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Amazon Opens its Blockchain Standard as a Service

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Amazon, through its cloud computing arm, AWS, had launched two new Blockchain products last November, and now, it has launched its Managed Blockchain Service for general availability. The new Blockchain Service will allow the users to create and manage blockchain networks, without the need for a centralized authority.

Noticeably, the company had launched the service in November, which was available only in ‘preview’, for which the users needed to sign up to get the approval to use the service. But now, it is open for general use. With the help of Managed Blockchain Service, the users will be able to set up their blockchain networks within their organisations, easily, quickly and economically.

The Managed Blockchain Service is a fully-managed service and will let the users ditch the arduous task of software installation, creating and managing the certificates for access control, and configure network settings, which they had to do in order to set up a separate blockchain network.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of provisioning nodes, setting up the network, managing certificates and security, and scaling the network. Customers can now get a functioning blockchain network set up quickly and easily, so they can focus on application development instead of keeping a blockchain network up and running,” said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS.

The company made the service first open to using in northern Virginia and is slowly expanding its availability to other locations. The companies like AT&T Business, Nestlé and the Singaporean investment market, the Singapore Exchange, are already up to use the company’s latest services.

For now, the service will make use of Hyperledger Fabric, whereas the company is working on the Ethereum network, which will be available as general by the end of this year.

Apple’s Q2 Revenues Shows a Drop in iPhone Sales, Apple Services Being the Profit Maker

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Apple has just released its quarterly revenue report, which clearly shows that the profits gained through the sales of its smartphone have lowered to an extent, as there has been a steady decrease in the sales of the iPhone in the recent times. But the company is not making much of the fuss about it as its quarterly profits also included the revenues from its other services.

apple
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The company reported on Tuesday that though it sold $31 billion worth of iPhones in Q1 2019, in the Q2 2019, the share of the iPhone sales was only 53% of the total fiscal second quarter revenues. The lowered profits through iPhone sales have also lowered the total year-over-year revenue by 17.33%. Also, Apple’s laptop series including MacBook Pro and iMac had to see a decrease in their sales despite new updates and the last year’s 100 million Macs in use milestone.

But on the other hand with the new updates to Apple’s other hardware series, i.e. iPad, outshined in the tablet market, and its individual revenue was higher by 22% year-over-year. Also, the company is constantly providing new services to its installed base of 900 million active iPhones, which also added to the Q2 fiscal profits. The company CEO Tim Cook mentioned the services including iCloud and iTunes, which are becoming more popular and are contributing more to the revenues. Also, its other hardware lineups, especially its wearables, including the AirPods, Apple Watch and Beats headphones are having more demand among the users, resulting in more profits.

“Our March quarter results show the continued strength of our installed base of over 1.4 billion active devices, as we set an all-time record for Services, and the strong momentum of our Wearables, Home and Accessories category, which set a new March quarter record. We delivered our strongest iPad growth in six years, and we are as excited as ever about our pipeline of innovative hardware, software and services. We’re looking forward to sharing more with developers and customers at Apple’s 30th annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.” said Cook.

Apple has also got a share of its Q2 revenues from its streaming service, which is expected to gain more client base in the coming future. The wearables, other hardware and the streaming services, are the new sources of revenue for the company, which it had been neglecting in the past years. But still, the iPhone is going to be its main revenue generator in the coming years, too. Though iPhones have seen a decrease in its sales, its sales are expected to revamp as soon as the new 5G iPhone will arrive in 2020.

Anki, the Robotics and AI Company, is Shutting Down

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The producers of cute little robots that were credited to teach the children how to code, Anki, has announced that it is going to cease all its operations by 1st May, as a result of lack of finances to fund its future products.

Anki is a decade old company, which is famous for its robots Vector and Cozmo, Vector being the latest product the company had launched last fall. With the popularity of Anki’s robots, getting convinced about the news of Anki’s shut down is quite unbelievable, but according to the reports the company had already informed its employees, about the same, a few days ago.

anki shuts down
Image Source: digitaltrends.com

Noticeably, the company had raised over $200 millions from its investors, and its revenues had approached $100 million in 2017. In fact, Vector had received $2 million in funding through a Kickstarter campaign, last fall, and also, the Anki products had received the Alexa integration just recently. Despite all those highs, the company has to see the lows now.

During the shutdown, the company will be laying off 200 of its employees, providing them with a week’s salary as the compensation. The CEO of the company, Boris Sofman, broke the news to the employees on Monday and confirmed that the company has failed to raise the money for the company after a new round of financing fell through.

“It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday. We’ve shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications. But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time. Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms. A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor, and we were not able to reach an agreement. We’re doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.” the company said in a statement.

Even though the company had seen success as a robotics company, and the time it had launched its first product, it was a big deal to have an Anki robot, after ten years the company is seen as a toy company, which might be a reason for the company being not able to raise the required funds.

Contradicting to that Sofman said, “For us, it was never meant to be a toy company or even an entertainment company. It’s a robotics and AI company.”

Though companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast had come in front with the intentions to acquire Anki, the company will still have to shut down this Wednesday.

Twitter Unveils New Deals and Partnerships for its New Targeted Video Strategy

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Twitter made its third appearance at the NewFronts event for digital advertisers on Monday, where it announced a series of new and expanded deals in the IAB-managed digital marketing series. The event was all about Twitter’s new partnerships and the live video strategy for news based on sports, finances as well as politics.

