Alibaba Pictures Group Posted Full Year Profit

Due to acquisitions and a deal with Paramount for Tom Cruise Mission Impossible, Alibaba Pictures Group steered last year by reporting a full year profit.

Alibaba Group Holding is very much interested in expanding its business in the media industry. It is not only investing to improve and bolster its media division but it is also making deals and acquisitions that would further help in growing in this domain. In March 2014, Alibaba acquired almost 60% stakes in ChinaVision, valued at $805 million. After acquiring, it registered it as a film company next month, which was first named Alibaba Films Group and then changed it to Alibaba Pictures Group in the later month.

Alibaba Group was quite confident of its Alibaba Pictures and wanted to come up with the best. Alibaba Pictures was boosted by the financial gains from a stock offering which helped the Films Group to end its year on a high. It might be a tough start in the beginning but with time, the film subsidiary did quite well in 2015. The Beijing based studio, which is also the film subsidiary of Jack Ma’s online retailing giant managed to post a full year profit of $71.7 million (RMB 466 million).

The result is a massive improvement as Alibaba Pictures Group reported a full year loss of $64.1 million in 2014, which was its first year in the industry. The decision to invest in Paramount’s Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, which features one of the biggest Hollywood stars Tom Cruise, was brilliant. The movie brought in nearly $10.6 million in revenues for this year and increased the overall subsidiary’s profits by $1.1 million with this movie alone.

Alibaba Pictures Group (also known as APG) noticed the widening of its operating loss last year as well but one-time gains that also include share issuance with net proceeds of $1.5 billion (HK$ 12.1 billion) eventually helped in reporting full year profit. The acquisitions also helped APG to raise revenues, which were $40.6 million in 2015. Last year’s revenues were a year over year increase by 108.3%.

Yueke, which was acquired by APG for $134 million, is one of the biggest suppliers of cinema tickets to the viewers in China, which also majorly helped the company to raise such high revenues. APG gave credit to Yueke in an announcement, which contributed in much of its revenues.

The officials said that Yueke has proved to be an asset for the APG and they expect the acquisition to continue being a strong revenue generator in the times to come. China’s national box office is massively growing considering the situation and has expanded over 50% in just the first two months of 2016. Hence, the positive growth strategy would be key for Yueke and APG to improve revenue gains.

Netflix Does Not Care About Geography Age And Gender

According to a report published by Wire, Netflix does not consider geography, age, and gender while tailoring content for its subscribers.

Netflix Inc. has completed revolutionized the television industry. When it debuted as the online video content service provider back in 2007, it changed the perception of viewing television. One of the best feats that the streaming giant offers to its customers is the facility to binge watch an entire season of their favorite TV shows. And this feature is actually changing the mindset of viewers based in United States as well as in the rest of the world.

It is known that Netflix proceeded with a global expansion at the beginning of this year where it launched its services in almost 130 countries simultaneously. This expansion plan made the platform available in 190 countries which mean it could reach anyone in any part of the world who has a stable internet connection. There was no technical glitch whatsoever when it launched in 130 new markets and since then the company is running its service smoothly and efficiently which is extraordinary work. But this is one end of the story. The other end tells that the streaming giant is looking to transform the whole world into binge watching in the coming times.

St. Patrick’s Day was one of the most memorable days for the company as it premiered the second season of its popular hit series, Daredevil. The show went live in all 190 countries simultaneously. This is the second thing which Netflix launched simultaneously in a short span of time. The streaming service provider was initially a DVD loaner which has now transformed it in a global TV network. And the shows including Daredevil, Orange is the new Black, and House of Cards is following the company’s ambitions to become the biggest TV network in the industry.

But Netflix’s worldwide premier of Daredevil was no big deal for the company as well as for the streaming subscribers. The company has nearly 75 million streaming subscribers on its platform but that is not it. There are extra 7 billion people out there who are not on board with Netflix and it is targeting to achieve this objective. As Wired reported, “For the world, Netflix’s aspiration could mean much more: the first glimpse at what happens when every part of an online entertainment empire, from interface to content to delivery, is engineered to be everything to everyone, all of the time.”

