Facebook CEO asks People To Safeguard Whatsapp By Protesting

The American social networking service provider calls people to protest in a favor of a legislation aiming to safeguard WhatsApp from suspension

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Brazilians to raise a demand that his American social networking organization’s messaging service WhatsApp should never be suspended again on 2^nd May 2016 overturned the second suspension of the application in 5 months.  In a post on his Facebook page, Mark urged Brazilians to gather outside Brazil’s legislature Congress in Brasilia, which is the Brazilian capital at 2100 GMT( 6pm) on 4^th April 2016 to rally for favoring a law that would ban the internet services suspension in the future.

On 2^nd April 2016 WhatsApp was blocked in Brazil after a judge in the Brazilian state Sergpie ordered the 5 main telecoms of the country to suspend access to the application for 3 days. The reason behind the order wasn’t publicized. The suspension of the text message as well as internet voice telephone facility of WhatsApp for smartphones was lifted after around a day when an appeals judge on 3^rd April 2016 gave a ruling favoring an injunction by the lawyers of the organization.

You and your friends can help make sure this never happens again, and I hope you get involved,” Zuckerberg posted on the platform. He mentioned  a uniform resource locator  to a request, calling efforts made to suspend communication “very scary in a democracy”.

The block highlights increasing global tensions between the privacy concerns of the tech companies and efforts of the national authorities to use social network to gain details on potential criminal activities. The same judge in the state gave an order to imprison a Brazil-based official of Facebook in March in a battle over demands to reach the encrypted messaging facility of company under a drug trafficking probe.

On 2^nd April 2016, WhatsApp stated it was “disappointed” at the decision by judge to block its facilities. It stated it missed the utmost to collaborate with tribunals in Brazil, but it didn’t possess the details the court requested it to provide. Spokesman of Facebook Matt Steinfeld stated officials of WhatsApp recently had a meeting with judicial officals and law enforcers to enhance communication and clarify that the organization can’t see encrypted messages of users and doesn’t store them following transmission.

In 5 months, WhatsApp has been blocked second time in the nation.  A São Paulo state judge ruled it close down for 2 days on 15^th December, after the networking organization was unable to act according to a ruling. Another state court lifted that ban shortly afterwards.

The suspension on Monday angered a large number of people in the state, where the messaging service is by far the most famous messaging application and installed on over 90% of Android products.

Amazon Offers Prime Service To Previously Neglected Black Communities

The American online retailer to provide its Prime facility to the South side of Chicago, Bronx and Boston neighborhood of Roxbury

Amazon will offer same-day delivery service to the Bronx and the South side of Chicago, after being criticized by elected members that the data-driven service limitations of the organization left out a number of minority communities unjustly.

The American e-commerce company has promised to extend its free same-delivery facility in at least three cities after Bloomberg News conducted an analysis that laid emphasis on racial differences in places where the facility was offered in a number of cities including Washington, New York, Dallas, Chicago, Boston and Altanta.

The online retailer promised to deliver quickly to the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, which is pre-dominated by the black community recent week after being criticized for excluding it. Then the online retailer promised to bring the facility to the Bronx- the only city borough of New York excluded and the South side of Chicago, in letters written on April 29 to elected representatives of those regions.

The company started to offer its same-day delivery facility free of charge as a benefit of being an Amazon Prime member, which is offered at a price of $99 per year. It is currently offered in 27 metropolitan cities. The determination of the service boundaries were done by the number of Prime members in every region, nearly to warehouses where items are stored and the ability of the organization to look for delivery partners to serve a particular area.

US Representative Rush, who is an Illinois democrat advised the Federal Trade Commission to probe the same- day delivery limitations of Amazon to find out whether they were unjust or if the organization is employing misleading business practices that breach federal legislations. The Seattle based organization promised to offer the facility to the Bronx and the South side of Chicago “in coming weeks,” in similar letters written by Brian Huseman, who is the organization’s VP of public policy, to political leaders in those regions.

Race did not take part in the procedure, Amazon stated. In most cities, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Seattle, the online trading platform operator offered the facility throughout the region and there weren’t disparities. The company has highlighted that it’s a growing and new facility with limitations that are extending with the passage of time.

