales during the current year while the consumers spending in the specific category will be of 1.2%.

However, the worst is for the mobile chip maker Qualcomm Inc. as the forecast suggests that its mobile phone sales are forecasted to be flattened. Furthermore, Apple, Inc. one of the chipmaker’s biggest customers witnessed a decline in its sales and a drop in its quarterly revenue for the first time in the last 13 years. The company has been downgraded by analysts due to the financial earnings of the first quarter of the current fiscal year and the guidance for the upcoming quarter.

Having said that, the Virtual Reality technology has been sparking up; every technology companies wants to develop a VR headset for its customers. The Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset is a much anticipated product that is scheduled to start shipping on March 28. While HTC’s Vive device will start it’s shipping a week later. However, like any other technology, customers will take time to get on board with it and get used to the idea of this technology. But it does seem like customers are anxiously waiting to get their hands on the VR headset.

How does Qualcomm fit into this? Well, the chipmaker has decided to unleash the potential of its Snapdragon 820 processor as it wants to ensure that it gets its fair share of the VR market pie. It has made its VR-ready chip to the developers with the help of the SDK – software development kit that it recently launched for IOS so that developers can start working on applications for the VR headsets. The Snapdragon downsizes some of the downsides of the VR experience which includes latency while making the experience more enjoyable as it enhances the VR world.

The biggest issue that the users have come across up till now is that of latency or buffering; some of the users who tested the device for the first time also got nauseous because of that but with the help of Qualcomm’s SD kit, developers are able to reduce latency by at least 50%.

VR has become a huge opportunity for the chip manufacturing company since the mobile market is ready to hit a saturating point the world of virtual reality is going to be the saving grace for the company. In addition to that, its rival Intel is also working on alternatives so that its reliance on the slow PC market lessens. However, its rival is working on chips to run of cloud based data centers, wearables and Internet of Things. It’s working on a few things unlike Qualcomm. But intel also realizes what Qualcomm says, that the VR world is a much appealing world for the customers and is the future.