Apple Spotify Clash

The tech giant is making most of its strong position to compete with rivals..

In the course of recent weeks, Apple Inc. has demonstrated that its Apple Music, is focusing on Spotify, presently the world's number one music service with boastful subscriptions of more than 30 million. At the point when initially presented a year ago, Apple Music offered a three-month free trial membership to the a large number of iPhone and App Store clients for whom the organization as of now had installment data.

That was a gigantic advantage for Apple and the organization now guarantees more than 15 million paid users of Apple Music, a confirmation more to the force of Apple's tremendous client base than to anything about Apple Music. Spotify, a very much subsidized start-up unicorn, has as of late run head-on into the Apple juggernaut.

The primarily and current issue was Apple's dismissal of Spotify's iOS application’s update that would have utilized Spotify's own particular charging framework instead of Apple's. Had Apple consented to the change, it would have sliced Spotify's installments to Apple at significant rate. Since iOS applications are a blessing that continues giving for Apple, the tech goliath squandered no time spurning the modified Spotify application.

Spotify has been putting forth its defense in Washington and in Europe, and it has discovered some backing. Congressperson Elizabeth Warren as of late included Apple as one of a few tech firms that utilize their equipment and programming stages as an instrument to "snuff out the opposition."

A second issue appeared last Friday when Apple presented a proposition to the U.S. Copyright Board that the organization claims rearranges the way songwriting sovereignties are paid. The present framework depends on an arcane rate sheet that relies on how the music is played. For instance, rates are diverse for radio plays and advanced gushing. Apple's proposition is basic: gushing administrations pay 9.1 cents for each 100 melody plays.

No matter how simple it sounds it is a shot directly at the heart of Spotify which would need to pay considerably more in sovereignties than it right now does. That would practically constrain the Sweden-based support of raise its month to month membership rate from $9.99, the same membership expense charged by Apple Music, which hit its own arrangements with rights holders and, apparently, would keep working under the terms of those arrangements.

Regardless of whether Apple makes a benefit on Apple Music is not the point. Obviously Apple can utilize its huge accumulated money and benefits from iPhone deals to put some genuine monetary hurt on contenders. The danger for Apple is utilizing its estimating energy to kill a contender, a strategy nearly ensured to bring about the fierceness of Senator Warren and different legislators of both U.S. political gatherings who share her perspectives on rivalry and markets.

The Copyright Royalty Board will take a gander at recommendations from other music administrations as it gets ready to set its rate for the four-year time frame starting in 2018. Filings were expected July 15, however the Board has not uncovered whether any others were supplied or the substance of contending recommendations.

Tesla Predictions Look Shady

The automaker giant announcement of investing in SolarCity raises multiple questions.

Tesla Motors has made to almost every news post the fatal accident that happened in Florida and claimed life of one. The car involved in the accident was Tesla’s widely famous Model S and the vehicles autonomous cruise control –dubbed as Autopilot –is said to be the main reason of the casualty. From then on, grave discussions about the future of self-driving cars overridden automaker’s another matter of more near-term interest, the Palo Alto, Calif. firm’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk offer to buy SolarCity.

According to Mr. Musk, the gathering of battery storage, electric cars, and solar panels under one corporate ceiling would generate operational synergies which subsequently will let Tesla to become a $1 trillion market cap company. That’s approximately 32 times current valuation of the auto-tech giant.

Neither organization, although supported significantly by government subsidies, has ever posted a yearly profit. A year ago Tesla lost $889 million—about three times as much as in 2014—while financial loss of SolarCity multiplied to $769 million. The investors might feel a sensation that this has happened before as a shadow has fallen over the sunlight based industry.

In April, SunEdison petitioned for section 11 insolvency post an Icarus-like fall. A year back, previous CEO Ahmad Chatila anticipated that his organization would be worth $350 billion by 2020—around 35 times its business sector capitalization at the time. After nine months, the stock cost had dove by 99%, to mere 21 cents per share.

SunEdison's stock first started to tumble last July when Mr. Chatila offered paying $2.2 billion for the housetop sunlight based installer Vivint Solar (the arrangement was scrapped in March), which lobbyist financial specialists bludgeoned as overrated. It soon turned out to be clear that SunEdison's development, empowered by obligation and entangled money related designing, was unsustainable.

Despite Mr. Chatila's cheerful predictions, the organization had neglected to acquire a benefit in five years. An inner test in April blamed an absence of bookkeeping controls and an "excessively idealistic society and its tone at the top." The Tesla-SolarCity arrangement is an all-stock trade, however the SunEdison disaster is a blazing yellow light.