The Bloomberg Businessweek analysis laid emphasis upon how a number of data based decisions can lead to racially disparate results. Data scientists are studying that more closely in an effort to avoid such untargeted bias. Dinowitz and Diaz stated they were happy the web retailer is extending the facility to the Bronx. 

S&P Likely To Downgrade IBM

After dealing with slow sales for consecutive sixteen quarters, International Business Machine Corporation have received a warning from Standard & Poor’s that it is likely to be downgraded by the firm. The news affected the trading session of the company after S&P analysts slashed down their outlook to negative.

The once rapid pace of the tech industry has now declined and in the current year, the company stood at the bottom line of the index.

The enthusiasm of the investors had curbed after the tech giants including Apple, IBM, Alphabet, and Twitter posted disappointing results. The only company who stood at top is the social networking giant, Facebook.

The ratings have been demoted after the company’s years-long strategy to transition to higher-margin businesses failed to turn the company around. The Big Blue has invested a lot in the cloud computing businesses but it has been behind the strong competitors like Microsoft and Amazon.

An S&P credit analyst, John Moore cited, “The negative outlook reflects the company’s protracted negative operating trends and pressures to restore operating growth as it addresses shifting client needs and the increasing market prevalence of cloud-based technology solutions.”

For the latest quarter, the company’s sales declined 5% in comparison with the year earlier and stood at $18.7 billion while the profit fell 13%. Back in 2012, IBM landed on double A minus rating after having a single A plus rating for over a decade.

After the outlook was slashed down, the shares of the tech company fell 1% which accounted for a totaled 13% decline in the share value over the past year.

But the Big Blue opined that it has potential to sustain its position as a strong investment-grade organization. It further said that the company has exhaustive financial flexibility in order to effectively carry out its strategy and capital allocation plans.

According to FactSet, in the first quarter, the tech sector earnings are anticipated to shrink about 7% bearing a 5% decline in sales as the market narrowed down to its record high.

Recently, on Tuesday, the oil giant, Exxon Mobil, has faced demotion in its long-held credit rating of “triple A.” Similarly, a lot of other companies who have been at the high end of its current credit cycle will likely be under the axe of the company’s downgrading.

The McGraw Hill financial unit, S&P, historically downgrades more than four organizations for every group which it has upgraded in the first quarter.

All in all, at the market which closed on Wednesday, IBM stock stood at a price of $150.5.

Google Encourages Ventures To Turn Employees Into Entrepreneurs

Google has started an incubation program to help its workers found startups

Google is interested in keeping workers who want to establish their own company or enter a successful startup. So, it might establish an “in-house incubator” allowing Google workers to establish their startups inside the organization.

Codenamed “Area 120,” the initiative will be headed by the organization’s Vice President of Corporate Development and Bradley Horowitz, who runs Streams and Photos, revealed a technology industry publication, The Information.

 Information is being worked out, but the employees of the company will probably disclose their business plans to the incubator and, if ratified, can build on their own for months. Groups can follow by inviting Google to initially invest in the start-up.

Silicon Valley is full of companies running after ‘the next big thing’ – whether it is drones, augmented or virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or anything even more future-oriented. Huge companies such as Google risk missing out.

Former employees of Google have established huge companies like Instagram and Twitter. Building a program to reach the ground floor might let the Larry Page’s company retain those kinds of budding companies. Historically, incubators have not succeeded.

They are frequently not easy to implement within huge organizations with established bureaucracies. The “Area 120” program will probably make efforts to capitalize on the unique culture of the organization and learn from the most successful incubator of the Silicon Valley.

The Information told this established in-house incubator could be viewed as an expansion of the noted 20% time of Google – the idea that the workers of the organization can allocate one-fifth of their time to work on their own independent ventures.

Similarly, the organization is thinking to have “entrepreneurs in residence”— experienced founders who have managed their owned companies successfully – involved for additional guidance. Many companies are quite interested in startups – corporate project investment reached 15 years high in 2015, revealed National Venture Capital Association. 

Such incubators can be crucial in the quest of the company for innovation. It is a thing to inject cash into a current startup, said managing director of Menlo Ventures Matt Murphy. It requires a very different set of skills to incubate an emerging company or help its founder to turn his or her idea into a business.

