Amazon makes second surprise quarterly profit

                        

Internet marketplace giant Amazon reported a surprise profit for the second quarter in a row thanks largely to higher sales in the US.

Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer, reported profits of $79m (£51.3m), compared with a loss of $437m a year ago.

Another period of strong growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud business also contributed to the better result.

Total net sales rose 23.2% to $25.36bn. Its shares were 10% higher.

Worldwide Sales in North America rose 28.3% to $15.01bn.

Amazon has piled on revenue growth since it started up but only recently began booking profits.

Instead, the 20-year old Seattle-based company has reinvested profits in order to expand.

Net sales from Amazon Web Services, which has more than one million active customers in 190 countries, rose more than 78% to $2.09bn in the three months to the end of September.

Amazon has made a strong growth forecast - if vague as to quite how strong - of between 14-25% for the Christmas sales period.

The online retailer reported a $92m profit for the three months to 30 June, surprising investors who had expected another loss.

Google's new parent Alphabet reports steep profit gain

                                 

Alphabet the new parent company of Google, has reported profits up almost 50% for the third quarter.

Net income was $3.98bn, up from $2.74bn for the same quarter last year.

Google's revenue was $18.7 (£12.1bn) compared with $16.5bn.

Growth came mainly from mobile searches and YouTube users.

In August, the company created Alphabet as the new parent company of Google and its other diverse businesses.

In January, Alphabet will report Google's financial numbers separately from the other businesses, which include experiments with self-driving cars, investing in startups, making Internet-connected thermostats and searching for cures to health problems.

The break out of Google's figures are expected to reveal how much money Google would have made if it had not diverted money into chief executive Larry Page's so-called ``moon shots".

Alphabet shares were up 11% to $722.53 in after hours trading - a record, boosted by news of a large share buyback, which will means fewer investors in future who will therefore take a higher portion of any dividend payout.

Square root

YouTube announced on Thursday a plan to offer a monthly commercial free subscription service that will compete with Netflix and Amazon prime.

The company's board approved a plan to buy back a precise $5,099,019,513.59 in shares starting in the fourth quarter.

There has been speculation the number represented the square root of 26 - the number of letters in the alphabet.

Chief financial officer Ruth Porat acknowledged that was indeed the reference during a post-results conference.

Amazon targets 1,114 'fake reviewers' in Seattle lawsuit

                           

Amazon is taking legal action against more than 1,000 people it says have posted fake reviews on its website.

The US online retail giant has filed a lawsuit in Seattle, Washington.

It says its brand reputation is being damaged by "false, misleading and inauthentic" reviews paid for by sellers seeking to improve the appeal of their products.

It comes after Amazon sued a number of websites in April for selling fake reviews.

Amazon says the 1,114 defendants, termed "John Does" as the company does not yet know their real names, offer a false review service for as little as $5 (£3.24) on the website Fiverr.com, with most promising five-star reviews for a seller's products.

"While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon's brand," the technology giant said in its complaint, which was filed on Friday.

Amazon said it had conducted an investigation, which included purchasing fake customer reviews on Fiverr from people who promised five-star ratings and offered to allow purchasers to write reviews.

It said it had observed fake review sellers attempting to avoid detection by using multiple accounts from unique IP addresses.

Amazon said the lawsuit was not targeting Fiverr, which is not a defendant in the complaint. Fiverr said it was working with Amazon to resolve the issue.

"Amazon is bringing this action to protect its customers from this misconduct, by stopping defendants and uprooting the ecosystem in which they participate," the lawsuit says.

Anyone, whether they are a customer or not, has the ability to review products sold on Amazon's online store, but the rules of the site forbid paid-for or fictional reviews.

Facebook will warn you if governments are spying on you!

A new tool from the social network will notify you if you are being targeted by 'state-sponsored actors' and help you secure your account

                             

In a move to take security more seriously, Facebook has said it will roll out a new feature that warns users if they are being spied on by government agents like the NSA or GCHQ.

Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote in a Facebook blog, "Starting today, we will notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state."

This is what the notification looks like.

Facebook doesn't specify exactly how it identifies such perpetrators. Stamos said, “To protect the integrity of our methods and processes, we often won't be able to explain how we attribute certain attacks to suspected attackers.” He also said, “We plan to use this warning only in situations where the evidence strongly supports our conclusion."

If users get the notification, the company recommends rebuilding or replacing systems that have been infected by malware.

Additionally, turning on login approvals is a good practice to help keep other individuals from logging into other users' accounts. Whenever accounts are accessed via new browsers or devices, Facebook will send codes to users' phones.

Facebook hopes the notification will help those who want to protect their data, according to Stamos. In addition, it promises it will constantly enhance its capability to detect and prevent attacks against its users.

The announcement comes at a time when Chinese President Xi Jinping told U.S President Barack Obama that his country would not "knowingly support" cyber theft and promised to abide by "norms of behaviour" in cyberspace. Facebook's new tool could cause some awkwardness if it starts pointing fingers at foreign governments. Mr. Xi arrives in the UK today for a four-day visit.