Tesla intends to wrench out 500,000 Model 3 cars in 2018—around 10 times its aggregate conveyances a year ago—and one million every year by 2020. However it isn't clear how quick the organization will have the capacity to increase generation at its not-yet-finished Gigafactory in Reno, Nev., and whether interest for the mass-market electric cars will meet Mr. Musk's objectives. Just 115,000 electric autos were sold a year ago across the country, around 0.7% of aggregate U.S. auto deals.

SolarCity has additionally over and over missed establishment targets and faces solid headwinds. Utility electric-rate increments have hindered in the midst of softening item costs, which has hosed interest for sun powered establishments. Industry controllers in numerous states have diminished or are thinking about downsizing net metering, which pays clients the retail control rate for the overabundance era that they dispatch to the network. After Nevada thinned down its net-metering endowments a year ago, SolarCity quit working together in the state.

Kroll Bond Rating Agency as of late cautioned that progressions to net metering like Nevada's may provoke sun oriented clients to renegotiate their agreements with organizations, for example, SolarCity. A lessening in rates would diminish money "accessible to the sun oriented organization, debtholders or assessment value speculators"— more dim mists for the sunlight based business.

However the determined government push for renewable energy and electric vehicle works for Tesla and SolarCity. In 2013, eight states drove by California required that 3.3 million electric autos be out and about by 2025. In the course of recent years, Tesla has made $580 million from offering "zero outflows vehicle" credits to other automobile creators. Interest for these credits could take off as car creators scramble to conform to the law, and as Tesla inclines up its Model 3 generation, Mr. Musk will have bounty to offer.

Tesla Have Delivery Growth In Second Quarter

After giving poor performance in first quarter, all eyes are set whether the company will be able to outperform it Q2 guidance or not..

In the first quarter, Tesla Motors delivery rate has been the worst. The automaker fell far below the expectations. Therefore, now, the investors will be closely eyeing automaker’s current quarter’s electric-car deliveries. Tesla’s second quarter report is expected to be made public sometime around July 1 and July 3 and the analysts and investors will get an idea about the company’s state of production.

Several analysts have projected that the Palo Alto, Calif. firm will be able to put forward year over year growth of 50%. Many investors are anticipating that a huge production constraint of first quarter will be made up by the company in the second quarter which will provide a coherent basis for the company to ramp up its production in the second half of the year.

With regards to its below expected performance earlier, several analysts are skeptical about the auto-tech giant’s capability to accelerate its production. In the first quarter, Tesla deliveries went up by 48% YOY but still it was lower than the company’s guidance.

To top that, the company didn’t give plausible reasons in its press release for such performance. It said: "The root causes of the parts shortages were: Tesla's hubris in adding far too much new technology to the Model X in version 1, insufficient supplier capability validation, and Tesla not having broad enough internal capability to manufacture the parts in-house. The parts in question were only half a dozen out of more than 8,000 unique parts, nonetheless missing even one part means a car cannot be delivered."

But, despite having worse-than-expected first-quarter deliveries, the Californian auto-tech giant is certain about accelerating its production. The optimism of the company can be backed by the fact that by the end of the year, the company is opting for to maintain its full-year guidance for 80,000 to 90,000. This guidance has a significant shift from the company’s prior 50,600 deliveries in 2015.

The grave question is that up to what level investors and analysts can expect the company regarding its production and deliveries in second quarter. According to statement given back in April by the management, the production "is now on plan." In the second quarter, the luxury electric car maker is expected to deliver close to 17,000 vehicles. The figure consequently represents a growth of 50% when compared with last year’s same period along with a 15% sequential increase.

The electric car pioneer has been expecting a major shift in production. Tesla is guiding to supply twenty thousand electric cars however some of them are going to be delivered in third quarter as an outsized variety of vehicles are expected to be in transit to Europe and Asia at the top of the quarter. This production level represents a 56% growth year over year.

The company has had a traditional guidance for the second quarter. It is however probable that the company may exceed management’s expectations as its Model S demand is still on a rise while all the obstacles in the path of Model X have been eradicated. Similarly, it can be assumed that in four out of five quarters the electric car manufacturer will surpassed its own guidance. Then, it will be quite usual for the automaker to stand up to its own expectations and reach its target for about 17,000 units.

Toyota Investment in Philippine

The largest automaker is investing in the region to enjoy tax incentive.

