Microsoft Embraces Backlash On Social Media

Microsoft embraces backlash on social media for objectifying women in its conference.

Microsoft Corporation is now under immense scrutiny since they are accused of depicting a strong display of sexism during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2016. The company hosted the Xbox GDC party on Thursday, where female dancers were dressed in school girl costumes in an erotic manner that entertained the guests.

As per the attendants who were present at the event found it to be extremely distasteful and an activity that was not really required. It was stated that having girls dressed as erotic school girls and making them dance was extremely objectifying and sexist. Twitter was one platform where the masses expressed their dismay and claimed that they would officially file a complaint against the act. Some were so frustrated that they claimed that this initiative has motivated them to switch sides and have encouraged them to switch to Sony’s PlayStation from Xbox.

So now we need to put the things back in the puzzle, the gaming fraternity has often been condemned since they usually display women in a superficial manner. Moreover, the characters are mostly not meaningful. Similar to the way, Hollywood is condemned for objectifying women. It now seems that the Windows 10 giant has taken a step back when it comes to the position of women in this fraternity. The ironic part was that MSFT sponsored a “Women in Games” lunch at the conference.

The company depicted a lot of maturity after the event where it apologized and took responsibility for what happened. Mr. Aaron Greenberg, the head of Xbox marketing did not have any clue about the happenings where he tweeted that he is extremely disappointed about what really happened and he claimed that he would "follow up with the team" regarding the scenario.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox mentioned in an official statement to The Verge stated that the incident that took place is against the core values of the company. He stated, "It was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. I know we disappointed many people and I'm personally committed to holding ourselves to higher standards. We must ensure that diversity and inclusion are central to our everyday business and core values. We will do better in the future."

The company is under a lot of pressure in terms of the Xbox division. Xbox is stumbling and is losing the sales in the long term in contrast to PlayStation. PlayStation is doing so well in the fraternity that Xbox One cannot keep pace with it.

The event which is so sexist in its true spirit ignited the controversy further which is likely to dent the image of Xbox One amongst consumers. When it comes to a consumer oriented product, any controversy that involves misogyny and sexism can prove to be really harsh for the life cycle of the product.  It will not be astonishing to note that Xbox’s core consumers particularly females shift to PlayStation. Female gamers have increased significantly over the past couple of years and Microsoft might just lose upon them.

Twitter Showing Signs Of Rebound After A Very Tough Period Of Negative Market Sentiment

Multiple high valuations and current CEO’s performance hurted market fundamentals; shareholders witness record breaking fourth quarter performance.

Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) is all set to announce its first quarter earnings for fiscal year 2015. Analysts forecast the company raking in more than $450 million in revenue, and EPS of around $0.04.

The social media giant has come under fire for its particularly lethargic performance for the past few years from multiple high valuation issues with the current management and on top of that, a negative market sentiment making it a very easy target for short sellers to sell off their stakes. Now, it is the most ‘loved’ and ‘sought after’ company.

Previously at its analyst meeting in November, the company pointed to at least more than 500 million unique page views per month, mostly from logged-out visitors (those who check out news feed, but are not registered Twitter users). This represents a good opportunity for the company to bring those logged-out visitors into its fold to generate more revenues, but that may not be so simple to try to convince them.

Twitter is also reporting heavy traffic, with over 125 million people visiting the website but not logged in every month. The company witnesses untapped potential in terms of its unlogged users. In response to this, it announced that, instead of asking users to sign up, it would ask them to engage with the latest trends and happenings by clicking on the ‘hashtag’ symbol that they come across in Google search engine, with whom Twitter has entered into an agreement.

In addition, the company has revamped its homepage by simplifying its welcoming address as "See what's happening right now. Find community, conversation and inspiration about the things you love.” instead of a few awkward questions being asked. It is part of Twitter’s new mission goal to "connect everyone to their world”, and not just connecting with friends.

