Tech Crunch News

Yahoo has once again extended a deadline for potential suitors to submit their bids until April 18.

Yahoo Inc. has tried every way to revive its business and now it seems like CEO Marissa Mayer is in deep water. The board of directors, along with the CEO, tried to explore the strategic alternatives in order to turn around the fate of its dying business. The activist investor of the company, Starboard Value LP, has already clarified its demands on behalf of majority investors and shareholders that a sale process should be pursued. If the demands were not met, Starboard Value would start a proxy war against the US internet giant.

Last month, Yahoo announced the commencement of the sale process and tried to approach bidders. Microsoft started to show interest. At that time, a deal was imminent between it and Yahoo, but no update on that matter is provided afterwards. When the news about Yahoo selling its core business broke out, Verizon was said to be the most interested candidate to purchase the web and advertising business of the company. According to Bloomberg, the telecom network is all set to make a first round bid for Yahoo’s core internet and advertising business by next week.

Verizon might also include the plan to acquire its stake in Yahoo Japan Corp. in order to make its offer impressive to the board of directors and shareholders. People familiar with the matter have said that the search engine company has once again extended the deadline for bid by one week. Another person claimed that the main division of Alphabet Inc., Google, has plans to make a bid for its core web business as well.

AT&T and Comcast Corporation were also named as potential bidder but the suitors have decided to go against bidding as reported by other persons familiar to the matter. These persons asked to not be identified as the details are private. Microsoft was expected to submit a bid before first deadline. It failed with a first hostile bid for Yahoo in 2008. It will not participate again.

On the other hand, companies and a few private equity firms, which include Time Inc., Bain, TPG, and others, are also exploring options and evaluating a bid for Yahoo’s core business. The bid can be made either alone or by backing a strategic acquirer.

Yahoo decided to extend the deadline by a week for its first-round bids, to April 18. This will facilitate and provide further time to other companies to evaluate decisions.

The tech giant has started the production of DDR4 DRAM chips at a massive scale for pcs and hybrids.

Samsung Electronics Corporation Limited is producing DDR4 DRAM memory chips on massive scale that will be installed in hybrids and laptops in the coming years. The South Korean tech company is manufacturing these chips at a 10-nanometer class process, which is a process tech designed to manufacture chips for electronic devices including smartphones, tablets and computers.

The Galaxy maker is aware of the fact that the size of these chips is of high significance, as the smaller the chip the easier it becomes to place it in any area. The area where the chip is placed affects the switching speed, that is, it consumes less energy and gives higher performance.

The newer model of these chips gives speed of up to 3,200 MHz while the previous version was capable of only giving 2,400 MHz. The DDR4 DRAM chips give storage of 4GB, using lesser power from the electronics. The modules are going to be available within this year, however Samsung has not yet revealed the exact time. The maker of mobile phones has plans to use these new chips in its smartphones, which might not be a problem for this tech giant as it has used its own exynos chips in the past.

The tech giant’s 8GB DDR4-3200 chips have several changes and updates to these 10nm class devices. Argon fluoride immersion lithography was used in the production of these devices with a pattern process. The cost of these chips is expected to be higher than the preceding ones as the manufacturing cost is higher too. More of these models might be seen in laptops too and not just in smartphones because of the performance it promises to offer.

The South Korean company recently reported its first quarter earnings for this year, which were better than it had hoped in terms of profit. It reported high sales of its new phone, the Galaxy S7. This result has made the shareholders happier in comparison to last year, when the company reported a loss of $8.0 billion per market value because of the tough competition it faced from major rivals including Apple and other Chinese competitors.

Thankfully, Samsung recently released Galaxy S7 helped it get the right amount of sales and profits. This was mainly because of the timing of its release, which was earlier than its competitors were.

Samsung has no plans of staying behind this year from production to the development of new and innovative gadgets including the smart windshield, smart suit and even smart contact lenses.

Intel is abandoning its old chip development technique in favor of three stage development process.

Multiple chip development methodologies have surfaced but the blockbuster approach, which took Intel Corporation to the insane heights of the success, was the renowned “Tick-Tock” approach. Over the years, it held strong dominance but the days of the famous Tick-Tock strategy have finally met their end and now the American chipmaker had finally taken decision to say goodbye to its microprocessor supremacy’s foundation.

Before 2007, Intel was deprived of a coherent, predictable, and definite placement linking the implementation, at smaller process nodes, of novel manufacturing techniques and the introduction of the latest architectures. After the deployment of the long running Tick-Tock strategy, the chipmaker was finally able to fix the area in which it was lagging behind and it issued the new process nodes, which were named as “ticks,” whereas the novel architectures were built on the exact process node and called “tocks.”

Nevertheless, the strategic era has finally ended when the Santa Clara, Calif. firm announced that it is transitioning to Process-Architecture-Optimization (PAO) – a three-step development process. This latest transition was not much surprising as last year. In 2015, Intel had already hinted about the slumping performance of the 10-nanometer technology and declared that the technology’s production is less likely to happen by the end of the year.