When Daredevil was launched, the streaming giant welcomed its subscribers with ‘eight header image variations’ of the cast. The different pictures were displayed to the customers in eight different but same sized boxes. From that, Netflix started to track which top shots is inspiring the most streaming of the series. Wired continued in its report, “By now, those eight images will have given way to the best-performing two or three. After 35 days, one of those will become the default. The rest will vanish.”

Netflix’s Vice President of Product Innovation, Todd Yellin, clearly announced that geography, age, and gender do not mean anything to tailor content for its users. He said, “There’s a mountain of data that we have at our disposal. That mountain is composed of two things. Garbage is 99 percent of that mountain. Gold is one percent… . Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap. Where you live is not that important.”

Toyota Mirai Was Endorsed Via Japanese Manga

A manga was published to endorse Toyota Mirai.

The Japanese are quite smart when it comes to endorsing their cars. There have been numerous campaigns in Japan that have gained a lot of traction and have thus resulted in increased sales. Toyota Motors Corp. vehicles have always used new techniques to market its products thus this time it is via the Japanese manga- a conventional cartoon style thoroughly followed in the region as highlighted by Green Car Reports.

Green Car Reports very smartly chalked out an example that was published in 2015. The company found the Toyota Mirai- a fuel cell hydrogen powered car being front and center in Motorfan. The issue was a Model Special Edition which surfaced in January, FY15. Similar to all the issues of the Motorfan, the publication was devoted to one model only and since Mirai was debuted at that time in Japan, the hydrogen powered car got the opportunity.

The comic was in Japanese but has also been translated in English for all those who are acquainted with the language. The issue shows Japanese mid aged guy who is on the lookout for a new car which has advance power features. He then goes through various possible option but soon he gets convinced that the Mirai is better than other car that have alternative fuels like BMW range-extended i3, Nissan Leaf battery electric, and Toyota hybrid car- Prius. Ironically, he has to go through a mild detour when he is hit by wife once he tells her about the price of the vehicle.

The good thing about this method is that nobody living in Japan needs to be concerned about crossing the lines when it is about the odd and weird depictions of Toyota cars. This is merely because TM is quite good at it on its own. By the start of the fiscal year of 2016, the company started to pitch a campaign for Toyota Prius that encompasses 40 young girls through anime graphics. 10 such girls were used in the company’s television advertisement whereas 30 were found on the company’s official website. These girls were known as the Impossible Girls where every girl was associated to a characteristic of the car is it door chimes or engines.

This is quite mild in contrast to an advertisement by the company that surfaced in Japan for the pickup trucks during the summers of FY14. The advertisement was called "Jungle Wakudoki" where a few businessmen were driving in the jungle. During this journey, they were heads on with a gorilla, a dance off also took place with the beast- it was like a Gangnum Style moment. The advertisement is extremely cute and attractive and the jingle is so engaging that it gets stuck on you mind.

This clearly indicates that Toyota has always been creative when it comes to their advertisements thus using manga as a medium comes as no surprise.

Netflix Demands Soars In The United Kingdom

According to a report conducted by Barb, Netflix and other streaming services are increasing their dominance in the region sidelining conventional TV businesses.

Netflix Inc. has expanded its global footprints in 190 countries this year after it announced a massive global expansion in January which covered most parts of the world. After the United States, the company’s major market is United Kingdom from where it has the dominant market share against local and international TV business. In short, Netflix has become a global TV network in a very short span of time. And this has had significant impact on the viewers of UK.

According to a report, it is believed that the streaming giant is significantly growing in the United Kingdom’s TV industry and has sidelined most of the conventional pay TV cable business as well as other TV networks currently present in the region. The report suggests that there are more than one million homes in UK which do not own a television all thanks to Netflix. The demand of the streaming network along with other streaming rivals such as Hulu and Amazon Prime Video is soaring. Almost 4.7 percent of participants i.e. nearly 1.3 million households do not own a television set at the end of last year as they were paid monthly subscribers of Netflix.

