You were busy celebrating the National Day, but these big things happened in the technology circle

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Large companies

October 3: Google officially becomes a subsidiary of Alphabet

After the US stock market closed yesterday, Google officially became a subsidiary of Alphabet. The stock codes of the original Class C shares GOOG and Class A shares GOOGL will not change. Currently, there are 9 subsidiaries under the parent company Alphabet, including Google Ventures, Google Capital, and Google Now. Alphabet plans to release its financial report after the fourth quarter revenue is available in January next year.

Apple acquires British artificial intelligence company VocalIQ

According to people familiar with the matter, Apple has acquired VocalIQ, a British artificial intelligence software company. This is Apple's third acquisition of a British company this year. The startup is from Cambridge, UK, and its main business is selling its natural language database to application developers. After developers embed VocalIQ's artificial intelligence technology in their applications, they can use this platform to store and learn user communication information, and then accurately recognize user commands and provide intelligent conversations.

Gaming technology company Havok acquired by Microsoft

Havok, a game development technology provider headquartered in Dublin, was acquired by Intel for $110 million in September 2007, and was acquired by Microsoft on October 2. The details of the acquisition have not been disclosed. Havok was founded in Dublin, Ireland in 1998. It mainly provides technology licenses to developers. Developers can use Havok's technology to simulate 3D physical effects in games. World-class game manufacturers including Activision, EA, Nintendo, and Sony are all its partners. Related technologies are used in various home consoles of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. 600 games such as "StarCraft 2" and "Call of Duty" use Havok's technology.

Tesla Model X delivered and 11,580 units shipped in the third quarter

Tesla announced on Friday that its Q3 shipments reached 11,580 vehicles, in line with previous expectations: Tesla had announced in August that its shipments in the third quarter ending September 30 would be the same as the 11,532 vehicles in the second quarter. Compared with the same period last year, Tesla's car shipments in the third quarter of this year increased by 49%. In addition, Tesla delivered the first batch of Model X on September 30. A total of two models, P90D and 90D, were released this time. At the same time, the company announced that the first batch of mass-produced vehicles will also be delivered immediately, but the official price has not yet been announced.

October 5: LeEco denied the rumor that it controls Uber China

On October 4, it was reported that Uber China might transfer its controlling stake to LeEco, and LeEco Auto would become the single largest shareholder of Uber China, with an investment amount of more than 1 billion US dollars. However, the next day, Uber said that LeEco had not invested a penny in Uber and Uber China. LeEco also issued a statement saying that it had not invested in Uber China, but stated that "LeEco does not rule out the possibility of cooperating with outstanding companies in the field of private car services in the future."

October 6: Twitter officially appoints Jack Dorsey as CEO

According to documents filed by Twitter with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, Jack Dorsey, the company's co-founder, has been appointed as the official CEO. SEC documents show that Twitter appointed Dorsey as the official CEO on September 30.

October 7: Microsoft holds a new product launch event and releases six new products

Microsoft released new products in the Lumia, Surface, and Microsoft Band series at the conference, in addition to Xbox and Hololens. Among them, Microsoft displayed the first-party Holoens mixed reality game Project XRAY, with a developer kit of $3,000; Microsoft Band 2 added a barometer and maximum oxygen uptake monitoring, priced at $249; in addition, Microsoft also released Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, Surface Pro 4 and notebook Surface Book.

Meituan and Dianping to merge soon

It is said that the existing shareholders of Meituan and Dianping will inject their equity into the newly established overseas company (still adopting the VIE structure), with a ratio of approximately 7:4. Dianping has temporarily shelved its plan to dismantle the VIE and return to the A-share market, and may choose to return to the A-share market after the merger. The merged company will adopt a "dual CEO" system, and Wang Xing is expected to have a higher voice. After the merger, Dianping's business focus will be low-frequency, high-unit-price businesses, such as weddings, exhibitions, etc., and it will no longer participate in price wars and subsidy wars in high-frequency, low-unit-price areas. However, both Meituan and Dianping refused to respond.

Amazon held the AWS Cloud Conference on October 7-8 and launched cloud service tools such as QuichSight, Kinesis Firehose, and Inspector

In terms of future plans, Amazon is preparing to release a new training and certification program around security, and will soon launch a DevOps competency program to promote hybrid cloud construction. It will allow users to configure dedicated EC2 hosts and provide partners with certifications similar to AWS's DevOps and management services.

