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Disney Plans to Expand in Streaming Business; Plans to Acquire 10% Hulu Stake from AT&T

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Reportedly, Disney is in talks with AT&T to acquire a 10 per cent stake that the latter holds in the streaming service media company Hulu, in order to expand its control over the company. AT&T carries the 10 per cent stakes in Hulu through its subsidiary WarnerMedia unit. Disney, currently, owns 30 per cent of shares in the streaming service and is already close to acquiring another majority stake in the same from the 21st Century Fox, which owns the rest of 30 per cent shares in the company.

Clearly, after the acquisition from 21st Century Fox and AT&T, Disney will be a 70 per cent stake owner in Hulu, and there will be only one other owner left with 30 per cent of the stakes in Hulu, i.e. the subsidiary of Comcast, NBCUniversal.

AT&T is in the process of settling off its extreme debts, and in 2018, it had announced that it would pay down at least $20 billion worth of debt in 2019, alone. Selling off the Hulu stakes is one of the major moves that the company has taken in order to settle its debts. It was in 2018 when the company announced that it is interested in selling its 10 per cent of shares it owns in Hulu. According to the reports, the deal between Disney and AT&T may close at $1 billion, which may help the latter to pay down its excessive debt to an extent.

Hulu has been providing its streaming services since 2007 but has always failed in front of its rivals including Netflix. But last year, the company started streaming its original content and gained much popularity among people. Also, the company registered 8 million new users in 2018. This increased client base has also increased the company’s worth. But still, it needs more focus and good content.

Disney already is looking forward to expanding its business in the streaming services and is working on its own home project for it, the Disney+. Disney+ will be a streaming service that will carry exclusive Disney movies and TV shows and will be launched by the end of this year. Initially, the service will be available domestically.

Porsche’s Best Seller ‘Macan Compact SUV’ to Go All Electric

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The luxury vehicle producers, Porsche, announced on Tuesday that it is going to transform it’s best selling Macan SUV, into all electric. The company has recently started working on its first electric vehicles, the Taycan and Cross Tourismo, and the electric Macan SUV will be another addition to its electric vehicle lineup.

The company has revealed that the production of the electric Macan SUV will start anytime at the start of the coming decade, and the company is already set to launch its Taycan sedan by the end of this year, and the launch of the Taycan Cross Turismo will follow shortly afterwards, which is also the final production version of the Mission E concept of the company.

Like Porsche’s electric vehicle Taycan, the Macan compact SUV will also feature 800-volt architecture and will be capable of taking charge up to 350 kW. The company has not given any statement on the total distance it would be able to cover when fully charged, but we can get a good idea of its mile range from the Taycan model, which will have a range of 250 miles, after charging in fewer than 20 minutes.

The company has said that the Macan compact will be based on the PPE architecture, and for that Porsche has collaborated with the Audi AG. The company plans to turn most of its vehicles into electric or hybrid models, like its contemporary Tesla, and according to the company, 50 per cent of all new Porsche vehicles may have an electric drive system, by the year 2025.

“Our aim is to take a pioneering role in technology, and for this reason, we will continue to consistently align the company with the mobility of the future,” Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said in a statement.

Porsche is known for its luxury and sports vehicles, and Macan compact crossover is the best-selling vehicle of the company, having been sold 23,500 Macan SUVs in 2018, in the U.S. only. Porsche has plans to invest over $6.9 billion on EVs manufacturing through 2022. The company will manufacture all its electric vehicles at the company’s existing plant in Leipzig, Germany.

Apple Makes Guidelines for the App Developers to Offer Discounts to Entice Past Subscribers

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Apple has posted an article regarding how the iOS, macOS, and tvOS app developers will be able to offer discounts on the subscription plans to their app users. Due to the increase in the subscribers for many apps in the past time, the company was working on its guidelines and tools in order to manage those subscription apps. The company released the news through a blog post on Monday.

Previously, the company had produced more strict guidelines on how the subscription plans should work. But the new guidelines will help the app developers to offer new discounts to its existing subscribers and to lure the new ones. The offers will also help the developers to regain their former users.

According to the ‘current’ guidelines, the discounts are only available on the limited time subscription plans (at the beginning), which are the part of introductory promotions, and as soon it ends, the subscribers have to pay the full amount of the subscription fee. Also withdrawing from the subscription plan is quite a tedious job. Even the developers are not allowed to make changes to those subscription plans.

But the new guidelines will make it easy for the subscribers to cancel their subscriptio. And, the developers will also be able to produce new offers to attract their former and new subscribers. This will provide the developers more control over their apps, as now they will be able to drop or raise the price of their subscription according to the demand, like offering discounts on the subscription plans during the festive or holiday season, etc.

The new guidelines from Apple will allow the developers to offer ten types of different deals to promote their apps’ subscription plans. And, if any user decides to withdraw from the subscription, the developers can suggest more tempting offers to them to make them stay. According to the previous guidelines, the developers were also unable to see the users with disabled auto-renewal of the plan, but now they will not only be able to see those users but also offer them discounts to draw them to opt for the auto-renewal.