Regardless of the content the streaming service provider offers to its UK subscribers which is three times less than what it offers to US subscriber, the demand is increasing at a faster pace. The survey was conducted by Barb which is the official body that collects television audience figures.

Barb surveyed 53,000 viewers in the UK. It was reported, “The number of households with Netflix grew by 1.4 million between the end of 2014 and the end of 2015, compared with an increase of 500,000 households for Amazon Video and 300,000 households for Now TV. One theory is that non-TV households are online pioneers who are keen on TV but prefer to use computer devices to access it.”

The report showed that 24 percent (a quarter) of households in the United Kingdom were paying for a streaming service monthly whether it is Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Sky’s Now TV by the end of last year. This figure was stalled at just 14 percent in the initial months of 2014. Barb’s reported stated that Netflix which has produced a couple of hit and popular shows last year such as House of Cards, Making of a Murderer, and Orange is the New Black is dominating the market irrespective of the continuous growth shown by Amazon Video and Now TV.

Netflix is an on the go TV viewing service which offers a diversified and extensive content library to its viewers with a benefit of binge watching any favorite series. This is one of the main reasons of as to why the demand is soaring.

Amazon Seeks Approval For Drone Delivery Service

Amazon is pushing harder to bring its drone delivery project to commercial use.

Amazon is trying to launch its drone delivery service within the United States boundaries, which it announced a couple of years ago. Sources reported that the online retailer spent a staggering $10 million in Washington last year just to begin the process of delivering packages through drones. The company is not only the online retailer but also an evolving advanced logistics giant, which is currently making headlines in this domain. The retailer is set to create shipping network.

The usual mechanism of shipping packages is that it will be shipped on either the same day, in one day, or more, but when it comes to Amazon, same day or one day shipping is not good enough. When the Seattle-based firm announced its plans to launch the drone delivery service, it was done under the one-hour and two-hour delivery program. It was an attempt to deliver packages faster to its customers i.e. within the next hour or so. Online shoppers, who wished to avail the drone delivery service, had to restrict their order within the weight limit.

Amazon is striving to deliver packages to customers faster than usual. The products may vary from fresh goods to floss picks, fashion, electronics, and furniture. The US retailer is trying to invest more than ever in shipping to spend on Capitol Hill. It has finally submitted its bid in order to bring its much anticipated drone delivery service and longer delivery trucks in commercial use.

The New York Times reported that the investment that Amazon has been making lately makes it the most active and the fastest growing tech lobby in Washington. The Times adds that the company is determined to bring in longer delivery trucks in commercially along with road improvements and improved relations with the United States Postal Service (USPS) as Amazon seeks to push for the delivery drone approval.

The Vice President for global public policy at Amazon, Mr. Misener said, “So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds.”

When asked about the pricing plan of Amazon Prime Air, he stated that he is not familiar with what the product has been priced yet. Amazon also wants independent logistics channel for delivery.

Criticism On Yahoo Sales Process Jeopardized

With criticism on the sales process, is Yahoo again in jeopardy?

Yahoo Inc. recently made an announcement pertaining to a rather mysterious sales process. This sales process caused various tech giant to raise their eyebrows such as AT&T, Comcast, Time, and Verizon Communication along with other major equity firms present on this planet. However, as per the recent details, all those who wanted to bid for the company seem to be rather hesitant when it comes to signing the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) by Yahoo.

As per the CTFN, bidders are relatively okay with the terms prescribed by the NDA and consider it to be an “uncharacteristically long document.” Basically, an NDA is signed amongst firms when the financial documents are unveiled. This merely happens when an acquisition is taking place. However, as per the extremely long document drafted by Yahoo did not encompass any information related to the private financial information.

Yahoo has established a unanimous committee to offer strategic alternatives for the firm. The committee has now taken Goldman Sachs & Co., JP Morgan, and PJT Partners Inc. to be the firms official financial advisors so that the bidding process can initiate. However, the company now needs to secure its future, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of the company has also recruited a veteran technology banker namely Frank Quattrone to go through the potential bids. For the aforementioned sales auction, the company has also recruited Moore LLP & Cravath Swaine.