The new incubation program could let Google prevent brain drain. Google has refused to comment. Shell, Nike, Samsung and AT&T have introduced similar programs in the past times.

Organizations expect these initiatives will help the development of new technology as well as new businesses with which they can collaborate with or takeover, whereas the founders can benefit from the brand name, personnel and technology of the company in the ideal manner. 

Alphabet Earnings Release

The internet search titan has reported healthy results but they fall short of analysts' expectations

Alphabet Inc. announced its quarterly earnings on Thursday which highlighted strong growth in the profits and revenue of the first quarter all due to the Google’s business’s rapid growth on mobile devices.

Although the company was able to post healthy increases however it did miss to meet the Street expectations. It is due to the widening losses of the company from its bets on blue-sky projects like home automation and driverless cars.

The expenses of the company were a bit higher than expected which slightly pulled down the revenue. According to the executives of Mountain View, Calif. firm, the high cost of advertising had increased the expenses. The advertising costs include payment to advertising partner as the Alphabet Inc.’s subsidiary’s ad revenue is generated through middlemen and from mobile devices.

Google is the frontrunner of digital-ad platform and is looking forward to capitalize on the shift to mobile, globally, by advertisers and users alike to make the accessibility of the Internet through mobile devices convenient.

A vast majority of smartphones come with Google as their default search engine. Last fall, the subsidiary added a third ad ahead of results of mobile-search, just after it declared that, for the first time, the mobile device searches have gone ahead of the traditional computers.

The second most valuable company didn’t disclose segregated account of the results generated from the mobile however Merkle Inc. –a digital marketing firm has cited that, in the first quarter, Google’s mobile-search results have doubled. For the first time ever, research eMarketer has projected that for this year, the majority of the Google’s ad revenue will be generated through such devices.

But the transition does have some unwanted disadvantages as well. The ads on mobile generate less income as users may not prefer following the purchases on the devices’ small screens. The $528 billion organization expressed that its per ad average cost fell by 9% across all devices. Also, Google has to subsequently share the smartphones ad revenue with telecom carriers and device makers.

On the conference call, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat expressed to the investors that the first quarter showed the healthy momentum gained by the business across the world. She added that the pivotal trigger for such growth was the increasing number of mobile searches by the consumers.

The investors were rejoiced when last year Ms. Porat joined now Alphabet Inc., after serving a considerable amount of time in Morgan Stanley. Ms. Porat brought some spending restraints and the expenses grew slower than revenue by 16.4% and reached at     $14.92 billion. According to the executives, the expenses grew because of the vigorous hiring –around 2,300 employees were hired making the total workforce of 64,115.

Just few months after joining the internet search titan, Ms. Porat           restructured the company into Alphabet Inc. and split the profitable sector Google from its long term loss bearing bets including experimental lab X and Nest –home automation company.

It was the second time for the company, on Thursday, to separately disclose the financial position of those bets and it showed a widening loss of $802 million from a prior year’s same period’s $633 million. Whereas, revenue was reported to be $166 million –more than double in comparison with last year.

For the quarter, the company reported $4.21 billion net income –or an EPS of $6.02. A year earlier, the company had managed to generate an income of $3.52 billion or $5.10 EPS.

According to Thomson Reuters, the analysts had earlier expected the company to disclose an EPS of $7.97. Moreover the revenue was reported to be $20.26 –an increase of 17% from last year’s $17.26 but falling short of the expectations of $20.37 billion.

Yahoo Quarterly Earnings

The internet search engine posted sinking revenue again while simultaneously beating the analysts' expectations

On Tuesday, the internet search giant, Yahoo! Inc., reported its earnings which, once again, showed the shrinking revenue of the company. But, the CEO, Marissa Mayer has said that she is actively involved in making a “beneficial corporate sale” possible. She also acknowledged the company’s shareholders as its “top priority.”

The struggling company reported EPS of $0.8 which was significantly lower than the EPS it had reported in the last year’s same period of $0.15. Additionally, the revenue of the company shrank to $1.09 billion, in comparison with year-earlier figure of $1.23 billion.

