Author: azeeadmin

Apple stock was down over 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was having a big impact on revenue, at least in the short term and Apple stock took a big hit as a result.

On October 3, the stock was selling at 232.07 per share, and while the price has fluctuated and the market in general has plunged in that time period, the stock has been on a downward trend for the past couple of months and has lost approximately $87 a share since that October high point.

Last night, before the company briefly stopped trading to make its announcement, the stock stood at $157.92 a share. This morning as we went went to publication, it was recovering a bit, but still down 8.19 percent to $144.981.

D.A. Davidson senior analyst, Tom Forte says yesterday’s announcement while not completely unexpected was surprising given Apple’s traditionally strong position. “We knew that iPhone unit sales were weak, but just not how weak,” he said.

The biggest factor in yesterday’s announcement in Forte’s view, was China where he says the company generates 20 percent of its sales. As the US-China trade war drags on, it’s having an impact on these sales. This could be due to a combination of factors including a weakening Chinese economy as a result of the trade war, or patriotism on the part of Chinese consumers, who are choosing to buy Chinese brands over of the iPhone.

This also comes at a time when Apple had already indicated that iPhone sales were weak in other worldwide markets including India, Russia, Brazil and Turkey. This already helped weaken the iPhone sales worldwide, although Forte still sees the Chinese market as the biggest factor in play here.

Forte says that in spite of the soft iPhone performance, the good news is the rest of the product portfolio is up 19 percent and that could bode well for the future. What’s more, the company has set aside $100 billion for stock buy-back purposes. “They have the balance sheet. They have the stock buy-back program. They still generate very significant free cash flow, and if the individual investor won’t buy the stock, then the company will buy the stock,” he explained.

In a report released this morning, financial analysts Canaccord Genuity believe that in spite of yesterday’s report, the company is still fundamentally sound and they continue to recommend a Buy for Apple stock. “We maintain our belief Apple can expand its leading market share of the premium-tier smartphone market and the iPhone installed base (excluding refurbished iPhones) will exceed 700M in 2018. This impressive installed base should drive iPhone replacement sales and earnings, as well as cash flow generation to fund strong long-term capital returns. We reiterate our BUY rating but decrease our price target to $190 based on our lowered estimates,” the company wrote in a report released this morning.

Forte says the unknown-unknown here is how the US-China trade war plays out and as long as that situation remains fluid, the company might not recover that income in the near term in spite of stronger sales across the catalogue.

This year’s CES is already shaping up to be another big show for smart home devices, with the Amazon Alexa/Google Assistant show down in the center ring. GE bought into the Alexa ecosystem fairly early on and got on-board with Google Assistant more recently.

At the Pixel 3 event back in October, the company announced that its C by GE bulbs were the first to carry Made by Google certification with Home functionality built-in right out of the box. At CES this year, the company will show a bunch more products, effectively tripling the size of the C by GE line.

In addition to the standard bulbs announced in the fall, the company’s also releasing full color lights with millions of color options, available in a handful of configurations, including a lighting strip.

Also new is a GE light light switch, which allows for remote dimming of standard bulbs, along with a smart plug and a motion sensor that controls the room’s lighting via movement and ambient light. All of the above are compatible with Home devices without the need for a separate smart home hub. They’ll also work with Amazon Alexa and Apple’s HomeKit. The lights aren’t cheap, running between $40 and $75. The smart plug, meanwhile, costs $25. Other prices are still TBA. 

Netflix is giving viewers a look behind the scenes at the making of its first interactive story aimed at adults, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In a featurette published today, the streaming service highlights the efforts that went into making this “choose-your-own-adventure”-style film, which tells the story of a young programmer who begins to question reality while adapting a dark fantasy novel into a video game.

In the video, VP of Product at Netflix Todd Yellin, talks about Netflix’s venture into this new type of storytelling.

“Part of the excitement of working at Netflix is constantly inventing what is internet TV. There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are innovating on this whole new form,” he says. 

Yellin says Netflix began experimenting with interactive TV by way of kids specials launched last year, before branching out to adult content.

But Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker admits he was hesitant to get involved when first approached.