Samsung's profit in Q3 2015 was nearly $6.3 billion, achieving its first quarterly profit growth in two years

Samsung Electronics has revealed some of its financial report data to be released at the end of October. The report shows that in the third quarter ending September 30, the company's operating profit reached US$6.27 billion, a year-on-year increase of 79.8%. This is the first time that Samsung has achieved quarterly profit growth since the third quarter of 2013, which is considered to be a bottoming out of the mobile phone business. Analysts from Bloomberg said that its mobile phone division's profit increased by 24% year-on-year to US$1.9 billion, but due to rising marketing costs, the profit margin was nearly 3 percentage points lower than the 11% in the previous quarter.

Investment and Financing

Pandora Media acquires ticketing company TicketFly for $450 million

Pandora Media Inc. has agreed to acquire TicketFly, a ticketing and marketing software company, for approximately $450 million in a nearly 50-50 combination of cash and stock. Founded in 2008, TicketFly serves approximately 1,200 venues and event promoters in North America, including the anti-traditional carnival Burning Man and Pitchfork Music Festival. In 2014, TicketFly sold 16 million tickets to more than 90,000 live events, with cumulative transaction volume exceeding $1 billion.

Cloud service company App Direct receives $140 million investment from JPMorgan Chase and others

Cloud service startup AppDirect announced on Wednesday that JPMorgan Asset Management, the investment arm of JPMorgan Chase, led a $140 million round of financing for the company. AppDirect specializes in building and managing virtual stores where users can purchase cloud software services such as Salesforce.com, similar to Apple's App Store, except that AppDirect's virtual market only has enterprise software. AppDirect hopes to provide virtual stores for international customers such as Deutsche Telekom to make foreign companies more willing to buy American cloud software.

Online design platform Canva raises $15 million in Series A funding

Founded in 2013, Australian startup Canva announced that it has successfully raised $15 million in Series A funding, with a company valuation of $165 million. Canva provides different design modes according to different user needs, such as social network stickers, PPT, posters, Facebook covers, and Instagram pictures. Users choose the appropriate mode according to their needs, and then Canva will provide the corresponding templates to choose from.

Football media 90min receives $15 million in funding

London-based football media 90min announced that it has received $15 million in funding led by German media group ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, with participation from previous investors Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and Gemini Ventures. 90min has raised a total of $39 million since its founding in 2011. 90min relies mainly on user-generated content, which they call a "contributor-led" model. Every day, fans contribute hundreds of original content to the platform, attracting more than 30 million fans in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Currently, fans around the world contribute content in 10 languages ​​through various devices, and 90min will help ensure the authenticity and fun of the information.

New Products

Google launches "Mobile Web Acceleration Program"

Google has launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), which aims to enable users' devices to load mobile web pages instantly, instead of waiting for several seconds to open articles as in the past. Nearly 30 publishers around the world, including The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed and Vox Media, will publish articles on the Google AMP platform. The AMP platform is currently in the testing phase and will be officially released to the public later.

Apple launches ad blocking app Been Choice on App Store

In terms of technical implementation, Been Choice filters advertising information by providing users with Safari plug-ins or VPNs. Safari plug-ins are relatively common, but the VPN method is very unusual. It achieves filtering purposes by analyzing the transmitted information flow. In this way, all user information must first pass through Been Choice's server. However, Been Choice stated that their information filtering is completed in the cloud and user information will not be stored. The whole process is a bit like some companies' inspection of LAN information. Been Choice can block many iOS native applications such as Facebook through this technology, but due to the end-to-end encryption technology used by Twitter, the ads it sends cannot be blocked.

Facebook launches TV partner tools

Facebook has just released a series of tools for TV partners, including real-time voting tools, user feedback tools and personalized icons. The voting API provided by Facebook helps TV partners better collect audience feedback on their Facebook homepages. Another API opened by Facebook is related to the public comment function. In programs such as presidential elections, audience feedback is particularly important, and Facebook hopes to help TV partners integrate audience feedback into the program to the greatest extent possible. Facebook will also provide personalized icons to TV programs to distinguish other similar programs.

Postmates launches Pop, a 15-minute food delivery service

Postmates, a local courier, is about to launch a fast food delivery service in its new service Pop. Users order food from a limited menu and receive it within 15 minutes, compared to the past when Postmates delivered food from nearby restaurants, which took an hour or even longer. Currently, this service is limited to the South of Market area where startups gather in San Francisco. The specific operation method of Pop is to cooperate with local restaurants. Postmates provides a limited menu. These restaurants prepare food in advance according to the menu. After users place an order, they can deliver it to users without waiting for the kitchen to cook.

Original article by Nicholas