Still, the company’s results were slightly better than the analysts’ expectations. According to Thomson Reuters’ consensus estimate, Wall Street analysts project the Internet search portal to declare EPS of $0.7 on revenue of $1.08 billion.

On the conference call, the CEO expressed that the company has had a fairly good start but she also emphasized the point that the company’s management has put the shareholders at top and therefore it is urgently dealing with the auction process.

She said that the company’s management and those charged with governance are dedicated to maximize the shareholders’ value and are open to “any strategic alternatives.” The deadline for preliminary bids passed this Monday however Ms. Mayer didn’t disclose anything regarding the bidding details nor identify any bidders.

Sources privy to the matter, however, have leaked the names of the potential bidders. Verizon Communications Inc., buyout firm TPG, and U.K. publisher Daily Mail are among the few bidders who have submitted their proposals. People familiar with the matter has also revealed that former Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn and investor groups like Vista Equity Partners and Bain Capital have also submitted their bids. In addition to them, around the time of Yahoo’s bidding deadline, two private-equity firms Advent International and Silver Lake had shown interest in the bidding process too.

The sources close to the matter added on that the proposed biddings range between $4 billion and $8 billion.

The Silicon Valley Internet search portal has been under a lot of pressure to speed up its process of having an appropriate sale before the annual shareholder meeting this summer. It is probable that the investor may vote in favor of Starboard Value LP’s suggestion of replacing the entire board with new directors. Currently, the board has nine executives.

Earlier, Starboard has complained about the slow progress the company made in the sale and the heavy influence of Ms. Mayer in the sale process as it is likely to create a conflict of interest in the process. According to Wall Street Journal, several people familiar with the matter told it that many potential buyers have been irritated by the company’s managers lacking of providing detailed answers about the company’s business prospects. Probably this is the reason that an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, Youssef Squali said in an interview that, “There is a fair amount of skepticism about their willingness to really sell the business.”

Ms. Mayer however said that she and the board have been actively involved in the process and that the company is “moving expeditiously.’

The time will tell whether the company was able to make adequate financial sale. As of now, Yahoo! Inc.’s stock closed at $36.33. 

Apple Diverts Public Attention To Care For Planet

The smartphone maker takes a green initiative to raise money to help WWF advance its environmental and climate initiatives

The recent efforts by Apple to trumpet its environment-friendly initiatives have been majorly concerned about production and supply chain, but on April 14, 2016, the American consumer electronics manufacturer launched a sensational new initiative targeted at a large number of customers.

The smartphone maker is launching out “Apps for Earth,” within which App Store will feature 27 famous applications for 10 days – including Jurassic World: The Game, SimCity BuildIt and Angry Birds 2 – that have included new environment-friendly content for Earth day.

Money paid to purchase any of these 27 apps, or buying within them, will then provide support to the World Wildlife Fund, to help progress it’s environmental and climate initiatives.

Assuming the large size of App Store itself – which has many users in 155 countries – and the large reach of some of the apps (the download of Angry Birds II has been done  85 million times, for example), it just may become one of the far-reaching environment friendly initiatives of the corporate sector.

One of the world’s largest companies, Apple, has announced a range of high-profile green strategies. For example, in October, the organization announced its new solar power plants in China.

In the last month at the recent special event of the organization, VP of Apple for environment, policy, and social initiatives and former director of EPA, Lisa Jackson, announced renewable energy powers 93% of the global facilities of the company. Now, when it is not easy to make people focus on the environment, the company is in effect developing a huge new megaphone.

While giving an interview to Post, Apple's Lisa told the company is seriously expanding its green strategies in new directions. WWF CEO and President Carter Roberts said, “Elevating these issues on a global scale through an unprecedented platform like this is huge,”

WWF’s own app will be among the 27 apps featured, and the environmental activist group will be donated the funds that are raised by featuring applications for Earth and invest those to conserve endangered species,  freshwater, oceans, forest and battle climate change.

The “Apps for Earth,” will start from April 14 to April 24. April 22 is the Earth Day. A large number of app developers who are taking part in the conservation program stated that a green strategy at this scale is comparatively new for them, but suits their values and they are excited to become a part of it.

Jackson claimed that the initiative might be the only means, with which Apple prompts its large number of consumers to help the cause of the environmentalists.