“Netflix asked us if we’d be interested in doing an interactive story ever. My initial thought was ‘no, I don’t want to do that,'” he says. But Brooker says he later had an idea that would fit the format and changed his mind.

However, the process was a lot more challenging that he originally thought, he also notes.

“Well, this will be fairly straightforward,” Brooker had thought to himself. “I’m sure I’ll have to draw a flowchart at one point. Cut to several months later, it kind of exponentially started to balloon,” he says.

As one choice could lead to another series of events, and then another could alter that course again, the number of potential combinations grew.

While there are only five possible endings, the film has over a trillion unique permutations of the story, Variety reported.

In the featurette, the various staff who worked on the project also detailed how hard it was to produce the interactive film, from the script supervisors to the video editors and beyond.

The time and amount of work that were clearly involved in making Bandersnatch seem to indicative that interactive TV won’t become commonplace – it will likely be reserved for specials, due to the increased costs.

In the end, it’s not clear how well the project paid off for Netflix. The film itself was certainly an interesting experiment, but the experience also became tiresome and some reviewers felt the tale being didn’t measure up to other Black Mirror episodes.

You can view the new behind-the-scenes featurette here on YouTube.

LG announcing all — or, at least, most — of its launches ahead of CES has become something of a time honored tradition. That’s one way to get noticed. This first week of the year tends to be among the slowest, and the same can’t be said for next, when we’ll be in the belly of the beast that is the Las Vegas Convention Center.

CES has never really been much of a mobile show for LG (that’s what MWC is for). Instead the company uses the opportunity to trot out new TVs and home appliances. There’s a chance the company will showcase some new stuff at its press conference next week (previews of robotics and AI always tend to catch the eye), but the company just unloaded a bunch of stuff on the home entertainment front.

As noted earlier, 8K TVs are leading the way here. That’s almost certainly going to be CES’s big story on the TV front (actually 8K content perhaps less so). The Z9 OLED appears to be the top of the heap, with a fairly gigantic 88 inch screen size, 8K upscaling and image noise reduction.

Both that and the 8K 75 inch SM99 utilize LG’s second gen α9 processor, “which recognizes content source quality and determines the best upgrade method for optimal visual output,” per a press release issued by the company.

This year also find Alexa hitting the company’s sets, in addition to Google Assistant. Amazon’s voice assistant will be available through the company’s Home Dash board, letting users control smart home functionality through the TVs. Both work in conjunction with LG’s proprietary ThinQ AI offering. 

While Facebook continues to repair its image with consumers disenchanted with the social network’s role in disseminating misleading or false information and mishandling their personal data, it’s ironically been finding some traction for its enterprise-focused service, Workplace. Today, the company announced that it has added another huge company to its books today: Nestle, the coffee, chocolate and FMCG giant with 2,000 brands and 240,000 employees, has signed up as its latest customer.

Facebook’s enterprise service competes against the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack and smaller players like Crew and Zinc, among many others in a crowded market of mobile and desktop apps built to address a growing interest among organizations to have more user-friendly, modern ways for their employees to communicate.

Workplace positions itself as different from its competitors in a couple of different ways: it says its communications platform is designed for all different employment demographics, covering so-called knowledge workers (the traditional IT customer) as well as waged and front-line employees; but it also claims to be the most democratic of the pack, by virtue of being a Facebook product, designed for mass market use from the ground up.

In the workplace, that translates to apps that do not require company email addresses or company devices to use; a strong proportion of employees at Workplace’s bigger customers, such as Walmart (2.2 million employees) and Starbucks (nearly 240,000 employees) do not sit at desks and, until relatively recently, would not have been using any kind of PC or phone on a regular basis on any average day.

But as smartphones have become as ubiquitous as having your keys and wallet, acceptance of having them and utilising them to communicate workplace-related information has changed, and that is the wave that services like Workplace are hoping to ride.

But despite the strong engine that is Facebook behind it, Workplace has a lot of challenges up ahead.

The company has not updated its total number of customers in over a year at this point — its last milestone was 30,000 customers, back in November 2017 — and today Facebook VP Julien Codorniou said that the company might put out a more updated number later this year.

