Jack Ma announced that he’ll retire as executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.in 2019, and that he will be succeeded by CEO Daniel Zhang.
Zhang, who became chief executive officer three years ago, is a certified accountant and a major force behind Alibaba’s ‘New Retail’ technology – touted as a revolutionary shift in retail industry encompassing digital shopping, physical stores, e-payments and logistics.Zhang also led mega shopping bonanza events such as the annual Singles' Day .The company’s stock has grown +87% during Zhang’s tenure.
Amazon is seeking to bolster its India presence, by offering Hindi language features.
On Tuesday, the company launched a version of its mobile website and Android app in Hindi – the most popular language among Indians.It is still working to develop features such as product reviews and ratings in Hindi.
However, Hindi is not yet available on Amazon's iOS app or the desktop version of its website.
Google Home is used by 30% of U.S. smart speaker owners each month.
Google started working on its language identification tool, LangID, in 2013.Google’s latest bilingual offering will be operative by Thursday, starting with English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.
In the three months ending June, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s revenues surged +61% - the fastest pace in more than four years.
The Chinese e-commerce giant’s revenues for the quarter was 80.9 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) which matched analyst estimates.Its net income – though dropped by -41% – still managed to come in at 8.7 billion yuan, topping estimates.
Buying a department store chain with 29 stores and 17 shopping malls last year, expanding Hema supermarket chain, increasing investments on data-centers for its cloud computing business, acquiring food delivery network Ele.me and video streaming site Youku – Alibaba’s aggressive investment/expansion strategies seem to be boosting revenues, while a part of it might be hurting margins.
KPMG, one of the world’s biggest tax advisory and auditing firms, released their twice-yearly “The Pulse of Fintech” report on July 31.It offered a rosy outlook for the space, revealing a significant uptick in venture capital, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions deals through Q1 and Q2 2018 on a level that already exceeds 2017’s overall totals.
Two massive deals accounted for the healthy growth: Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Financial raised $14 billion during Q2, while Vantiv acquired WorldPay for $12.9 billion in Q1.
Blue Apron Inc. lowered its sales forecast and reported a slide in its customer count.
In Q2 2018, the meal-kit company’s customers declined by -24%, causing revenues to drop -25%.Blue Apron expects Q3 revenues in the range of $150 million to $160 million - which would be a -24% decline from the year-ago period.
Touted as ‘Amazon Prime Day’, the e-commerce giant’s massive discount event apparently saw several shoppers frustrated by technical faults on its website and app.
In addition to speed bumps on shopping (mainly in the first hour of the event day that started at 3 P.M Eastern time Monday), customers also faced troubles streaming content on Amazon Prime Video and connecting to AI voice assistant Alexa – as indicated by user reports on DownDetector.com.Many people took to social media and tagged the event as “#PrimeDayFail”.
The technical hiccups, however, could not stop this year’s Prime Day from outshining last year’s event.
technologies, the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba is set to invest $15 billion over the next three years into quantum computing and A.I.The algorithms on Tickeron are able to scan the stock market in search of patterns and trends, and then can use back-testing to determine statistical probabilities of outcomes that investors can use to make trading decisions.