Alphabet Inc

The NASDAQ hit the all-important 5,000 level on March 2, 2015, for the first time after the dot com bubble burst of 2000.

LinkedIn’s stock, which traded at $269 in February 2015, fell to one of its lows of $101.11 in February 2016.

Oracle ID Graph’s unique feature is that it separates device-based identifiers and mobile devices that allow marketers to send a message to these devices directly.

Microsoft (MSFT) is behind only Amazon (AMZN) in the overall cloud space.

The Digital Marketing segment of Adobe (ADBE) provides solutions and services for creating, managing, and executing advertising and marketing initiatives.

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TXN) planned its strategic exit from it back in September 2012. It instead dedicated its strategic and R&D investments toward becoming a pure analog and embedded processing company.

Third-party mobile payment services in China registered a total transaction volume of ~$197 billion in 2013—an increase of 707% on a YoY basis.

VMware’s NSX is a networking platform that can manage and control any virtualized networking environment, irrespective of endpoints.

In fiscal 3Q18, Microsoft’s capital expenditure was $3.5 billion, with most going toward data center expansion.

Earlier in the series, we discussed IBM’s improved position in the cloud space due to its prowess in the hybrid cloud space.

In September 2014, Microsoft (MSFT) announced its acquisition of Mojang, a Swedish company popular for its game Minecraft, for $2.5 billion.

With each passing day, the prices for handsets such as Google’s (GOOGL) Android and Apple (AAPL) iOS devices are falling. This trend has played a key role in the popularity of games, especially among youth, benefiting the gaming industry.

In late February 2018, VMware announced its acquisition of CloudVelox, taking its hybrid cloud to the next level.

Tesla’s (TSLA) third-quarter earnings are scheduled for Wednesday. Notably, the company will likely post a loss in the quarter.

Alphabet (GOOGL) has several branches, and Google is the branch that looks after its smart speaker business.

Microsoft’s cash and short-term investment balance of $136.9 billion was on the top of the list for the fourth straight quarter.

With about five weeks remaining in the trade truce, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said yesterday that the US was “miles and miles” away from a trade deal with China.

In the trailing 12-month period, net fund inflows were $2.3 billion. FDN’s fund flows in the trailing one week and trailing three months were -$105.7 million and $719.3 million, respectively.

Facebook’s net profit was $3.9 billion in 2Q17, up from $2.3 billion in the corresponding quarter a year earlier.

Microsoft, Amazon, and other vendors are pursuing a $278.3 billion revenue opportunity in the global public cloud market, according to the latest Gartner estimates.

Last month, for the first time, China applied restrictions on instant messaging services for national security purposes.

Alphabet reported its 3Q17 earnings on October 26, 2017. The company posted EPS (earnings per share) of $9.57, which beat analysts’ estimates of $8.33.

Google’s closely watched cloud computing business recently got a boost from Twitter, which signed up for some cloud storage and computing needs.

In late 2016, Oracle (ORCL) launched the second generation of its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering, Oracle Bare Metal Cloud.

As Millennials increasingly move to OTT (over-the-top) services, pay-TV companies like Dish Network (DISH) are also focusing on OTT services.

For fiscal 3Q17, analysts expect Salesforce (CRM) to post revenue and non-GAAP EPS (earnings per share) of ~$2.12 billion and $0.21, respectively.

The US saw positive fund flows in 2014 due to a relatively better economic position.

Cobra Kai, a spin-off of Karate Kid that stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka, is part of YouTube Red’s lineup of original content.

After 11 long months of uncertainty and many negotiations, Verizon (VZ) has completed its $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s core Internet assets. Let’s look at what’s in store for the US telecom space.

SanDisk (SNDK) announced its 3Q15 earnings on October 21, 2015. The market reaction was positive, which showed a marginal increase of 0.16% in after-hours trading.

Dish Network’s (DISH) streaming television service, Sling TV, turned three on January 5.

Farmers for Free Trade’s campaign was rolled out on September 12 with the slogan “Tariffs Hurt the Heartland.”

