Microsoft announced HoloLens would be introduced to China next year

Microsoft held WinHEC 2016 hardware conference in Shenzhen today. Terry Myerson, global executive vice president and chief of Windows system and device BU, announced that HoloLens would be officially sold in China in the first half of 2017. Its selling price is undisclosed.

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Microsoft HoloLens was going out of North America market in October and introduced to UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany. On October 2nd, HoloLens was introduced to Japan, Asia for the first time. It supports pre-orders of HoloLens in Japan. The delivery date is set in the beginning of 2017.

There will be 9 countries of the world selling this AR glasses then.

Speaking of its selling prices, HoloLens was sold at $3,000 in United States. It was sold at €3,299 in Germany, France and Ireland, and £2,719 in UK. In Australia and New Zealand, it was respectively sold at 4,369 Australian dollors and 7,829 New Zealand dollors. Judging by the above selling prices, it may set its price at about ¥22,000 in China.

Microsoft has been exploring the potential of HoloLens with global partners in the past few months. Thyssen Krupp bought HoloLens for its 24,000 technicians. Swedish Volvo hopes to apply this device to change means of purchasing vehicles from consumers.

In the meantime, SketchUp released a new software version for HoloLens so that experts from building, engineering and framing engineering fields to make 3D modelings with this device. NASA also applies HoloLens for the exhibition of Destination: Mars center.

At this MWPC, Microsoft introduced the cooperation between itself and Japan’s space agency that applied HoloLens to optimize the training of aircraft maintenance engineers. Japan’s space agency claimed that HoloLens offered advantages and potential for its management.

Niklas Zennström invests Lilium Aviation for €1 million

Niklas Zennström, Skype co-founder and former CEO, invested a German mini aircraft startup through Atomico to attempt to product vertical lifting private aircraft as electric vehicle does.

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This startup is called Lilium Aviation which locates in Munich, Germany. It was established two years ago. On Monday, Lilium Aviation received the investment fund of € 10 million from Atomico and other investors for the launch of vertical lifting private aircraft.

Lilium Aviation was established by four entrepreneurs in 2014. It aims at producing quiet and light air transportation tool. Such air transportation tool can fly at the height of 3,000 meters. The company planned to test the prototype of aircraft next year.

The flight distance of Lilium per test is expected to reach 300 kilometers, and the max speed per hour is expected to reach 300 kilometers. The meaning of producing such vertical lifting aircraft is to realize the air travel between two cities. This transportation tool will be faster than any other public ones. It is said that it will take under 15 minutes from San Francisco to Palo Alto, and one hour from Munich to Frankfurt.

Zennström said at TechCrunch Disrupt conference :” This is the perfect example that founder avails of advanced technology to solve major events.” He becomes one of the membership of Lilium board of directors.

There are many traffic jams we encounter every day. We also face the problem of air pollution and global warming. It may be an effective solution to produce air transportation tools in the future.

Gooligan virus infected 1 million Google accounts, 57% of them were from Asia

A malicious virus called Gooligan based on Android app was found to hack about one 1 million Google accounts, hundreds of them were associated with enterprises.

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The technicians of Check Point called this virus as Gooligan. It was spread via the repacks of apps from third party app market. So far, 86 apps are found to be embedded this virus.

Once users install those apps, this virus can access root authority of all Android 4.x devices or some Android 5.x devices.

The virus can control the mobile devices once it access the root authority, including silent installation application, stealing of applications passwords, obtaining screen-shots and visiting owners Google account or other accounts, or making positive comments on others apps on Google Play.

Andrian Ludwig, Android security director, stated on his blog that it teamed up with Check Point. It is not confirmed whether those infected accounts have been stolen or not. It indicated that the overall Google security system works as usual at present. Users can two-step verifications to have their accounts safer. In the meantime, Google is set up with verified process in its latest version, and scan all kinds of apps installed in mobiles regularly to compare with the ones on Google Play. The system will pop up warnings once it found users installed the copy cat apps.

Gooligan is a variant of Ghost Push which found in September of 2015. There is no app infected with Gooligan on Google Play store. The research showed that 57% of infected devices were from Asia, 19% were from United States and 9% were from Europe.

Microsoft Store offers discount for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift

Cyber Monday is coming around. If consumers missed some items during Black Friday, they can seize this opportunity to purchase more reasonable items.

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Microsoft Store is announced to continue to offer discounts for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. HTC Vive offers $100 discount by means of Microsoft Store gift code. Its price cuts down to $699.

It was rumored that HTC sold over 140,000 HTC Vive helmets last week. Such sales volume brought HTC over $112 million in revenue. The discount for HTC Vive will be ended at 23:59 on November 28. Any one who wishes to own an HTC Vive, please hurry up.