Twitter
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The company wants to move the focus of its users from trolls, celebrity feuds, and Donald Trump, to more productive live video sessions. The company has partnered with the news mainstays like Time and The Wall Street Journal, to bring more of the sports and news content as well as has completed a deal with Univision, to produce content for its U.S. Hispanic audience.

Noticeably, the company has been in partnership with companies like Viacom, Major League Soccer, NFL, Live Nation, ESPN, and Activision Blizzard in attempt to build connections with the target audience through its live video platform.

“When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter. Together with our partners, we developed this new slate of programming specifically for our audiences, and designed the content to fuel even more robust conversation on Twitter,” said Kay Madati the Twitter Global VP and Head of Content Partnerships.

The company through its new deals and partnership will provide the marketers more control over the message they want to convey within the advertisements. In the deal with Univision, Twitter will be streaming the sports, news as well as entertainment content in Spanish. It will also air the 2020 Election analysis and reporting.

Along with The Players’ Tribune, Twitter is also about to release a talk show, named Don’t @ Me. Twitter has extended its partnership with its previous partners and with its new partner, Wall Street Journal, the company is releasing a new show WSJ What’s Now. Also, Twitter will be streaming all the WSJ events live.

On the other hand, another new partner to Twitter, CNET, will cover the major tech industry events and Time will be airing two shows in collaboration with Twitter, named Person of the Year and Time 100.

The company has also announced that its other partners including Live Nation, Bloomberg and Blizzard Entertainment have also plans for their new content release with Twitter, and companies like Viacom will be live-streaming red carpet coverage from their events.

Spotify Now has 100M Paying Users

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Spotify 100 milion paid users
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Only a week ago, Amazon announced its ad-supported music streaming service for its Alexa users, and now, another famous music streaming service Spotify has revealed that it has registered a 100 million paid subscribers, in its Q1 2019.

The company has become the world’s largest music streaming service, and the first one to touch the 100 million paid subscribers’ milestone. The increase in the number of paying users for Spotify has hiked by 32 per cent of the number of users it had in 2018 Q4.

Noticeably, the Spotify had just launched its service in India, in February this year, and since then, it has registered over 2 million users for its music streaming service for both paid and ad-supported version, making a total of 217 million subscribers serving in 79 markets. In fact, its rival Apple Music is still at 50 million paid subscribers.

Despite the increased number of subscribers, the Q1 2019 profits are way lesser than the profits it had earned in December 2018. The revealed profits for Q1 2019 by the company is $158 million, whereas, last year in December it had $493 million in revenues. But still, the company has increased its part in the investment for Tencent Music and is readily working in improving its podcast service.

“Over time, our ambition is to develop a more robust advertising solution for podcasts that will allow us to layer in the kind of targeting, measurement, and reporting capabilities we have for the core ad-supported business,” the company said.

Spotify has been working on its ad-supported podcast service, through which it will allow the producers to place ads in between the podcast depending on the target users. Recently, the company acquired the podcast network Gimlet Media, Anchor FM, and Parcast for a combined investment of $400 million. The company is expecting to see a rise in its revenues through its podcast service in the Q2 2019.

Along with the podcast service, the company is also looking forward to an increase in the number of subscribers for both its paid and free music streaming service as well as the profits for Q2 2019 through it.

Apple Pulls Off Third-Party Screen Time Apps from Apple Store Violating its Privacy Policies

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Apple launched its screen time monitoring feature for all its iOS users and following that many other third-party developers also released their screen time monitoring and parental control apps. But it seems that Apple is not happy about it, as it has abruptly removed a few such apps from its iOS stores.

apple screen time feature
Image Source: gadgethacks.com

Noticeably, Apple has built its screen time monitoring feature only for the iOS users, whereas the third-party apps are compatible with both iOS and Android having better features than the Apple’s screen time monitoring features. Reportedly, iOS’s feature has flaws like only a few methods of blocking apps for kids, less-granular scheduling, as well as in many cases the kids were able to modify the filtering tools themselves.

But it is not that the company is insecure about the popularity of its screen time feature, but in a blog post, Apple mentioned the name of some apps including Balance Screen Time by Moment Health and Verizon Smart Family, as the best parental control apps apart from its own, giving the reasons for removing the other third-party apps from Apple store.

“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” said Apple in the blog post.

According to Apple, the removal of the apps from its Apple Store has been presented as a step out of insecurity. But those third-party apps were using Mobile Device Management (MDM), an invasive technology, which makes the apps to access the users’ some of the very personal information, including location, email address, gallery, browsing history, etc. The company has been investigating this MDM technology since 2017, and by the mid of 2017, it had made some strict guidelines on the usage of MDM in the non-enterprize apps.

On the other hand, the third-party companies which got their apps removed from the Apple store, have claimed that there were no clear indications or notification from Apple on the pulling off their apps from the Apple store. Most of the companies have admitted that 80 per cent of their revenues come from Apple Store.

But Apple is confident that those apps were a bigger threat to its customers’ privacy and data security as those apps had violated its guidelines. Though the company is simply following its rules for the safety of its ‘users’ data’, a few companies including Kidslox and Qustodio as well as Kaspersky Lab filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union, after Apple pulled off their screen time apps from Apple Store.