Best of luck Microsoft, but the Surface Book isn't going to save the PC

Microsoft has unveiled the pinnacle of laptop design as the format faces a terminal, and possibly unstoppable, decline

                          

Three things happened in the space of two days last week that explain perfectly the state of the market for personal computers.

On Wednesday morning, at a glamorous Apple-style event in New York,Microsoft unveiled its first laptop, a breathtaking combination of design and function called the Surface Book that the company, without a hint of humility, dubbed “the fastest laptop on any planet”.

Then just a few hours later, it emerged that Dell, a computer hardware giant with its better days behind it, was in talks with data storage company EMC over a $60bn deal that would be the biggest technology takeover in history.

And finally on Thursday, IDC, a research company that tracks worldwide sales of tech products, said that sales of PCs in the third quarter of the year had fallen 10.8pc against the same quarter a year ago, a much worse decline than expected.

To understand these events, it is best to look at them in reverse-chronological order. First, the IDC figures. Sales of PCs – laptops and desktop computers combined – have been on a downward trend since 2012 after a decade of unbroken growth, and now sit at roughly 2007 levels.

Reasons for this include stretched corporate IT budgets, diminishing returns from upgrades and Microsoft’s lacklustre software releases, but the main factor has been the rise of mobile. Touchscreen smartphones and tablets have redefined personal technology, combining the internet with portability and ease-of-use to become the dominant platform.

This brings us to Dell. Once the world’s biggest PC manufacturer, whose low-cost manufacturing and fashionable designs allowed it to disrupt lumbering giants such as Compaq in the 1990s, it has suffered more than most from the decline of the industry. In 2013, its founder, Michael Dell,took it into private ownership, saying a radical strategy to turn it from a hardware company into an enterprise-focused services group would be easier out of the public glare.

Buying EMC, a move that reports suggest could be announced this week, is the clearest manifestation of this. “Selling PCs isn’t working for us, we need to try something else,” the company is saying.

Similar things are happening at HP, which is splitting into two next month to free its growing data and infrastructure unit from its declining hardware operation, and Lenovo, which bought Motorola’s mobile business from Google last year. In other words, the world’s PC manufacturers are getting ready for the demise of the PC.

More than 7m iPhone 6s models have been activated in China

                         

Apple's popularity within China shows no sign of slowing, after more than 7m new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models were activated within days of going on sale, new data has found.

More than 5.5m iPhone 6s units and 1.63m iPhone 6s Plus phones were activated by October 11, after the new iPhones went on sale at the end of September, according to Chinese data monitoring firm TalkingData.

The iPhone 6s sale marked the first time China acted as a launch country for the new generation of phones. Previously, customers in China had to wait several weeks or months before the new models were approved for sale.

The phones swiftly shifted more than 13m units within three days of availability, easily surpassing last year's 10m models within the same period. Of the 13m sales, China is estimated to have accounted for between 2 and 2.5 million unit sales, meaning non-China sales rose by between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, according to analysts FBR & Co.

The phenomenal popularity of the iPhone in China is particualarly interesting when viewed against the cooling wider market - smartphone sales in the country fell for the first time in August by 4pc year-on-year.

TalkingData claims the number of activated iPhone 6s phones actually fell slightly compared to figures for the iPhone 6, witnessing a drop of 14.6pc.

Of all the iOS devices within China, the iPhone 6 is the most popular, it said, accounting for around 23.8pc of all devices, followed by the iPhone 5s at 18.8pc and the iPhone 6 Plus at 16.9pc. The iPhone 6s edged into the top 10 devices at number eight, equating to 1.8pc.

Native brands including Huawei and Xiaomi are also extremely popular across the country, and are proving stiff competition to more established brands including Samsung, Microsoft and BlackBerry.

Google's Android operating system was running on 78pc of smartphones in China during August, compared to Apple's iOS system's 19pc, according to Kantar.

Tesla Autopilot Mode Will Let Car Switch Lanes

                        

Electric car company Tesla has launched an autopilot mode that will let a vehicle change lanes by itself.

Chief executive Elon Musk said the Model S and the new Model X will be able to automatically steer, change lanes, and adjust speed in response to traffic.

They can also find a parking spot and parallel park.

While other car makers such as Mercedes, Audi and Volvo have their own semi-autonomous systems, lane-changing is an industry first.

Cameras, sensors and mapping data will be used to navigate, and the update will be available via an on-board software update to customers who paid for the full autopilot system.

But he warned drivers to exercise caution when using it.

He said: "It should not hit pedestrians, hopefully. It should handle them well. The driver cannot abdicate responsibility. That will come at some point in the future.

"It can see and sense cyclists and pedestrians. It should brake before hitting them. But I wouldn't want to say today, don't worry about it."

A future update could see cars being able to exit and enter garages when summoned by the owner.

Mr Musk said fully autonomous, hands-free driving is at least three years away.