Facebook is banned in China, but the company generated at least $5 billion in sales there last year by one estimate.READ MORE...

In a mission to becoming the world’s leading audio platform, Stockholm-based music streaming provider Spotify is all set to acquire podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor to compete with Apple’s popular iTunes’ podcasting platform.Spotify plans to spend $400 million to $500 million on acquisitions in 2019. Gimlet Media has a podcast studio with dedicated intellectual-property development, production and advertising capabilities. Anchor has a platform of tools for podcast creators as well as an established and rapidly growing creator base. This move is an effort on the part of Spotify to branch out and differentiate its musical offerings in a nascent but burgeoning podcast industry that promises opportunities for growth.

After several months of dismal performance, Snap Inc.'s latest report confirmed forecast-beating fourth quarter earnings -- sending the beleaguered stock soaring back with gains of more than 20% in Tuesday’s after-hours trading. The adjusted earnings loss for the fourth quarter stood at 4 cents per share, beating estimates by 4 cents.Revenue increased 36% to a record $390 million, while operating loss improved $166 million to ($195) million.

Sometimes too powerful. Last year, a spate of lynchings triggered by viral hoax messages on its service put the company at the center of a debate about misinformation in the country, where it has more than 200 million users.READ MORE...

(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google became the most-profitable internet company by recruiting talented technologists and inspiring them enough to keep them around.That advantage may be slipping as some workers increasingly doubt the leadership and vision of Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, according to recent results from an employee survey. READ MORE...

Facebook’s latest Q4 report reveals forecast-beating top and bottom-line growth, resulting into the shares of the company rising by 7.1% after hours. Revenues rose 30% to $16.9 billion.Monthly active users were also up 9%, to 2.32 billion. But perhaps the most compelling figure showed that the company's effective tax rate dropped to 14% from 43% the year prior. The company also estimates a whopping 2.7 billion users each month accessing the various platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp or Messenger). Capex for the quarter stood at $4.37 billion, while liquidity was $41.11 billion at quarter's end.

Hackers and scandals could not stop Facebook from registering solid earnings last year. Touching a record $6.9 billion in the last three months of 2018, Facebook’s profit surged +61% from the year-ago period.Facebook also managed to make net additions to its daily userbase in apparently more saturated markets, Europe and North America. Facebook’s fundamentals in 2018 seem like a ray of hope for the company, as the year was also an extremely challenging one for it.

WhatsApp is imposing stricter limits on how widely its users can share messages in a bid to crack down on the spread of false information. Following a six-month experiment in India, the messaging platform announced on Monday that it will restrict users globally to forwarding a message to only five chats at a time.READ MORE...

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit confirmed on Thursday that it is set to buy about $40 million worth of smartwatch technology from the watch-making giant Fossil Group Inc. Although neither Google nor Fossil has yet confirmed what this new technology exactly is, the head of Google’s Wear OS division, who oversees a version of Google’s Android operating system for smartwatches and other wearables, suggested ‘wellness’. He said that technological wearables built for ‘wellness’ and simplicity have the power to improve lives by bringing the information people need at a quick glance.The addition of Fossil smartwatches is expected to diversify Google’s portfolio of wearable technology that is now on the rise catering to mobile customers. Fossil ended 2018 on a high after emerging as the second-best performing retail stock.

Shares of Snap Inc. plummeted nearly 13.8% on Wednesday following the announcement of the exit of its CFO, Tim Stone, after only eight months on the job.Over the past year, the company has witnessed the exit of several top-level executives as it faced a steady decline in users and tough competition from Facebook Inc.'s Instagram. Losing more than 65% of its value since its IPO almost two years ago, the market value of Snap after the exit of CFO fell from $8.5 billion before the start trading to about $7.3 billion by the end of the day. On Wednesday, RBC Capital Markets analysts have downgraded the stock from outperform to sector perform, while Summit Insights Group lowered its price target by 17% to $5. According to analysts, Snap’s 28-year-old Chief Executive Evan Spiegel’s increasing centralized control could be driving the heavy turnover in the executive ranks. The only positive news, in Tuesdays filing, was that the company expects its quarterly results would be

Spotify is set to enter the Indian market in the new year, after signing a major licensing deal with one the largest record labels io the subcontinent, T-Series, known for producing mostly Bollywood music soundtracks.Announced in March 2018, two of the largest local music services, Saavn and JioMusic, officially merged just last month to create JioSaavn that offers a 90-day extended trial of JioSaavn Pro to Jio subscribers.

Facebook has planned a three-year commitment to invest $300 million towards news/journalism sector. "We don't want publishers to be dependent on us, but we do want to support them," Campbell Brown, Facebook's Vice President of global news partnerships, said in a telephone interview, according to CNN. Facebook will hold a two-day summit in March for further discussions with local news publishers, as revealed by Brown (according to CNN's report). Facebook’s funding will support non-profit organizations like the Pulitzer Center and Report for America, among other publishers. Local websites and newspapers have apparently been facing thinning readership largely due to proliferation of social networking/digital giants like Facebook and Google  who are rapidly grabbing the largest shares in the advertising industry.

Google employees, who walked out of offices around the world in November in protest of sexual harassment policies, are extending their critiques to the rest of the industry.The organizers are launching a social media campaign Tuesday to educate the public and protest the issue of forced arbitration by tech companies.

Google is growing its presence in Los Angeles, the company says. Google has leased a new 584,000-square-foot office in West Los Angeles that is scheduled to be completed by 2022. Dubbed "One Westside," the offices will take up part of what is today the Westside Pavilion mall. READ MORE...

I know the company name is Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) now, but I still have to call it Google.Now the stock could be facing resistance from a downward sloped trend line and earnings are right around the corner. If we look at the daily chart for the last few months, the highs from August, October, December, and this week all connect very neatly.

Twitter Inc. shares traded higher Thursday after a so-called double upgrade for the microblogging website from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. BAML analyst Justin Post upped his rating on the stock two notches, to "buy" from "underperform", with a price target of $39 per share, firmly ahead of the Street consensus of $33.11.The change followed a price target reduction from analysts at Cowen & Co., who lowered their estimate by $2 to $25 a share, and from JPMorgan, which trimmed theirs by $1 to $45 a share.

Chinese company Baidu’s technology will soon be helping deliver grocery for Walmart. California startup Udelv has built self-driving vehicles using Baidu’s open-source autonomous driving software named Apollo, and plans to deploy them for delivering food items for U.S. supermarket chain Walmart.Last year in Arizona, Walmart began testing the waters with a pilot program using Waymo, the self-driving car division of Google's parent company Alphabet.

Google is expanding in L.A., the company announced Tuesday.The company has leased the current site of a shopping mall in West Los Angeles that it will turn into a 584,000 square-foot office campus, according to a press release.

Internet dating website operator Match Group (Nasdaq: MTCH) has really strong fundamental indicators, and those strong fundamentals helped push the stock higher in recent years.Match Group has a return on equity of 39% and a profit margin of 24.6%. Despite those fundamental strengths, the stock has dropped significantly as the overall market has declined.

Technology giant Facebook is in for another tough year as marketers ramp up their scrutiny of the platform, according to Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser who has reaffirmed his "sell" rating on the company's stock.READ MORE...