The price of Oculus Rift at $599 on Microsoft Store is not discounted price, but consumers who purchase this helmet will get free $100 Oculus Store Credit to purchase VR content. The sales promotion activity time of Oculus Rift will be ended at 23: 59 on November 28 as well.

Speaking of games, these two helmets are binding a game. HTC Vive is binding The Gallery-Episode 1: Call of the Starseed and Zombie Training Simulator.” Oculus Rift is binding Lucky’s Tale at random.

Google will release Google Earth VR for HTC Vive. If you would like to apply Google Earth VR on your mobile or ipad, you can image how this app works in VR. To Oculus Rift, Xbox will soon bring streaming games to VR devices.

May Samsung sell its PC business to Lenovo?

TheBell reported that Samsung is busy in spliting off business which makes less profit and negotiating with Lenovo for selling its PC section.

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It is reported that the negotiation does not envolve in any financial consultants.Paul Hastings and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer are the legal advisers respectively for Samsung Electronics and Lenovo. The selling price of Samsung PC section may reach $ 850 million.

The confirmed source showed that the negotiation between Samsung and Lenovo has been discussing for months. Before Samsung split off PC section, it sold its printer business to HP for $1.05 billion in September. The merging of Samsung Printer business and HP Printer business will be accomplished by the second half of 2017. HP is the world biggest printer manufacturer and second biggest PC manufacturer.

An anonymous ex Samsung officer said:” Taking the commercial relation between PC and Printer business into consideration, Samsung may consider quiting PC market after selling its printer business.”

IDC and Gartner released the global PC shipment reports in Q3 last month. HP gained some vitality in Q3, but it was still weaker than Lenovo. The good news was that their market share gap was less than 1%.

IDC report showed that the global PC shipment quantities in Q3 were 68 million, declined by 3.9% yoy. HP PC shipment quantities in Q2 increased by 3.3% yoy, up to 14.4 million units. Its market share increased from 19.7% to 21.2%. Lenovo PC shipment quantities in Q3 declined by 3.2% yoy, down to 14.5 million units.

Gartner pointed out Lenovo, Apple and Acer pc shipment quantities all declined in Q3 among 6 biggest world PC manufacturers in accordance with shipment quantities. Lenovo shipped 14.43 million units in Q3, declined by 2.4% yoy. While its market share was 20.9%, increased by 20.2% yoy. HP shipped 14.058 million PC units in Q3, increased by 2.3% yoy. Its market share of Q316 was 20.4%, while it was 18.8% in Q315.

Volkswagen plans to cut 30,000 employees worldwide to save € 3.7 billion annually expense

It is reported by British media that Volkswagen plans to cut 30,000 employees worldwide, while Germany will lost 23,000 job positions.

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Volkswagen has over 610,000 employees in 31 countries in accordance with the statistics. It has plan to increase its brand profit from 2% to 4%.

To achieve this goal, the productivity of German factory must be increased to 25%. Volkswagen has 120,000 employees in Germany. This job cut plan meant that one fifth of its employees will lost their jobs.

This job cut will help Volkswagen to save about €3.7 billion expense each year by 2020. Volkswagen and trade unions have been working hard to achieve this goal since June.

Even Volkswagen is still solving the fraud scandal concerning emission rate, it engages in revitalizing its core brands, developing new vehicle models and self-driving vehicles. Volkswagen claimed that it would invest more on new products and hope to create 9,000 job opportunities.

Bernd Osterloh, representative of senior employees, claimed that Volkswagen would not force to lay off employees and would launch new vehicle project in Germany. Next generation electricity vehicle will be made in Germany instead of any other countries.

Matthias Mueller, CEO of Volkswagen, addressed that:” This is the biggest modern project concerning Volkswagen core brands in history. Our brands need a real revolution which is the goad that we need to achieve in the future.”

Volkswagen was reported to install cheating software against emission in diesel vehicles. About 11 million diesel vehicles were affected worldwide.

Facebook acquired CrowdTangle, developer of social analytics tools

Facebook announced on November 12 that it already acquired startup enterprise CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle was established four year ago. It helped publishers to track how content was spread on social networking platforms. So far, these two companies did not reveal the acquisition price yet.

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CrowdTangle displayed its subscribers the real-time traffic and made great impacts on those contents showed up in users’ message source. This acquisition indicated that Facebook still manages to attract publishers, especially the unstable timing of how to create sustainable and profitable business.

Facebook claimed that it would invest and operate this service so that more publishers can make full use of this business. Though CrowdTangle has a smaller team, it has raised about $ 2.2 million from investors included Betaworks.

The statement that Facebook made indicated that all of worldwide publishers would ask help from CrowdTangle to publish the impactive contents, assess their social influence and seek for the influential characters or things. Facebook felt happy to cooperate with CrowdTangle for launching new serivces and provide more contents to publishers.