“We’re not using that metric to communicate our success,” he said, “but we have to communicate growth, I feel the demand from the market.” Slack claims 500,000 organizations, over 70,000 of which pay; Teams from Microsoft has some 329,000 customers, the company says.

There is also the issue of how a customer win is actually translating to usage. Last month, a much smaller competitor, Crew, with 25,000 customers, noted that at least some of them were in fact those that Workplace was claiming to have secured.

“Starbucks is theoretically using Workplace, but it’s been deployed only to managers,” Crew CEO Danny Leffel told me. “We have almost 1,000 Starbucks locations using Crew. We knew we had a huge presence there, and we were worried when Facebook won them, but we haven’t seen even a dent in our business so far.”

Codorniou said that this also doesn’t tell the full story. He describes the approach that Crew and others take as “shadow IT” in that the companies don’t talk to central HQ when winning the business. “You can’t give a voice to everyone by going in through the back,” he said. He also contends that it just takes time to deploy something across a massive business. “Workplace only works if you get 100 percent of the company using it,” he added. Notably, today Facebook announced that Nestle has already onboarded 210,000 customers to Workplace.

There is also the bigger question of how these products will develop technically to further differentiate from the pack. For now, it feels like Slack still reigns supreme when it comes to desktop knowledge worker functionality — even without usefully threaded comments — because of the fact that you can integrate virtually any other app you might want to into its platform.

Crew, meanwhile, has differentiated by focusing on providing handy tools to help businesses managing scheduling for shift workers, who comprise the majority of its user base.

While others like Teams, and yes, Workplace, have also added in integrations and their own functionality — Workplace’s most interesting features, I think, are how it has translated consumer-Facebook features like Live into the Workplace environment. But there is still a lot of space for apps to consider what other features and functionality will be most useful and stick for the most employees and for the business customer at large.

It will be interesting to see how and if this is affected by way of a key leadership appointment. Last month, Facebook appointed a new “head” of Workplace, Karandeep Anand, who came to Facebook three years ago from Microsoft (and thus has a close understanding of enterprise software). Codorniou said Anand be relocating to London, where Workplace is developed, and will focus on the technical development of the product while Codorniou focuses on sales, client relations and business development.

Technical leadership for Workplace had previously come straight from CTO Mike Schroepfer, Codorniou said. “We decided that we needed someone full time, here in London,” he said.

It’s not clear if Workplace’s win at Nestle is replacing another product: it seems, however, that it is more likely a trend of how more businesses are making an investment in company-wide communications platforms where they may never have had one before, in hopes of it helping keep employees switched on, linked up, and generally more happy and feeling less like expendable cogs.

“Nestlé is a people-first environment,” said EVP Chris Johnson, in a statement. “We really rely on our talented teams to manage more than 2,000 Nestlé brands worldwide. We help our employees develop and we give them the right tools, so Workplace is a perfect fit.”

Since the advent of bluetooth earbuds, charging case have been utilitarian, at best. Understandable. I suspect few, if any, purchase the things based on how their cases look. For many of us, however, headphones are the one piece of tech aside from a smartphone (and, perhaps, wearable) we never leave the house without.

When they’re not bad, the design is largely benign. Take the AirPods. Perfectly fine and unoffensive design that brings to mind nothing more than some Glide dental floss. Good on the Klipsch for trying something different (along with another notable exception in Sennheiser’s pricey Momentum). I can’t speak to the sound quality, comfort or battery life of the T5 (they’re only being shown off for the first time at CES next week), but damn if that isn’t a nice looking travel case you’ve got there.

Gizmodo’s comparison to a Zippo light is pretty spot-on. And if I’m being perfectly honest, there was a time in my life (let’s call it “high school”) when I, a life-long non-smoker, carried around a Zippo as an accessory. I learned a few of the snap to open tricks. I’m not proud.

Anyway, the T5 will run you $199, which puts them toward the higher end of the current crop of bluetooth earbuds. The sound quality on Klipsch’s stuff tends to be pretty solid, so you’re likely in for a decent set of buds. They’re due out over the summer.

Wear and tear is a major issue in the realm of electric scooters, resulting in a short lifespan of individual scooters and poor unit economics. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Segway -Ninebot unveiled the Model Max scooter that is designed to help services like Bird and Lime, for example, reduce their respective operating and maintenance costs.

