Alibaba Offers $3.6 Billion To Buy Chinese Video Streaming Site

Alibaba announce on Friday it’s intention to buy up the rest of Chinese video streaming site Youku Tudou for $3.6 billion deal signaling the e-commerce giant’s intent to expand beyond its core business of online shopping.

What does Youku do you ask?  It’s a YouTube imitation site that runs videos, clips, etc just like YouTube does. Of course, the Chinese government has no issues with its citizens accessing Youku content.

The deal would give the company, which has been expanding into films, a bigger platform to broadcast content including Hollywood blockbusters directly to China’s growing ranks of middle-class consumers.



“Digital products, especially video, are just as important as physical goods in e-commerce, and Youku’s high-quality video content will be a core component of Alibaba’s digital product offering in the future,” Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. CEO Daniel Zhang said.

The company, which already owns 18.3 percent of Youku Tudou’s U.S.-listed shares, said it’s proposing to buy the remaining stock for $26.60 in cash per share, or 30.2 percent more than the last closing price on the New York Stock Exchange.

After subtracting Youku’s approximately $1 billion in cash on hand, Alibaba is paying about $3.6 billion to buy the stake.

Youku Tudou said its chairman and chief executive, Victor Koo, supports Alibaba’s offer.

The offer follows a series of moves by Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. to expand into the film industry through its film arm, Alibaba Pictures Group. Recent investments include a deal to collaborate with Paramount Pictures to promote Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the latest in the spy thriller series starring Tom Cruise, and an investment in a movie starring South Korean star Kim Soo-hyun.

Alibaba made its initial investment in Youku Tudou, which is seen as China’s version of Youtube, in 2014. By contrast, Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube in 2006.

The deal gives Alibaba access to a sophisticated, user-friendly operation. Youku’s two private streaming sites, which attract a young audience, have operated with fewer of the restrictions dogging state-run TV broadcasters, allowing it to introduce more varied and foreign content.

Youku has never turned a profit by standard accounting measures. Its loss for the most recent quarter widened to 342 million yuan ($55.2 million) from 142.3 million yuan in the same period in 2014, according to its latest earnings report.

Ghanaian Actor John Dumelo To Launch New Game App

The popular movie star John Dumelo is set to unveil a new mobile game application that will run on  any android and Apple (iOS) phones.

The game is named ‘Aya’ centres on the main character, John Dumelo, trying to rescue a loved one who has been captured by an evil villain.



These game will be officially launched in April 2016 and it has several scenes from several parts of Accra, Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

According to the 31-year–old actor, who was speaking in an interview with Hitz, said it took him a lot of time and effort to develop the game.

He added that “It’s taken a lot of time to build this game which will be released in April next year,”.
He said ‘Aya’, which is a female name, is for both young and old. Is just for girl and kids alone but for adults too,” he explained.

“It now time that we do other stuff of things that can also bring us money,” the award winning actor added.

Facebook Introduces 7-Second Profile Videos

To keep its decade-old social network lively, Facebook is introducing five big changes to user profiles, which are viewed 4 billion times per day:

• The option to pin Featured Photos to the top of the profile
• Temporary profile pics
• Easier visibility controls for About info, including a new 100 character Bio field
• A mobile-centric design with centered profile photos plus big sections for photos and friends
• The ability to use a 7-second looping video as your profile pic.

 Some users has stated testing the features



Together, these changes should make Facebook more visually stimulating and addicting. As other networks like Twitter introduce auto-play video like Facebook did, and Snapchat adds animated selfie lenses and its own profile GIFs, Facebook has to stay a step ahead in the graphic arms race.

Meanwhile, Facebook wants to cement its profile as the center of your web presence. Snapchat hardly has a profile, and Twitter’s is basically just your most recent tweets. If Facebook can do more to let you customize how you represent yourself, you might be more willing to link back and send traffic to your profile.

Facebook’s project manager on the new profile, Aigerim Shorman, tells me it’s designed to highlight “what’s going on in their life, what’s important to them now in more expressive ways.” The most recent post you shared probably isn’t as useful for grasping your identity as biographical info or photos of you, so Facebook’s pushing that stuff above the timeline.

And finally, putting biographical info more front and center could get people to keep this information more up to date, which is critical to powering Facebook’s advertising engine. A similar overhaul of the web profile in 2010 scored Facebook immense amounts of data on where people live, where they went to school, and where they work, which has fueled its ad targeting ever since.

Profile Videos

Soon you’ll be able to click on your profile pic to upload a new profile video. You tap the record button and can shoot for up to 7 seconds with sound. The looping video will auto-play without sound (unless clicked) on your profile and the feed story about you uploading it. A still cover image you select will appear everywhere else, such as the small thumbnail that appears next to your News Feed stories.

“Earlier this half [year] we were having a brainstorm, and sometimes you find a gem,” Shorman tells me. “One of my designers called me over [to look at an engineer’s] Facebook At Work account. But his profile pic was moving. I thought ‘this is going to be a great expression opportunity.’

It brought the profile to life. You got to know the person better. So we got inspired to create an option to create a profile video.” She insists the Snapchat Profile GIFs that launched in July weren’t even discussed in the feature’s creation.

In the examples, you’ll see Facebook employees dropping hats onto their heads, blowing their faces with air, or cracking a slow but subtle smile. The profile videos feel a bit like the Harry Potter newspapers, where photos suddenly come alive.

They’re sure to unlock a ton of creativity from the user base.

Featured Photos

The next biggest feature is a new option to select up to five Featured Photos that will appear pinned to a section at the top of your profile. This is designed to let you give people considering your friend request or who just met you a better clue to your identity. They could show your favorite after-work activities, your pets, or just some extra selfies. Think of them as the extra photos in your Tinder profile. They’re not your main profile pic, but they’ll be used to judge you.

Temporary Profile Pics

The temporary profile pic feature I spotted Facebook testing a few weeks ago is now getting an official rollout. It lets you select a profile pic, but have yours revert to your old pic after a set number of hours, days, or weeks. It’s useful for promoting a cause, like the 26 million people who set their profile pic rainbow in support of the right to gay marriage. In some cases, Facebook even provides little tools for filtering your profile pic.

Visibility Controls And Bio

Facebook is now adding in-line privacy controls to the big About information fields that appear at the top of your profile. Those set to public will now appear immediately on the profile below your profile pic, rather than buried in the About section. You’ll also be able to describe yourself in words with a new 100-character Bio field, which could also help people figure out if they want to be your friend, as long as you keep that section public.

Mobile Design

Rather than just port the more left-aligned web profile to mobile, Facebook has built a mobile-first design. It makes the profile pic/video bigger and puts it in the center of the screen. Below, rather than small panels that open to reveal details on friends and photos, Facebook is giving both their own big sections pinned below the profile pic and above the timeline.

At first glance, the changes might seem merely aesthetically pleasing. And truthfully, that was the only task of the team that designed them. But the repercussions for Facebook’s business could be significant, just like a similar overhaul of web profiles in 2010 was.

The more that people want to visit profiles, the more they’ll want to update their own. With biographical information now easier to see at the top of the profile, users are incentivized to keep the info like their job title current. That in turn lets Facebook accurately target these users with ads meant for “software engineers” or people who “live in San Francisco.”

It’s another smart way Facebook has managed to align its business with its user experience. People go to your profile to get to know you. News articles or weekend tales aren’t as illustrative as a profile video, featured photos, or Bio text. Pushing them to the top gives your friends, and advertisers, a better understanding of who you are.


Source: Techcrunch