Microsoft Unveils its New $3,500 Second-gen Holographic Headset HoloLens 2 at MWC 2019

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Starting on Sunday, a few tech giants have already showcased their upcoming technologies, in the Mobile World Congress ( MWC) 2019 happening in Barcelona, Spain, including LG that introduced its forthcoming foldable phone in the same event.

HOLOLENS-2
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On the same league, Microsoft also revealed its new second generation mixed reality headset, HoloLens 2, the successor to 2016’s groundbreaking holographic headset. The device is an AI-backed pair of goggles, integrated with the company’s Azure cloud services. The new HoloLens 2 is more efficient, more advanced and more improved version of its predecessor.

The HploLens 2 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Compute Platform and also has its own custom-built processing unit. The device comes with an iris authentication technology, such that it is ready to use as soon as the user puts it on. It offers a double field view, approximating 2,000 pixels per eye, maintaining the holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight. The headset projects across a 100-degree swath, which is almost double as of its predecessor, projecting to a wider viewing area. It is built with the microelectromechanical system (MEMS) display technology, providing the 2K display for each eye.

The device boasts a 5-channel microphone array, and spatial built-in hardware is employed to the device, which controls the audio I/O of the device. The device is embedded with an advanced ToF sensor, through which the headset allows the users to interact with a hologram with their hands. Now the user does not need to use the virtual reality icons, rather they can simply move their hands to control the HoloLens. It also includes a 12-megapixel RGB camera, to facilitate video conferencing.

The device uses the USB-C for charging and includes a pretty generic 2×2 802.11ac wireless radio. It also offers Remote Rendering which processes the holograms of up to 100 million polygons, through the Azure-powered service, serving as the external GPU for the HoloLens 2.

The new HoloLens 2 is more immersive and more comfortable than its predecessor. The cost of the headset is set to be $3,500 (around Rs. 2,49,000), and currently, is only available on the Microsoft e-shop, for the citizens of United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia, and New Zealand. According to Kipman, Microsoft’s technical fellow for AI and mixed reality, the device is not for the gamers or the knowledge workers but is specially designed for the enterprise customers, workers who fix gear shifts and work on oil rigs, and the military personnel.

Pinterest May Go Public Coming June; Files Confidentially for U.S. IPO

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According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the social media website, Pinterest has confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The news came out on Thursday, according to which the company is seeking a valuation of at least $12 billion over its IPO.

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Pinterest plans to go for the IPO in the month of June this year, for that it has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co, as the lead underwriters, although the company has denied commenting over this matter.

Pinterest is one of the largest, still-private, companies and the Unicorns of Silicon Valley, that had also raised $150 million in a private funding round in 2017. A few months ago the CEO of the company Ben Silbermann had also announced in a statement that the company was planning to go public in April 2019. But due to the economic slowdown, like few other companies, the IPO has delayed to June.

In the last September, it was estimated that the San Francisco based company caters to over 250 million through the company’s website and mobile app. The users use Pinterest as a bulletin board where they pin the things of their interest. The app is also used as an e-commerce platform to sell products and services. The company itself earns profits from marketing and advertisements. In 2018, the recorded revenue of the company was more than $700 million.

The news of the company going public can be an after effect of the other tech giants like Slack, Uber and Lyft filing for their IPO, even though the company has still maintained confidentiality over this topic. Under the JOBS Act of 2012, a few companies with annual revenue less than $1 billion can file for IPO confidentially, such that they could raise capital before the before releasing detailed financial information.

WhatsApp Confirms the Bug in the New Authentication Feature on its iOS App

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The data security has become the prime concern today and to maintain proper privacy, WhatsApp had rolled out a new biometric security feature for its iPhone app users, earlier this month. The security features made use of the Face Id and Touch Id to unlock WhatsApp, such that in the case of the unlocked phone screen, the users had to use the Face Id or the Touch Id to unlock WhatsApp.

But, a bug has been discovered in this new biometric feature that allows anyone to access WhatsApp, even the Face Id or the Touch Id is enabled for the app. This new feature was made available to the iOS users having WhatsApp version 2.19.20, and the bug was first reported on Reddit by a user named de_X_ter. Even WhatsApp has accepted that it is aware of the bug and is taking proper measures to fix it asap.

According to the Reddit post, the user can bypass the FaceId or the Touch Id security if the user selects any option other than “Immediately” for the Screen Lock under the WhatsApp Account’s Privacy Settings. The Screen Lock options other than “Immediately” are “After 1 minute”, “After 15 minutes”, and “After 1 hour”, which lets the users bypass the security using the WhatsApp share option on any other third-party application.

In reality, when the Screen Lock is enabled for the WhatsApp account, and the user tries to use the WhatsApp share option using other apps, a Face ID or Touch Id authentication must appear on the screen every single time. But due to the bug, the Screen Lock is not working the way it should. If we use the same share feature when the “Immediately” option for the Screen Lock is enabled, the Face Id and the Touch Id is working perfectly fine.

WhatsApp has acknowledged the issue and said in a statement, “We are aware of the issue and a fix will be available shortly. In the meantime, we recommend that people set the screen lock option to immediately.”