The year old anticipation of the company was finally transferred into a reality after Intel finally declared the expiration of the technology in its latest 10-K filing. The chipmaker cited that the company is working to expand the length of time during which its 14 nanometer could easily be utilized. It expects that the 10-nanometer next-gen process technologies will optimize chipmaker’s product and process technologies while simultaneously reaching the “yearly market cadence for product introductions.”

The probable plans of introducing several product families were also highlighted in the filing. The company stated it looks forward to launch a third 14nm product, dubbed as “Kaby Lake.” The latest addition is likely to have chief performance enhancements in comparison to the chipmaker’s 6th generation processor family. The company also discloses the futuristic production of 10nm manufacturing process technology, which is more likely to be market as the company’s next-gen process technology.

It will be too early to have an opinion whether the new methodology of chip development will be able to cater to the favorable impact or to imitate the Tick-Tock strategy success but the semiconductor manufacturing company is positively hopeful about the improvements the new technology will bring into different areas that will subsequently provide better user experience. The time will be the judge whether the chipmaker took a wise decision after all.

Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, called for an Electronic World Trade Platform to value the small and medium enterprises when it comes to global trading.

Alibaba Group Holding owns and operates multiple marketplaces that does not only offers luxurious brands products but also offers a chance to small and medium business owners to list their products on the platform. The reason behind this excellent and unique idea is the owner and founder of the firm Jack Ma who wants to bring the foreign products and items to Chinese people and vice versa. And in the advanced digital world, Jack Ma, seeks to come up with another but ‘fresh’ global e-commerce platform that would assist the interest of small traders.

At this point in China, the small merchants and traders have been enabled by the e-commerce to buy, sell and trade across border and Jack Ma wants a platform that would accommodate all of it. Mr. Ma was giving a speech at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan where he laid the foundation of an Electronic World Trade Platform also known as e-WTP. This platform would allow the small and medium enterprises to enter the e-commerce market which were previously left out of the free trade area of the world.

Ma stated, “In the Internet Age, we need trade platforms that are more open, fairer and freer. We need to go back to trade itself. It is not an organization. It is not a negotiation. It is just a platform to enable the small and medium enterprises and the consumers of the world, especially the young.”

As of now, Jack Ma has not disclosed or revealed details of the platform i.e. the rules, mechanism, and how it will work considering customs and tax procedures are the two main obstacles in the way if it is going to be a cross border e-commerce platform. Alibaba Group founder said that with the new e-WTP platform, the world can predict that there will be better connection of small and medium enterprises through logistics and financing. The platform will be offered to enterprises that are not currently participating in the trade.

He said at the conference that the free trade regime which is represented by the World Trade Organization (WTO) only benefits and favors multinational companies and large corporations and there is no space for the small and medium enterprises who are eventually being left behind along with the younger generation of the country.

Jack Ma added, “Trade blocs are often used to advance protectionism rather than as enablers. Trade is the best way for people across the world to communicate with each other. No matter if you like it or not, an age of new trade has come.”

Netflix offers fewer titles at more price to UK subscribers when compared to the US subscribers.

Netflix Inc. is operational in 190 countries and has nearly 75 million members. From United States to United Kingdom, and UAE to Asia, the company offers its entertainment services to almost all parts of the world. However, entertainment offerings of the company are not same for all the regions, which have caused issues between the subscribers and Netflix.

The subscribers living in countries apart from United States feel that the content available for them to stream is not good enough. It is known that the US content library is far superior to all other regions.

The US library has three times more content when compared to the UK library and ten times more content when compared to the libraries of all new regions. The Sun planned to do an investigation in which it found that the UK streaming subscribers have to pay £7.49 to get access to a library, which has almost 3,000 online movies and TV shows~. On the other hand, American subscribers spend £7.05 for a choice of more than 5,600 movies and TV shows.

International subscribers are not satisfied with the way Netflix adds content, but the streaming service provider claims that it is moving as quickly as it can to provide the same service in all 190 countries where it is operational.

This is one of the main reasons for the international subscribers to use VPN services to access the US library. This has been going on for a while, but Netflix is now finally taking action against such users and banning them from the platform. It is not the company’s fault that it offers different catalogues to its customers. It is how the international content licensing works. Due to this, it has set up different catalogues of movies and shows in every country.

The trend of accessing Netflix’s services using a VPN was increasing so that one can automatically get new titles and the titles that are not available in a certain region. After the crackdown operation, it is not possible. If a user is still trying to use the service through VPN, he will be directed to a black screen with a message saying, “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again.”

This cat and mouse game is not over yet. The streaming company has recently started the crackdown operation and managed to get a few big VPN service names on its black list. However, it has not blocked all of them yet. The blocked services came forward to say that Netflix may have won for the time being but they will return with a better proxy to bypass its servers.