The result was that the company announced a strong fourth quarter earnings, though it is not entirely clear if it had to do with the initiatives taken as described above. Nevertheless, if this quarter’s earnings prove to be an even bigger hit than the previous quarter, then it will be a sure sign that the restructuring of the company’s image, message, and vision statement has paid dividends. If that happens, Twitter would have retraced almost the entire sell-off and placed near the ‘highs’ that were printed last October. The microblogging site is speculated to have embarked on a journey of restructuring.

Twitter stock price ended the day last Friday on $50.82. Investors stock quotes expect that to shoot up around less than $55.

Twitter Owns Its Venture Capital Fund

Twitter at this stage on inconsistency is offering funding to promising startups.

Twitter Inc., the social media giant is not doing well in the market where it has been constantly victimized for competing with Facebook who is far ahead of them in the league.  Apart from this, the recent flair in the number of harassment cases reported has also added to their misery. The company at this stage is dealing with several internal and external issues that can result in making survival difficult for them.

It has only been 18 months since TWTR has established its image as public company. At this stage, the company is in a phase of hyper growth and is currently not generating revenues but is more inclined towards losses. However, even then the company is extremely occupied in giving money to other firms through venture capital funding.

The Twitter Ventures arm, the company’s project was one of the few investors in an event that accumulated $80 million so that they can fund Cyanogen- who considers itself to be “a leading mobile operating system pure-play.”

This news was reported by the Wall Street Journal where other investors in the funding included Qualcomm, the popular chipmaker, Rupert Murdoch: the owner of Wall Street Journal and Media Baron

However, Twitter venture arm unit is not much of a surprise for market. Anthony Noto, the former banker at Goldman Sachs helf the position as the chief financial officer in FY14. The person who became the predecessor, Mike Gupta was actually moved to look after the strategic investment sector.

Like Google and Intel, Twitter also wishes to play its part in providing funds to startups that seem to be promising. The company currently plans to invest only small sums on money in such startups.

This encouragement which Twitter has experienced has resulted in strict scrutiny by regulators. The reason behind this is that the company is not so stable itself that it starts to fund other ventures. At one point it is in a loss making stage and the other it is investing in other startups. However, the company has declined to comment over the matter. Thus, nobody really knows what the intentions of the company actually are currently.

The company is taking several steps to make its way to redemption. However, at this stage it is fairly unreasonable to offer funds. Nobody can predict what law enforcement agencies have to say about this matter but one thing remains clear. Twitter’s strategy is not something easy to predict and foretell what they actually want to do in the times to come.  Twitter Stock are likely to be affected by this move

Twitter Inc. Head Of Development And Platform Resigns

According to reports, Twitters Inc.  Development & platform relations head Mr. Jeff Sandquist has decided to quit the company later this week. After serving the company for almost one and half year, he tweeted, "Thank you Twitter for an astonishing 18 months. The team we have built the product we have shipped. An absolute honor to be a part of an amazing company.”

Twitter’s official spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. However, unofficial reports by the employees closed to the matter confirmed before Mr. Sandquist tweet. He has previously worked as a developer at Microsoft prior to his joining in Twitter, where he was employed to make the micro blogging website more supple for developers and users. He also had an important role in Fabric Project.

During October 2014, the fabric was exposed to deliver mobile developers a platform which in return allows the making of apps by third parties available on Twitter. This also includes companies such as Crashlytics, which supports developers to correct and examine their applications, and MoHub which provide assistance to developers about opportunities of advertisements on their apps. Fabric was started to satisfy the users and also to start a productive relationship between developers and Twitter.

According to co-workers, during the last 18 months of Mr. Sandquist, he has been outrageous in his efforts. Though, bearing in mind his time spent on Microsoft he was still free after a slight “vacation period”. As everyone knows it is a common practice in the company. Apart from the regular hobbling at a lesser pay grade, officials at key posts like Chief operating office, chief financial officer , product head , media relations have already left Twitter last year.