When the announcement surfaced of the sales process, many analysts and investors were skeptical about it since they questioned the loyalty of the sale mechanism. These individuals accused the company for make using of the sale process as a tool to delay the proposed turnaround strategy by Marissa Mayer. This majorly talks about laying off employees and theb making massive investments in the mobile ecosystem.

This is not it but the Chief Financial Offer of YHOO, Mr. Ken Goldman has also highlighted the fact that the company is seeking a quick sales process of the non-core assets. This further ignited the conspiracy since people have started to question the sincerity of the company to its online search business and the bidding plans.

An NDA which is rather ambiguous is not doing quite well to the sales process in general. This is particularly relevant by taking the popular proxy that took place with the activist investor group, Starboard Value LP into consideration. Irrespective of the negativity surrounding the company, Yahoo stocks have been trading in green recently which have increased by 1% posing to be a relatively good sign. However, there is a lot of pessimism pertaining to the company when it comes to the sales process which is going to hurt the investor’s sentiments as perceived.

Hence in a nutshell, Yahoo at this point has embraced a crucial point where its sales process is in jeopardy. The company needs to play it safe at this point of time as they cannot really afford any more damage whatsoever. It won’t be wrong to say that it is a do or die situation for them.

Tesla To Establish More Charging Stations In Manhattan

Tesla to double the number of charging stations in New York City.

Tesla Motors Inc. has made up its mind to increase the number of charging stations in New York City. The number will rise to 105 by the end of March as per The New York Post. The company is devoted to expanding its network in urban cities of fast charging infrastructure. So it is quite astonishing to note that it is relatively easier to charge the Tesla cars in New York rather than filling its gasoline tank from any other tank station in the vicinity.

In compliance to the recent move, the charging stations belonging to Tesla will beat the number of gas stations in Manhattan by almost a double. The initiative to increase the electric car charging infrastructure is governed by Mr. Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer of the company. The company is all set to launch is Model 3 electric car during this event scheduled for March 31^st, 2016.

Tesla Motors at this point of time is going through a transition where initially it was a seller of high end luxury vehicles to a mass market car supplier. To add weightage to its dreams, it needs to increase the charging stations. The electric cars and charging stations run parallel to each other, since the cars are mostly functioning on battery juice, thus a charging station nearby will cater to the range issues.

Back in 2015, the electric car giant faced this issue when it was making its debut in China. The company did not really have many charging station in comparison to the population of the high density cities. Other than that, most of the individuals reside in apartments. This issue is seen in most busy cities across the globe including New York.

It needs to be noted that Supercharging stations are relatively difficult to establish in densely populated cities. Thus understanding this problem, the company has come up with distinct options in terms of charging facilities known as Destination Chargers that are placed between restaurants and hotels. These were designed to save the Chinese operations. However, TSLA finds it convenient to come up with charging facilities in the garages housed in New York.

At present, there are almost 1,500 owners of Tesla cars in New York City where the electric car giant has decided to collaborate with garage companies to offer charging facilities as it is inclined to establishing Supercharging stations in the vicinity. The initiative was initially revealed in August, 2015 where Tesla joined forces with 24 garages in the vicinity as mentioned by the New York Times.

The previous week was extremely eventful since garage companies and a bunch of hotels collaborated with TSLA to offer support for the charging facilities.

Most of the people usually park their vehicles in garages; it will give them the advantage to charge those vehicles provided some incentive in the form of extra miles is given. So the company is coming up with a great facility that will benefit all those owners who wish to charge their EVs with ease.

BlackBerry Is Not Content With Facebook

Facebook has ended support for its app on BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS platform.

BlackBerry Ltd. is not happy by the decision made by Facebook Inc.

The social media giant made a decision to put a halt to its service for its application on the BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry 0 platforms. Back in March, Facebook owned WhatsApp announced that it would no longer support the BlackBerry version of its application after FY16. However, it has now been confirmed that the company will finish its support for BlackBerry APIs after this month.

So once these changes are implemented, the users on Blackberry OS and BlackBerry 10 will be diverted to the desktop version of Facebook in case the select the application. When the news surfaced to the executives at BlackBerry, they were not really happy with it. The company expressed its dismay by stating in an official blogpost, "We are extremely disappointed in their decision as we know so many users love these apps."