While Twitter (TWTR) recently posted better-than-expected earnings and revenue on April 25, concerns over its future revenue growth have pulled down the company’s stock by 2.1%.

In 4Q14, AQR Capital raised its holdings in Apple (AAPL). AAPL constituted 1.46% of the fund’s fourth-quarter portfolio.

Google, an Alphabet (GOOGL) company, recently bought a 1,210-acre piece of land in Reno, Nevada, for $29.1 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

NVIDIA (NVDA), which earns more than 80% of its revenue from GPUs (graphics processing units), is expanding the application of these GPUs in verticals beyond gaming.

eBay’s management noted that eBay Enterprise margins fell by 3.9% during the last quarter compared to a year ago. The increased cost to prepare for the holiday season was blamed for the decline.

On February 24, Microsoft announced that it will acquire Xamarin, a mobile app platform provider. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

A comparative lack of security for Android shows that BlackBerry could do more harm than good to its image as a secure player by adopting Android as its operating system.

The trade war that President Trump unleashed with the Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs has taken a toll on market sentiments.

On March 8, Netflix (NFLX) stock fell 0.9% to $349.60 after Buckingham Research downgraded its rating from “buy” to “neutral.”

Salesforce.com (CRM) announced a collaboration with Accenture (ACN. Both companies share an equal passion about wearable technology ruling the market in the future.

It comes as no surprise that Google is spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to review content on its platforms such as YouTube.

Facebook has been concentrating its efforts on video for a long time now. It has ambitions of becoming the number one player in the video ad market.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), headquartered in Palo Alto, California,  is one of the world’s largest information technology companies and a leading provider products, technologies, software, solutions and services. HP has seen its shares bounce back from their late-2012 lows, and the company beat street estimates in its latest quarterly results. For the first quarter of fiscal 2014, […]

Twitter (TWTR) announced in mid-February that it would be dismantling its app for Apple desktop computers.

Monthly active users Investors are on high alert as Twitter’s (TWTR) 3Q17 release approaches. Last quarter, Twitter failed to grow its audience base meaningfully, and going by how the market reacted to the report, investors were not impressed. Twitter went into 2Q17 with 328 million MAUs (monthly active users), and it came out of the quarter […]

Facebook (FB) has been trying to come up with a mobile payment service for WhatsApp in India (EPI) for quite some time.

Renaissance Technologies eliminated a position in online retailer Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) that accounted for 0.34% of the fund’s 3Q portfolio.

Baidu is selling a majority stake in its financial services unit as it seeks to raise funds to bolster its competition in China’s digital financial services market.

According to the latest report from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C continued to lead the British smartphone market in May.

Facebook (FB) has once again reiterated its ambitions to become the leading content supplier in the social media space.

Social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (or SMAC) is a disruptive technology that’s transforming the current IT environment at a rapid pace. Many technology leaders, who failed to acknowledge its importance or were slow in embracing it, are suffering. HP has been impacted by SMAC.

Apple (AAPL) was the biggest public company by market cap between 2011 and last November, when holding that title became a game of cat and mouse.

On the positive side, growth in AT&T’s net additions of connected devices continued to be solid during 2Q15. AT&T added ~1.4 million connected devices during the quarter.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) came into force on May 25.

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet (GOOGL), is phasing out the pod-like cars it has long used to test its autonomous driving technology.

AWS and the continued success of the Prime membership program were the main drivers for Amazon in 2015. This will likely continue in 2016 as well.

BlackBerry now plans to launch its next version of the Passport smartphone, Passport Oslo, by the end of this year. The smartphone will have high-end specifications.

The mobile advertising market is expected to grow at a faster rate than the overall digital advertising market.

Amazon (AMZN) had expressed interest in acquiring Flipkart to try to keep Walmart (WMT) away from India’s fast-growing online retail sector.

Stages of deep learning In the previous part of this series, we saw that GPU[1.graphics processing unit]-accelerated computing is helping supercomputers solve many complex problems efficiently. The cost and time savings brought by GPUs have encouraged many cloud companies to use these chips for their deep learning tasks. Deep learning happens in two stages. The […]

Earlier in this series, we discussed the factors that might impede Oracle’s (ORCL) dominance in the database space, which is also the company’s cash cow.