Chief Operating Officer of Twitter Inc. Ali Rowghani resignation added more problems last year in monetizing revenues, left the company shares in a declining path as average monthly user growth decreased dramatically. Mr. Rowghani was also denoted as the co –CEO by majority of employees. His resignation raised questions in investors mind about the ability of the company to appeal more users and company’s future seemed unstable in terms of statistics. Other than Mr. Rowghani Twitter’s CFO and product head also left in 2014.However, Twitter was able to surpass the prediction s regarding its fourth quarter this month. During the whole year company shares grew by more than 35%.

Twitter stock was trading previously at $48.08 before the market close on Friday 27^th February.

Twitter Considered Being A Promising Gamble In 2015

From the last few weeks, Twitter Inc. has been thrown into a pool of serious criticism. However, based on the changing aspects of social networking; online news media and the company’s ability have retained shareholders interest on the way to micro blogging platform this year.

The current era of social network has been the reason for the expansion of services and platforms, which are now considered to be an important part to change the perception, start mass movement, and redefined the way people connect and interact with the rest of the world.

During the last decade, Twitter Inc. and Facebook has been at the front to witness the changes took place in the world through social media. In an attempt to cope up with the problems in the plugged up and fastest growing social network, Twitter has provided a platform to the world for  quick news distribution, micro blogging, getting to know people and business from all over the world, sharing content. Twitter also started innovative trends, to provide awareness to the users about politics, sports, and businesses.

However, things are not measure so easily by The Wall Street, especially when there are huge criticisms on a company for not putting efforts towards user growth, where billions are on stake.

There has been news for past several months about the company’s performance related to user growth, monetization, user base, financial performance, ad revenue and more importantly the future guidance. The biggest distress for the company and investors is steady logged-in user base growth.

During the fourth quarter of 2014, Twitter ad revenue per user grew by 65% against Facebook, whose ARPU increased by 35% only. The average ARPU has out-shined over the years and company believes that it will increase more in future.

Twitter is in competition with linked-in, Facebook and its Instagram and others. Majority of the investor complains about the steady growth of company’s user base, by mentioning examples of its competitors. However, the investors are not well aware of the fact twitters has entirely different business model than these companies. Facebook is considered as a biggest threat to twitter, but despite of all this we overlook the element that Facebook business model and platform is mainly for socializing not for broadcasting and micro blogging like twitter.

Twitter has been continuously putting efforts to grow its user base by making the sign-up process simpler, while also planning of reducing 500 million inactive users from the data base.

Facebook Releases Breakthrough Switch Platform

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has come up with a device that is reportedly one of the biggest advancements made in the tech industry, a hardware device called the Open Source Modular Switch Program. This device is built to make internet usage a lot cheaper and speedier than it already is.
According to technology experts, this device can bring improvements in the internet surfing by a huge difference and make massive developments in the performance of the cyberspace. This switch is created for the purpose of directing traffic flow throughout the internet. Also, this switch has also been deemed as being more reliable.

These switches are at points where fibers and wires, which are connected to computers, meet and create intersection points. These switches help information to flow freely and without distortions. Having said that, the usage of switches has been ignored due to the fact that switches have previously proved to be not very reliable or intelligent if compared to a human being.
Facebook has decided to bring a revolution in this case. The switches that were formerly deemed unintelligent are now being made into more smart beings by the social networking giant which will now handle all the traffic flow on the internet, something that was previously being done by computers. If things go according to plan for the Facebook, then this new switch introduced by the company will lessen the burden for computers and will be solely responsible to for guiding traffic flow and will therefore work more efficiently.
The social media giant has also launched racks and power supplies to work with these switches. Its new venture to make productive changes on the internet is clear as the switches that are already available in the market are not compatible to work for a user base of over a billion people of the social networking site.
Another reason why the company has decided to invent their own customized switch is because the companies which are already provided satisfying switches usually have a closed source which can be operated only by those companies which have spent time in building the switches up.
Facebook has introduced its own set of customized switches as they wish to gain more control over the traffic flow on the internet. Besides that, Google Inc. and Amazon.com have made private switches way before the social networking giant even thought of creating them.
The social networking website aims to make data center cheaper and obtain more control over the internet usage and improve their future designs.