Toyota Motor Corporation looks forward to make an investment of around $70 million (US equivalent of 3.22 billion pesos) in Philippine to surge the local production and be eligible for latest tax incentive, according to Southeast Asian nation’s government reported on Wednesday.

Last year, a six year incentive program worth $600 million was introduced by the government to accelerate the automotive output and increase local competitiveness. According to the Board of Investments, the world’s largest automaker will produce close to 230,000 Vios.

Vice-president for Government Affairs at Toyota Motor Philippines, Rommel Gutierrez, endorsed Toyota’s plans to invest, but declined to elaborate further.

Earlier in February, Mitsubishi Motors Corp, said it will likely invest $91 million to build 200,000 Mirage and Mirage G4 cars starting in 2017.

Toyota Motor Philippines is Philippines’ biggest by sales. It is a joint venture with GT Capital Holdings Inc., and is already manufacturing Innova and Vios cars at a factory south of the capital Manila.

Due to the government's Comprehensive Automotive Resurgence Strategy, the Board of Investments also expressed that it is looking forward for auto parts makers/suppliers to collaborate with Mitsubishi and Toyota to create $388 million or above in fresh investment.

In other news, Toyota is also planning to revamp its battery-skeptic position. According to one of Toyota’s leading engineers, Kouji Toyoshima, “Currently, a lot of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels. But this is shifting, and more and more carbon neutral electricity will be generated.”

Primarily, Toyota has been reluctant to adopt batteries to its cars. It has only adopted hybrid-cars for mid range and fuel cell vehicles for the upper range. Toyoshima has now predicted that in the near future the company along with its rivals will be majorly adopting carbon neutral energy. With respect to zero emission energy, “Toyota might even produce bicycles,” the engineer chimed.

Recently, Toyota’s second generation Prius has been launched in Japanese market. At Smart Community 2016 –a small green show –the plug-in attracted a lot of people to it. In the US market, the car debuted back in March. In both markets, however, the car will be available by end of the current year.

The leading engineer has admitted that sales of Prius first generation had been disappointing. He reasoned multiple factors for disappointing sales. He said, “Appearance-wise, it was not possible to tell the difference from the regular Prius. The electric mode range was too short, 26.4 km (16.4 miles) according to the Japanese cycle. In the wintertime, the gasoline engine kicked in rather quickly.”

Twitter Investment In SoundCloud

The American social network operator has invested millions of dollar in SoundCloud for reviving itself..

Twitter has made a big investment of $70 million in well-known music streaming service provider SoundCloud. This initiative will let the American social networking service provider a growth with more than 300 million users. CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has confirmed that now his organization owns a stake in the company.

He stated “Earlier this year we made an investment in SoundCloud through Twitter Ventures to help support some of our efforts with creators, they've been great partners of ours over the years and their community-supported approach mirrors ours in many ways.”

As per reports by Recode, Jack Dorsey would not comment on the particulars of the investment. The decade old Twitter is suffering from increasing competition and hindered user growth for quite some time. A sequential decrease in its monthly active user base caused a sharp decrease for Twitter stock as the social platform operator disclosed its last quarter results in recent times.

For the final quarter, excluding only SMS followers, the micro-blogging website reported a monthly active user base of 305 million compared to 307million in the third quarter. As several leading executives have left the organization in recent times, the company is being overhauled to a major extent under the leadership of Jack. He has pointed out that the organization’s agreement with the National Football League (NFL) for streaming 10 games in the fall of this year will let his organization get more traffic.

After the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft Corporation for a price of $26.2 billion, LinkedIn was quite highlighted by the media recently, the shares of Twitter increased by over 80% in trading done by early-morning. Media has reported that, Microsoft- LinkedIn takeover in the enterprise social networking industry has rekindled expectation for Twitter which is troubled by a stalled growth in users. If the shares of Twitter continue to stay up for an adequate period of time, then that will clearly indicate investors’ interest in seeing it under the control of someone else.

Rumors have it that the American search engine operator Google is leading the competition to purchase Twitter. Another significant global media company Comcast Corporation might also contest the race, the report stated. In other news, as per reports by the Telegraph, Twitter has started to let its users re-share tweets, which already have been found in the timelines of followers. Thankfully, a user can just retweet him or her once, preventing him or her to clog up timelines by retweeting repeatedly the same message. The update makes it also easier for any Twitter user to quote-tweet him or herself, which permits him or her to tweet with any other tweet embedded in it.

Facebook Myanmar Userbase

The American social network operator  has millions of users in Myanmar, which tells us about its popularity in the region..

