Alibaba Financial Affiliate Might Expand in Thailand

Ant financial might increase its stake by 10% in Thailand,s Ascend Money to dominate the online payments industry..

Alibaba Group Holding Limited’s financial affiliate is aiming to purchase a 20% share in Thai organization Ascend Money. This agreement will probably increase the exposure of the Chinese online retailer in the Southeast Asian region. Alipay, a division of the Hangzhou based organization’s affiliate Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group— called Ant Financial- is also interested in using an option, which would permit it to further add to its stake in the financial service provider to 30%, revealed a statement posted on the China’s Ministry of Commerce website.

On 18^th June 2016, the company stated that the proposed investment was conditional on ratification from the Chinese Commerce ministry’s antimonopoly division. The proposal marks Ant financial’s recent move to grow into the Southeast Asian region. Now, the Chinese E-commerce company’s financial arm operates in 70 states and has received a funding of $4.5 billion. Ant has stated it is interested in growing across the globe to permit  Alipay’s user base of 450 million  for  using its online-payments application.

Ascend Money Holding is business division of recently established Ascend Group, which was developed in initial 2015 as it was sold by one of Thailand’s leading telecommunication service providers True Corp. Ascend Group is a subsidiary of huge Thai agribusiness conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group. The businesses of Ascend Group, ranging from digital marketing to venture capital, electronic payments as well as E-Commerce, have grown to 5 other Southeast Asian states. These include Phillipines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The public relations office of Ascend Group stated Saturday the CEO of the organization  Punnamas Vichitkulwongs had nothing to say regarding Ant financial’s plan to purchase the stake. The Chinese online shopping platform operator has set its transaction volume targets high for the upcoming 4 years, stating by 2020, it wishes to grow its yearly transaction volume to over a sum of $1 trillion. “What I can share with you is that, in four years, we have a very clear goal which is, in fiscal 2020, Alibaba wants to be the first company to have a retail market base scale of over $1 trillion, so that is our clear goal in the next three to four years,” stated CEO of Alibaba Group Daniel Zhang while addressing a conference recently.

The web retailer also estimated a 48% growth for the financial year-end in March, as its executives tried to calm down the concerns of the investors regarding its growth. Despite of the increased rivalry and Chinese sluggish economic growth, the company is yet optimistic regarding its forecast. Executive Chairman and co-founder of Alibaba Jack Ma pointed out in a conference that his organization is about to change how it reports its Gross Merchandise Volume(GMV), since he stated it is not the only standard financial measure to assess the performance of the organization.

Apple Enhances its Social Network Messages

The American social network operator improves its social platform Messages to increase its customer base..

At WWDC, Apple has announced that it had laser-focused on Messages –a place where one has the most secretive digital talks with his or her friends and family along with huge volume of image sharing and the like.

The latest iOS 10 will be accompanied with impressive new features which will be able to improve users’ private communications with Donald as well as other stickers, increase the size of emojis, even use applications such as DoorDash for ordering lunch with friends, without quitting the chat.

Messaging applications have turned out to be the most used app in the tech world’s as they glue the people together and keep them connectedwith the most significant services and people in their lives. Isn’t it mimicking an operating system? That is the idea. Currently, while using Facebook Messenger, a user can request an Uber ride or pay money to his or her friend and this is how far tech giant wants to take its app.

A lot of applications are providing varied services to their users. For instance, in China, people use WeChat to pay their every bill- even traffic tickets. Alphabet Inc.’s Google upcoming Allo application will let one reserve dinners for friends. In Slack, the growing business-focused messaging facility, one can share articles easily without ever quitting as well as add jobs to a shared to-do list.

With huge levels of openness and import functionality- as well as a handful of well-placed stickers- the Apple iPad maker’s messaging platform can take it to the future. Sending a text-only message will look similar to sending a telegraph when iOS is launched. A lot of its features resemble to already existing Snapchat and it can be rightly assumed that the tech titan is aiming to target the teens among whom Snapchat is enormously popular.  