“Model Max was designed taking into consideration complex shared usage scenarios, consumer overuse of vehicles, operation models and maintenance costs,” Segway wrote in a press release. “At the same time, Segway-Ninebot is also more open to accept the customized needs of various operators to meet the different needs of users and customers in each market.”

Segway won’t share any details on the specifications but says it will share more on January 8.

It’s worth noting that some of Segway’s Ninebot scooters created safety hazards for Lime. In August, Lime says it became aware of a potential issue with some of its Segway Ninebot scooters. Specifically, Lime identified a problem with one of the two batteries in some of its earlier scooter versions.

Bird, which also uses Ninebot scooters, said it conducted an investigation and found that none of the vehicles it purchased from Segway Ninebot were affected.

Segway also unveiled today Loomo Delivery, an autonomous vehicle for last-mile deliveries. The idea is to use the bot to make autonomous deliveries for food, packages and other items.

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make sure it has a foothold in the medium. Cision, which provides press release distribution, media monitoring, and other PR services to businesses and the media industry, has acquired Falcon.io, a startup founded in Denmark that lets companies post, manage and analyse their presence on social media platforms.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, the companies tell me, but the whole of the Falcon team, including CEO/founder Ulrik Bo Larsen, are joining the company, where they will continue to operate its existing product set as well as integrate it into Cision’s wider business. We’ve heard from sources that the deal may be around $200 million, although I’m still trying to get more confirmation on this.

Falcon had raised around $25 million according to PitchBook, and it has never disclosed its valuation. Cision — well known to many journalists — is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of just under $1.6 billion. For some context, two other prominent social media management firms that compete with Falcon, Sprout Social and Hootsuite, are respectively valued at $800 million and anywhere between $750 million and $1 billion (depending on who you ask).

These two are bigger firms — Falcon has around 1,500 businesses as customers who use it to manage their social profiles and read social sentiment across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, while Sprout says it has around 25,000 and Hootsuite counts millions of individual users — and both have raised significantly more capital, but their valuations underscore the demand that we’re seeing for platforms and user-friendly tools to target the world’s social media users — estimated to number at upwards of 2.5 billion people globally.

Kevin Akeroyd, who came on as Cision’s CEO after long stints at both Oracle and Salesforce among other places, describes Falcon as a “top five” social media marketing and analytics firm, and in an interview he said that the new acquisition will form a key part of the “communications cloud” that Cision has been building.

As with Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe (who also use similar cloud-themed terminology to describe their product suites), Cision’s strategy is to build a one-stop shop for customers to manage all of their communications needs from one platform. Falcon itself may be smaller than its competitors, but idea is that it will be cross-sold to Cision’s customers, which currently number 75,000 businesses.

“We’re seeing too many of our customers using one application for content, another for something else, and so on. There are too many apps,” he said. “We have always believed in earned media” — that is, media mentions that are not in the form of paid advertising — “and the role of influencers alongside paid and owned marketing. We believe we could provide the first solution for businesses across earned, communications services and public relations, helping to build a better data stack to measure and attribute what you are doing in comms.”

As social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter build more of their own tools in-house to serve the social media needs of organizations who want to better manage their profiles and interactions on these platforms, this has led to some consolidation and shifts among social media management companies. Some are merging or getting acquired, and some are shopping themselves around.

And in that wider trend, it’s not too surprising to see public relations firms get in on the action. Social media has completely changed the landscape for how information is disseminated today, sometimes complementing what traditional media organizations do — there are many examples of how newspapers and other news outlets leverage, for example, Facebook to grow and communicate with their audiences — and often replacing traditional media altogether. (Pew last month said that social media outpaced newspapers for the first time as a news source in the US, although TV and radio are still bigger than social… for now.)

Given that public relations management has long been the connecting link between organisations and media outlets, they have had to take a bigger step into social media in order to provide a more complete picture of the media landscape to their clients. Cision is not the first to have done this: Last year, Meltwater, another media monitoring firm, acquired DataSift to add social signals and traffic to its platform mix.

“This consolidation has to come because there is just too much value for the user,” Akeroyd said. “CMOs and CCOs do not want their own islands, they want something bigger.”