BlackBerry is struggling since a relatively long span of time, and this move is again a massive blow to them. The company also tried its best to encourage the social media giant to take its decision back. However, it did not really prove to be of any benefit for them. To strengthen the commitment to the users and developers at BlackBerry, it has asked the WhatsApp and Facebook users to express their dismay by coming up with a hashtag #ILoveBB10Apps.

WhatsApp made a claim that it decided to halt its services on BlackBerry since the platform did not really offer the desired specifications to support the enhanced features and expansions that were being added to the service time and again. The BlackBerry users have also signed a petition online requesting the service to function the way it did earlier. So far the company has been successful in getting a little more than 1800 signatures on it.

BlackBerry is reigning over a marginal share in the smartphone market globally, thus the recent step taken by Facebook will cause the company to lose more users in the times to come. The company is striving hard to bolster its finances and pump up its smartphone division, thus they also came up with the BlackBerry Priv smartphone in FY15 to redeem themselves. The smartphone might have encouraged developers of app to have faith in the BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS platform back. However, it now seems that they are not willing to take the risk again.

BlackBerry on the other hand has different plans as mentioned in the blog post. The company is optimistic about coming up with a new feature known as “Great Apps on BlackBerry” that will encompass the best 20 apps that are featured for 14 days every month. While this may be of interest to the app developers, conventional users might not really be happy if they don’t have WhatsApp and Facebook apps on their smartphones.

Gilead Cancer Drug Trials Got Suspended

The Foster City biotech giant has suspended the trials of its drug on account of safety issues.

Immediately after the biotech giant, Gilead Sciences announced the termination of the clinical trials on Zudelig –its cancer drug that the investment bank Leerink slashed the price target of the biotech titan on Wednesday. The trials were cancelled due to safety problems.

Last Friday, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced that it had been looking into the reports which have indicated the negative side effects leading to death in the biotech’s trials on its cancer drug tested in varied form of blood cancer. Subsequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it had been carrying out the similar activity and on Monday it released a notice which says that the Foster City, Calif. firm had decided to suspend the six trials in patients with indolent non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs), chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) who have failed other treatments. The Gilead’s drug Zydelig was launched by the company in July 2014. It has been approved as third-line treatment for B-cell NHL and SLL and for relapsed CLL.

The agency cited the following in a statement: “The FDA is reviewing the findings of the clinical trials and will communicate new information as necessary.” A spokesman for the $122 billion organization, Nathan Kaiser, said in an e-mail on Tuesday that the company has been “conducting a comprehensive review of all ongoing studies” while contemporaneously having appropriate consultations with regulatory authorities. Moreover, Kaiser didn’t disclose the number of patients who suffered from serious side effects or who died during the trial. The Foster City company expressed that it’s trials of cancer drug as a front-line treatment for any cancer are also been suspended.

In the view of above mentioned events of drug’s trial suspension, the Leerink analyst, Geoffrey Porges slashed the price target from $130 to $127. He also brought down his estimation of annual sales of the drug to $174 million from colossal $935 million in the year 2020. He has further speculated that in the event where the sales will be minimum the EPS of the company will cut by the range of 1% to 3% in the period covered in 2017-2020.

Porges wrote, “Though accretive to revenue, oncology accounts for a small portion of Gilead’s total revenue, 93% of which consists of antivirals. We have never been convinced that oncology would become a major franchise for the company, and given these recent events, maintain this outlook.”

Amazon Rolls Out Its AWS Migration Service

After five months of testing and previewing, Amazon has launched its migration service for big companies.

In the past three to four years, Amazon Inc. has proved that it has all what it takes to dominate the e-commerce industry of the United States. An industry which was getting tougher and stiffer day by day due to intense domestic competition, the company came on top of all with its exceptional goods and services offerings along with decent loyalty programs to further cater the customers. However e-commerce is not the only domain the online retailer dominates in. It is believed that Amazon is also known as the powerhouse of the cloud computing industry.