There is Invisible Ink masking a message or picture up till a user swipe for the grand reveal. The feature Celebrate automatically activates an animation taking over the screen when he or she types any festive message such as “Happy Birthday!”. One can alter his or her message bubble size, sketch on videos and pictures with his or her finger.  As far as emoji features are concerned when one types, his or her keyboard will propose emojis. A user can easily also swap words out for emojis with a click.

The wait for using the feature is not long and they will be integrated into the latest iPhones to be launched in the fall of this year.

Qualcomm Dominance Shaken

The San Diego chip maker is not the only chip supplier to world's most valuable company..

Qualcomm Inc. will no longer remain the only chip supplier to Silicon Valley tech giant, Apple Inc. Like its rival, Samsung Electronics Co., the tech titan is taking a step forward to diversify its chip suppliers for its new handset –dubbed as iPhone 7. But, the blow hasn’t been too harsh for the chip maker as expected earlier. The San Diego, Calif. firm hasn’t lost his client completely and its chips are still being installed in the handsets sold through Verizon Communications Inc.  

For the iPhones use on AT&T Inc., the tech behemoth has opted for Intel’s modem chips. Also, the latest supplier chips will also be part of the smartphones for several foreign markets. The good news for Qualcomm is that the smartphones traded in China will be run on its chip, according to the sources privy to the matter who disclosed the information on the condition of anonymity.

No representative from any company came forward to comment on the latest news.

For Intel, winning a contract from the tech leviathan itself is a big achievement. The world’s largest chipmaker has sluggish growth since PC market started to decline. It was nevertheless necessary for it to step into other markets which have been equally saturated as well. So far, it only managed to gain a single percent of market share. The latest win of Intel has sent a stifle dent on Qualcomm’s once bolstering dominance. However, the $77 billion organization was ready for such times. Earlier in April, CEO Steve Mollenkopf opined that one of its major customers is likely to diversify its supplier base. All eyes were set on Apple as company’s other major client –Samsung –has had the practice of diverse supplier base for a long time.

According to analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, Stacy Rasgon, Qualcomm gets around $15 per phone from the tech giant which accumulated to around $3.47 billion during tech titan’s fiscal year 2015. It is likely that a step back from the once held monopoly will affect the bottom line of the company but its CEO is confident that it will bounce back in 2016 second half.

For San Diego based chipmaker, it is important to have firm grip on its business. Its stock has fallen close to 2.09% and now rests at $53.83. This year, the stock had managed to go up by 10%. It had had worst decline in the past years when a flaw in its chip ended in suspension from Samsung who opted for its in-house chip rather than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810.  

The current year will be important for both chipmakers –Intel and Qualcomm. An analyst at BTIG LLC, Walt Piecyk has speculated that AT&T –having Intel’s chipset –is likely to sell close to 22 million and 23 million iPhones in the current and next year respectively. On the other hand, Verizon will sell close to 21 million and 22 million iPhones in 2016 and 2017 respectively. As of now, many analysts have expressed that Qualcomm’s modem chips performance is likely to outperform Intel’s. The future will tell whether the tech giant was prudent to gamble on the sales of its core products by bringing multiple modem chip suppliers. 

Mother Nature Troubled Amazon in Australia

 

A weekend storm has heavily  damaged Amazon's operations in Australia as their power failures were suffered by businesses for a long time period.

Amazon faces tough times in Australia after the Sydney storms halted the operations of number of Amazon Web Services consumers. As a result, a warning has been issued to Australia based businesses that they should spread the risk in their cloud computation operations across various different areas. The fierce storms that hit New South Wales, left clients of AWS including Stan and Domain, The Iconic, FoxTel and Domino’s Pizza without key systems or websites accessibility for hours.