Over the last few years, Facebook’s user growth in Myanmar has been impressive. During those years, the website worked as national news outlet and emergency relief coordinator – but through it the fangs of cyber bulling and privacy invasion has been injected into the region.

The website holds a large number of personal details, yet users might not be aware about the US social networking giant’s presence in the country, as the website doesn’t publicize its statistics regarding its Myanmar users.

The Myanmar Times got assistance from Yangoon based Amara Digital Marketing Agency –an organization which keeps the details of site obtained from Facebook’s business manager –to better understand the social network platform. The data received from the same firm declared the number of active monthly users of Myanmar to be over 9.7 million by mid of May. This indicates that close to 19% of the country’s population is using social networking site.

According to agency’s head of operations, Ma Chan Myae Khine, although the number of profiles has increased by thrice or four times however there are several accounts which are either locked or inactive. She added that within the time frame of less than 12 months, the site’s user base has grown by twice. Last year, by mid-July, the total monthly active users in Myanmar was totaled 4.7 million.

Almost 90% of Facebook users are located in country’s two major cities Mandalay and Yangoon, and their nearby regions. But in an upset Chan finds difficult to elaborate upon, Mandalay has eclipsed the commercial capital of the city, Yango, as far as Facebook users are concerned. Out of the cumulative 9.7 million active monthly users, around 41% are inside the40 km radius of Yangon compared to 47% around Mandalay.

Chan views a relationship between the nation’s latest telecom rollouts and grown Facebook usage. She states that, for example in the state of Kayah there’s an increase in users on the social networking website when a telecommunication service provider launches there. Ma stated that Facebook can prove to be unsafe for users who are not digital literate- particularly those from rural regions. But she also stated the website can boost income as well as knowledge.

Men surpass women on the platform by almost 2-to-1, the data demonstrated. While over 6.2 million men in Myanmar were active on the website, the number of women who had logged upon on the platform was less than 3.5 m. In the country, despite of making up the majority of the population, ladies are 30% less probably to have a cellular phone, as reported by The Myanmar Times.

Will Google Larry Page Introduce Flying Car?

The American search engine developer's co-founder is interested in  developing flying cars for diversifying his portfolio.

Just when the world thought that autonomous cars would be the greatest revolution of 21^st century, Alphabet Inc.’s CEO and Google’s co-founder Larry Page surprised the world by investing in two flying car startups.

The financing indicates technology executive’s aspiring efforts apart from internet search. Zee.Aero –a startup established almost three years ago and was eventually surrounded by the rumors that it belonged to Google. Later, it turned out that Mr. Larry is owner of Zee.Aero and personally funding the startup which now has approximately 150 workers who test airplane in rural California. Likewise, Page also owns a smaller sized startup dubbed Kitty Hawk that’s developing its own flying car design, according to source familiar with the matter.

Progress in battery and computing technology are making such products highly feasible, still they face major commercial, technical and regulatory obstacles before they start ferrying passengers.

Both organizations are based near Alphabet’s headquarters in the city of Mountain View in California. Previously, Bloomberg reported investments by Mr. Larry in the startups as well as their advancement up till now. The organizations are two out of around 12 companies trying to develop the so-called flying vehicles, which are effectively tiny automatic planes that can land as well as take-off vertically.

The aircraft organizations are personal projects of Mr. Larry and are not associated with Google’s parent Alphabet, another person stated. As per reports by Bloomberg, he has made an investment of more than $100 million in Zee Aero Alone.

His interest in personal planes indicates his wide-ranging ambitions to have an impact on industries outside internet, like Alphabet venture involving autonomous cars, life-extension technology and delivery drones.  The patents awarded to Zee.Aero in 2013 show many models for “private aircraft” that includes generally thin fuselages packed between wings on the back and front as well as topped with 8 rotors.

New York Post reported that Zero.Aero which has poached leading talent from organizations such as Boeing, NASA as well as SpaceX has a head office which covers a space of 30,000 sqft. The organization is also running  a production facility on a NASA research campus in Mountain View, reported Bloomberg. The other Page’s venture Kitty Hawk employing 12 engineers and has its head office at a distance of around half a mile from Zero.

According to business filings in the last year, President of Kitty Hawk was Sebastian Thrun, the search engine operator’s self-driving program creator and its research unit Google X founder, whose “moonshot” ventures have included robotics as well as artificial intelligence. In other news, as per reports by BBC the Indian government has refused to let the search company collect pictures for its service Street View in the nation after objections were raised by security agencies.