A one-year-old Chinese startup called Luckin is busy waging war against Starbucks as the new year unfolds. At an event on Thursday, Luckin announced that it aims to be the largest coffee chain in China by number of cups sold and outlets by 2019.

Caffeinated drinks are taking off in the tea-drinking nation. Average coffee consumption per Chinese consumer is expected to grow 18 percent between 2014 and 2019, well above 0.9 percent in the US. Starbucks is currently the largest player in China’s coffee market with 3,300 stores as of last May and a goal of topping 6,000 outlets by 2022.

Loss-making Luckin vows to more than double its number of locations from just over 2,000 to over 4,500 by the end of this year. It sounds like some kind of mission impossible given it took Starbucks 20 years to reach its current scale, but not all of Luckin’s facilities are the size of Starbucks’ sit-down shops.

Rather, Luckin operates a combination of cafes, tiny booths for customer pickup and take-out kitchens that dispatch deliverymen who bring drinks to people within 30 minutes, a big selling point of the company.

It also helps that Luckin has nailed powerful partners like food delivery giant Meituan Dianping after Starbucks teamed up with Ele.me. These moves in a way represent a proxy war between China’s two largest internet companies — Tencent and Alibaba, which backs Meituan and owns Ele.me, respectively.

Luckin has also scooped up loads of investments to power its lightspeed expansion. The company secured a $200 million series B funding round in December that valued it at $2.2 billion, only five months after it raised $200 million. It ventured into the market by shelling out large subsidies for consumers, with deep discounts like “buy five get five free.” It’s thus not surprising to see the company operating in the red. Luckin’s net loss amounted to at least 850 million yuan, or $124 million, within nine months in 2018, the company recently told local media.

“Our chief strategy is to quickly grab market share through subsidies, so losses are expected,” said Luckin, adding that it will press on with its subsidy-powered expansion.

CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round from a clutch of existing investors to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Sequoia India, Hillhouse and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the round which also saw participation from Axis Bank, one of CarDekho’s financing partners.

[Update] The company confirmed that the deals gives it a valuation of $400-$500 million, that’s in line with a report from Economic Times one month ago. The figure is up slightly on a reported $360 million valuation from CarDekho’s previous fundraising in 2016.

The deal takes the company to $185 million to date from investors, which also include Times Internet, Ratan Tata — Tata Group’s Chairman Emeritus — HDFC Bank and Dentsu.

Founded in 2005 as GirnarSoft, CarDekho operates a range of online portals that sell new and second-hand cars and motorbikes in India. The company has also branched out into Southeast Asia where it operates portals in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia and, on the content side, it operates a YouTube channel and an auto blog and reviews site.

CarDekho claims 39 million monthly unique visitors to its websites, and six million downloads of its apps. On the finance side, it said revenue went from 114 crores ($16.3 million) in the 2016-2017 financial year to 160 crore ($22.8 million) in 2017-18. (The Indian financial calendar runs from April 1 to March 31.)

CarDekho claims to work “actively” with 5,000 dealerships in India while it has direct retail partnerships with eight car and motorbike makers. It claims to influence 42 percent of sales for those dealerships and 15-30 percent of annual sales for those auto- and bike makers, although the company didn’t provide specific details on how it calculates those figures.

Beyond helping facilitate sales, it also offers car financing in partnership with over 10 financial entities who offer terms to its customers. It has provided insurance options too since 2017 and, with this new funding in the bag, it said that it intends to double down and build out more “transaction services” that go hand-in-hand with auto sales.

“Our contribution to a person buying a new car has grown manifold and this will continue to be a bulwark for us. Our used cars engine has scaled up tremendously and has also enabled us to incubate allied businesses like insurance and finance business as they are one of the largest opportunities ahead of us. The opportunity lies in extending formal credit and insurance coverage to the new-to-formal economy population and will continue to be a focus area for us” said CEO and co-founder Amit Jain in a statement.

CarDheko is rivaled by the likes of CarTrade, which is backed Temasek and Warburg Pincus and previous gobbled up rival CarWale, Truebil and Cars24, a service that buys cars from consumers and resells them to dealers. Notably, Sequoia India is also an investor in Cars24.