The storms also serve as reality check and underline the fact that choosing cloud computing over on-premise hosting doesn’t mitigate the risk of expensive failure. The fiasco tarnished the organization’s image –which, over the years, represented strong reliance –and brought upon a huge humiliation for Amazon, which earned $2.57 billion sales revenue in the recent quarter. The catastrophe pointed out that the consumers who had acute trust on company were stopped from carrying out their trading from mid-afternoon till late morning on 6^th June 2016.

AWS didn’t respond to the questions when asked what caused the humungous failure. A spokesperson also refused to share views regarding whether affected enterprises would be eligible for compensation, and what destruction the failure has led to for its own local business.

It’s assumed that energy was lost in numerous systems in its own data center, prior to being restored around two hours and 30 minutes later. It then took a huge amount of time for certain systems to be re-booted as well as brought back online. Experts stated consumers who insisted that their data and every system that remained in the country had been affected, as other consumers traded normally after moving the data to Singapore.

Analyst at IBRS Joe Sweetney stated most would use the failure as an instance of why enterprises must not adopt cloud computation. Nevertheless, it was a big wake-up call for enterprises to organize their technology in such a manner that the failure of one data center wouldn’t be as fatal as the current one.

During weekend storms, outages were faced as over 226,000 houses as well as businesses lost energy. Public transport, bridges and roads were also harmed.  Mobile ordering and payment service provider AirService’s main provider is AWS, but had another one prepared to go in case of a failure.

"As amazing as AWS is, and we've been using it for a long time, we do understand that things can sometimes go wrong," AirService CEO Dominic Bressan stated..

Tesla to Hold its Gigafactory Celebration Next Month

The US EV maker will host a event on 29th July 2016 to celebrate the opening of its Gigafactory.

Tesla Motors will hold a“grand opening” event for its under-construction huge battery manufacturing plant outside the city of Reno in Nevada on the 29^th July 2016. The American electric vehicle maker revealed that date in an email to consumers who are winners of tickets to the celebration by referring over 5 customers in the company’s vehicle referral program.  A spokesman of Tesla confirmed that email but didn’t offer other information regarding the ‘Gigafactory’ event.

The email was shared on Reditt and the automaker confirmed with the publication Fortune that a consumer-focused launch event will be held in that night. The facility would not probably be entirely completely inside the upcoming 2 months, but the company has been holding smaller events in regions where the facility where building is complete.

SolarCity and Tesla hosted Nevada’s law makers for talks regarding the future of solar power in Nevada. The plant, which will be built at a cost of $5 billion to establish, was just  be 14% completed at the start of May, reported Bloomberg. The EV manufacturer is collaborating with the Japanese battery maker Corporation Panasonic to supply battery manufacturing equipment to it and share of financing.

Despite of the ongoing building of the facility, it is already manufacturing batteries that the company is delivering to companies, utilities and owners of buildings. These battery systems, which the California based organization launched 12 months ago, can be employed to store solar power at night and manage the energy grid in a better manner.

The company is establishing the facility to manufacture huge amounts of low-cost batteries for its upcoming electrically powered vehicles. It hopes to  cut down its battery costs by one-third least. The organization’s upcoming vehicle, Tesla Model 3 will be offered at a cost of $35,000, which is very lower when compared to the Model S price of $150,000.

In April, the company launched the mass-market EV, and rapidly racked up around 400,000 reservations for the vehicle. To fulfill the high levels of demand, the automaker has stated it will accelerate the car production in a considerable manner.

The automaker raised a sum of $1.7 billion soon in a follow-on offer to finance its rapid Model 3 production. The battery machinery used in the organization’s facility should expand the lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity capacity. The facility at its own will cover a space of 5.8 million square feet.

The company has rapidly forwarded its objective to manufacture half a million automobiles by 2018, 2 years before than estimated. It will release its Model 3 in 2017. To do so, the automaker will need a very large number of low-cost batteries. The huge Tesla factory will probably be producing at its full capacity by 2020, revealed a website. It will not only produce batteries to power EVs, but also manufacture stationery battery systems for storing solar energy at businesses and homes.