According to various reputable sources, it was reported that the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos said in the first half of last year that its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, is a massive $5 billion business. The company is well known for not revealing its figures whether it is success or not, it does not exactly disclose its results. But the data compiled so far, it is known that Amazon has ‘numerous’ big name clients subscribed to its cloud service offering. Apart from that, AWS leads the cloud division of various tech giants including Google and Microsoft.

According to Venture Beat, the firm has come up with a new service which will allow the companies to shift their databases conveniently to Amazon’s own cloud computing division, AWS. And it claims that the companies who wish to do it can easily set up their migrations within 10 minutes.

The vice president of relational database services at AWS, Hal Berenson, said in a statement “Hundreds of customers moved more than a thousand of their on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora, other Amazon RDS engines, or databases running on Amazon EC2 during the preview of the AWS Database Migration Service.”

Five months ago, Amazon debut its AWS Database Migration Service in preview to show what it can do for the companies. For instance, there are many firms who wish to change their cloud service provider or are in need of an upgrade but the fear of losing database or creating and managing all over again stops them. But after five months of the first preview, Amazon is finally filling this loophole with its new service.

Mr. Hal Berenson added, “Customers repeatedly told us they wanted help moving their on-premises databases to AWS, and also moving to more open database engine options, but the response to the AWS Database Migration Service has been even stronger than we expected. In the preview, one-third of the database migrations used the AWS Database Migration Service to not only move databases to the AWS Cloud, but also to switch database engines in the process.”

Since the beginning of this year, Amazon reported that there are more than 1,000 databases that have been migrated to the AWS. It does not necessarily mean to move other cloud premise database to Amazon Web Services but companies who have saved huge data and databases on MariaDB, MySQL, and Oracle can migrate their databases to Amazon’s cloud segment. 

Apple Might Be Asked For Source Code

The legal battle between Apple and the government is taking nasty turns.

The legal battle between the Silicon Valley tech titan and the most influential government of the world – company’s homeland – is accelerating in quick pace. According to the most recent filing, authorities indicated that they intend to ask for the “source code” and the “signing key” from Apple Inc.

If the government could gain the access of the aforementioned things, then it can easily develop one of its spying software and deceive the users of iPhone into installing it on their devices. In this way, a user will not be able to segregate whether the software they have been using is the one authorized by Apple or the fabricated version issued by the government in order to spy on the people.

On the matter, the technology and security experts have expressed that if the U.S. government could grab the intended source code, then eventually other governments would ask the company to do the same for them. Center for Democracy & Technology’s chief technologist, Joseph Lorenzo Hall expressed that the government acquisition of the source code would be “pretty terrible.”

In February, the legal battle between Justice Department of U.S. and the Cupertino Calif. firm began when the tech company challenged the court orders of writing new software in order to provide assistance to the law enforcement officials to unlock the iPhone 5C used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino attacks, which reportedly killed around 14 people.

In its defense, the company strongly opposed the court order expressing that by complying through the orders, the company will put the security of many users at risk. Moreover, the Silicon Valley business cited that this would also build a precedent that will allow the judges to create demands of private companies.

The comments of the DOJ came as a footnote to a filing made last week. The department has already rejected the iPhone maker’s prior arguments. On Tuesday, the tech titan is expected to record a statement in response to the Justice Department brief.

The lawyers of the DOJ expressed that they had initially avoided asking for the iOS source code because they believe “such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple.”

The recent demand of the government has opened a “nuclear option,” which refers to the government looking for the power to require and use the most valued assets of the technology companies. Sources privy to the matter told Reuters that the DOJ is not proposing to snatch the source code of the company while a source favoring Apple expressed that neither the tech giant is worried from the threats posed by the government. People following the case have expressed that it is more than likely that the case will be brought up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Earlier as well, the source code had been demanded instead of asking for the code production. In fact, in a legal battle between Apple and the rival Samsung, the tech titan received the permission of reviewing the code of Samsung, which was allowed under a lot of protection and the strictest rules so that the sensitive data is not copied.

Tuesday’s brief will further unveil how the company responded to the government’s latest demand.