Third Point added, “when we break down the applicability of Apple Pay to PayPal’s business mix, we find that Apply Pay will compete directly with only 1.5 to 2% of PayPal’s total payment volume (or TPV).”

Twitter (TWTR) is gearing up to tighten rules to foster healthier conversations on its platform and curb toxic speech.

During the recent installment of Asia’s largest computing show, Computex, Microsoft (MSFT) announced that it will start selling smartphones and tablets running its software at below $200.

According to a report from Statista and the previous chart, Pandora leads the Internet Radio market with a share of 31%.

According to eMarketer, Facebook (FB) took 19.9% of total US digital advertising funds in 2017, and Google (GOOGL) took 38.6%.

Google, Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), and Snap (SNAP) might be losing sleep because authorities are pointing fingers at them for allowing their platforms to breed extremist ideologies.

HP’s (HPQ) split into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise will finalize by November of 2015.

Amazon’s Twitch drives the highest US live video streaming volume with about 44% share. With live video streaming service at 60fps, YouTube aims to give competition to Twitch.

This article considers the importance of investment, including residential investment, in the support of U.S. consumption data and the implications for investors.

The company has now stopped including results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine through the Facebook search.

On May 12, 2017, Alphabet (GOOGL) generated investor returns of 30.1% on a trailing 12-month basis.

While Amazon (AMZN) currently dominates the smart speaker market, its days at the helm could be numbered if two recent studies are any guide.

Microsoft (MSFT) is set to release its fiscal Q4 2018 financial results on July 19.

On November 28, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech “appeared to signal a nearer end to the U.S. central bank’s interest-rate hikes,” Reuters reported.

Disney Kids TV streaming box, which Walt Disney (DIS) unveiled at the CES 2017, quickly has generated heat in the streaming media device market.

US equity markets gained in the week ended April 24, 2015. But the week was all about the NASDAQ, which gained 3.2%.

Snap, which went public in March 2017, looks focused on accelerating its path to profitability.

Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Lowe’s were the four retailers in the United States that spent the most on YouTube video ads last year.

Facebook’s advertising business posted second-quarter revenues of $13.0 billion, which grew 42.0% year-over-year.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL) biggest division, Google, has recently gained traction in the home automation segment where Amazon (AMZN) has a dominant position with its Echo Devices.

According to KGI, Apple Watch (AAPL) sales will fall more than 25% in 2016. KGI forecasts sales of 7.5 million units in 2016 compared to estimated sales of 10.6 million units in 2015.

Du Xiaoman Financial, Baidu’s (BIDU) financial services subsidiary, has been cleared to enter the business of selling mutual funds in China.

Seeing the success of local inventory ads, Google has expanded them to all major economies outside the United States, including the United Kingdom (EWU), France, Germany, Japan, and Australia.

While announcing its plans for three new undersea cable systems and five new cloud regions, Google also disclosed that it had invested $30 billion into expanding its cloud infrastructure over the last three years.

Billionaire investor George Soros recently shared his views on social media companies Facebook and Google.

On May 22, 2017, 2.6 million shares of Amazon (AMZN) exchanged hands, and the stock rose 1.1% to close at ~$970.7.

Surface Hub features built-in advanced sensors, cameras, NFC, and microphones. Through the welcome screen, users can call or connect a personal device to display content on the screen.

Facebook (FB) is building a paywall tool that would allow publishers to charge for access to stories they publish on Instant Articles, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Amid tightening competition for advertising dollars, there is growing pressure on Google to diversify its revenue sources.

In early June 2017, Apple (AAPL) escaped a $533.0 million fine after a federal appeals court ruled in its favor. The ruling ended in a patent dispute that had dragged on for nearly four years.

Apple’s stock is trading at a forward P/E of 12.5x, which is lower than its main peers, Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT).

The Pandora One service has 3.3 million subscribers and includes advertisement-free access, better audio quality, and reduced timeouts, and offers listeners with additional skips.