According to the papers that released by FastCompany last year, CrowdTangle was initially considered as a tool to help active users to combine the activity posted on Facebook. The lack of financial support led Brandon Silverman and Matt Garmur released a new feature which showed the most popular posts to obtained likes and traffic. Then they made a product where publishers can check their likes and traffic on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine.

Soon after that, CrowdTangle was widely applied by Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, CNN, The USA Today, ESPN, MTV and The Verge. In addition, it was welcomed by many famous brands and non-profit organizations.

CrowdTangle will be integrated to Signal and Page Insights when the deal is accomplished.

Google Chrome installed capacity was over 2 billion

Google Chrome caught up from behind among browsers, ranking in the world-class browsers list. A few days ago, Google announced an important data officially that its accumulative installed capacity was over 2 billion.

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TheVerge reported that Google held a Chrome Development Summit a few days ago. Darin Fisher, vice president of Chrome engineering project, claimed that the installed capacity of Chrome browser was over 2 billion, including PC and Mobile devices.

It is worth noting that the data index indicated the installed capacity happened in the past instead of monthly active users and  daily active users. Google did not reveal the latest statistics concerning these two indexes.

Google once announced the monthly active users of Chrome browser in April, obtaining over 1 billion users. Such installed capacity meant that Chrome becomes a popularized world-class as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger do.

Fisher stated that such a big pile of users brings opportunity to third party developers. Chrome is also deploying the latest web technology standards as other browsers did.

By now, Google has 7 networking services or software products which obtained over 1 billion users, including Gmail, Android OS, Chrome, Google Maps, Web Search, YouTube online video and Google Play.

Chrome is another successful networking service besides Web Search. Chrome is welcomed by consumers for its concise UI,quicker webpage loading and render effects.

The latest third party statistics showed that the global market share of Chrome accounts for 55%, which is about two times of the ones with IE and Edge. Its market share increased by 30% in past year.It meant that many former IE users turned to Google Chrome after Microsoft stopped upgrading IE.

WhatsApp is testing new app which has similar functions with those of Snapchat

WhatsApp, Facebook subordinate multi-platform messaging app, will have its own ” Snapchat” features in the near future.

Mashable reported that WhatsApp is testing a new app which has similar functions with those of Snapchat. This project is called “Status” which is installed among WhatsApp applications on latest Android and iOS systems.

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Status feature will be displayed between the tab menus of Chats and Calls. Users will be able to make description and type details or add other entertainment contents in it which is similar to the feature of Snapchat.

In recent years, a great amount of Millennium users has turned to Snapchat and Instagram. To avoid losing more users, Facebook had to make measures to get rid of such dilemma.

First, Facebook acquired Instagram for $ 1 billion. It then considered acquiring Snapchat as well. However, Evan Spiegel, Snapchat CEO, refused the acquired offer of $ 3 billion sent by Facebook and decided to create and consolidate his career. Now, Snapchat is valued at $ 25 billion and becomes the third social networking platform. Among its users, Millennium users and teenagers account for most. Recently, Snapchat considers issuing IPO plans and makes preparation for it.

Comparatively speaking, Facebook also faces identity crisis. It lost a great deal of young users and has tendency to develop as shared platform. Facebook users upgrade their personal info on this platform much less though it released Facebook Live and 360°View. In fact, Facebook Live is not as welcomed as expected.

Facebook should take positive measures to make up its product failures. Instagram Stories has been disputing. It seems to focus on the development of WhatsApp, specially when it failed to acquire Snapchat.

Facebook announced Internet.org project connected 40 million people around the world

At the meeting of Q3 earnings, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Internet.org project issued by the company has helped 40 million people access to Internet around the world.

This figure accounted for 0.5% of global population. In addition, the monthly visit traffic of Internet.org impressed the public as well. It increased from 3.63 % of Q2 to 4.67% of Q3. It obtained 1.79 billion visits each month.

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Facebook promoted the basic internet access service by binding Free Basic app and Express Wi-Fi hotspot. The goal of this promotion is to apply Aqulia , satellite and other advanced technologies to provide better network service in remote places.

The service objects of Internet.org include citizens from remote places who have no access to internet and those who can afford internet service.

By Q3, it obtained 40 million users which was dramatically increase in compared with 3 million users of July, 2014. It increased by 166% yoy( it had 15 milllion users last year and 25 million users in this May.)

Though Free Basic app is banned in India, it considered as one of the most potential markets and is supposed to obtain more market share in the future. If Facebook keeps such growing pace to promote Internet.org, there will be more and more people benefiting from it.

It was a pity that SpaceX rocket blew up on the launching platform, which led to a failure of Internet.org promotion in Africa as the satellite connected this service blew up as well.