For the first time ever, Amazon.com Inc. raked in more than $2 billion in profit, on the back of solid performance of its cloud computing services and its advertising business. Earning $2.5 billion in Q2 2018, the e-commerce giant delivered its third consecutive quarter of ‘$1 billion- and-over' profit – thereby vindicating the firm’s long held invest-more-to-grow-more strategy.Amazon’s Q2 profits marked a massive climb from the year-ago period’s $197 million. A key driver of the company’s solid performance was its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services, which generated $6.1 billion in sales – a 49% surge compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Facebook just lost $120 billion in market value, experiencing one of the largest losses for a publicly-traded company. Plunging -19% as markets opened on Thursday, the social networking giant’s stock extended the previous day’s after-hours decline (the company’ shares lost -20% in market cap during New York’s late trading session on Wednesday). On Wednesday, the company’s Chief Financial Officer David Wehner indicated that sales growth may decelerate in the coming quarters.Plus, he also mentioned that the firm is ready to spend billions of dollars every year towards raising the bar on safety and security, following this year’s revelations about Facebook's potential role in allowing fake news’ circulation and in influencing election results.

U.S.President Donald Trump feels that Twitter is biased against Republicans. Trump’s tweet read: “Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans.

Facebook Inc. took a hit in after-hours trading, as lower-than-expected revenue performance from the firm rattled investors. The company’s shares lost -20% in market cap during New York’s late trading session on Wednesday, even plummeting by as much as $151 billion at one point.Its user growth also was lower than what analysts reportedly expected. The social networking giant’s missing estimates could potentially add to its challenges, if the after-hours trading pang lingers on through Thursday or beyond.  

Twitter has been consistently going up for the past year, and it topped everything off with a 5% gain today at the market close.It will be interesting to see if they make any more drastic changes to their platform going forward.

Facebook’s hopes of connecting with China might have been blocked, again. For several hours, a Chinese government database showed that Facebook (FB) got the regulatory go-ahead to open a subsidiary in the eastern province of Zhejiang.But the more recent censoring of mention of the subsidiary in Chinese media could be hinting at FB's continued challenge in penetrating the elusive market.  A New York Times article mentions that the approval has been withdrawn, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not want to be named since they were not authorized to speak on the record. Having been banned from having its social networking website in the nation for over a decade, FB has apparently been trying to win access into the Chinese market through various strategies and  gestures for a while – including its founder Mark Zuckerberg’s  holding a Mandarin-language Q&A session with students,  and posting photos of his jog through Tiananmen Sq

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, during the second quarter conference call, revealed a remarkable and completely mind-boggling statistics – Google translates 143 billion words a day.A stranger on the street will answer in his native tongue, and you will hear in perfect English (you can choose between male or female voices with or without a British accent). This service is not perfect yet and it is free for now.

But the question for investors is, will it matter if earnings, revenues, and sales are stronger than expected? We'll find out tomorrow.Time will tell.  

Alphabet posts a stellar quarterly report. Investors apparently had been fretting over Google’s substantial expenses incurred in paying to phone-makers to get its apps installed on their devices.On top of that, Google’s net revenue surged 25.4% in Q2 2018 compared to the year-ago period, marking its fastest growth in four years. Plus, Alphabet’s operating profit margin peaked at 24 percent – its highest since the Q3 2017 (excluding a $5 billion fine from European antitrust authorities).

  Google introduced the mini program “Caihua Xiaoge”( or “Guess My Sketch”) on China’s largest social media platform WeChat.Mini programs are apps that users can access without having to install Google Play or Apple App store. Caihua Xiaoge is an AI-powered game in which players get to draw something on their smartphone/tablet in a limited time, so that Google’s AI software can identify the object drawn. In a nation where most of Google's apps/services including Google Play, Gmail and Youtube are banned, the company’s AI product on WeChat marks one of its rare (and therefore significant) connections with the Chinese market, following its investment of $550 million in Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com last month.

EU regulators have charged the Android developer for compelling smartphone makers into pre-installing Google Search app and Chrome as a condition for licensing Google Play store, and even paying them to bundle Google apps into the operating system in some instances. The investigation, started by EU regulators in 2015, apparently indicates that Google has been using its Android dominance to milk advertising and other revenues, while restricting choices for European consumers. Previously, EU had slapped $2.7 billion fine on Google in 2017 for unethically favoring its own shopping services over rivals on its search results.Adding the latest charge, Google potentially faces more than $7 billion in fines from the EU. Google however, argues that Android has actually enhanced consumer choice and that providing Android software free of charge to manufacturers has helped lower phone prices and therefore increased online usage by consumers.

But as it turns out, it wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. In a blog post by Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, Facebook is now saying that “most” of its 2 billion users may have had their personal data skimmed from the site by "malicious actors."While Facebook insists it has disabled the feature that enabled data scraping from the site’s search function, the fact remains that the feature existed for enough time to compromise most users. The direct quote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is the tell-all of how bad this problem really is: "It is reasonable to expect that if you've had that setting on in the last several years that someone has accessed your information.

Shady stuff, sure, but also potentially against the rules. The Federal Trade Commission has a rule known as the “consent decree,” which states that users must explicitly give their consent if data about them is to be shared beyond the scope of what’s covered in their privacy settings.In this case, it seems fairly clear that sharing personal data with a third-party data firm (Cambridge Analytica) – whose goal it was to use the information to influence people for political reasons – violates the consent decree. That’s where the numbers start to add up in a big way.

discovers.  One such pattern is the “Cup-and-Handle Bullish” formation.The question is: how can investor possibly spot this pattern when there are literally thousands upon thousands of securities being traded? The answer: Artificial Intelligence! Tickeron’s A.I.