Tech News
China’s YY eyes overseas live streaming with $1.45B Bigo buyout – TechCrunch

One of China’s top live streaming companies YY bought a stake and obtained the right to purchase a majority share in Bigo last June, and now the other shoe has dropped after YY fully acquired the Singapore-based startup behind live streaming app Bigo Live and short-video service Like.
That’s according to an announcement YY made on Monday, which disclosed it has bought out the remaining 68.3 percent of all the issued and outstanding shares of Bigo for a price tag of about $1.45 billion.
Bigo’s connection to YY is deep-rooted. Li Xueling, a veteran Chinese journalist who’s also known as David Li, founded YY in 2005 well before the heyday of mobile-based live streaming apps. With the intent to bring the China-tested business to overseas markets, Li started Bigo in 2016 to replicate YY’s lucrative revenue model where the platform operator takes a cut whenever viewers reward streamers with virtual gifts, which can be cashed out.
YY racked up $675 million in net revenues and a net income of around $100 million from the fourth quarter of 2018, its latest earnings report shows.
The Bigo buyout is set to be a huge boost to YY’s international ambitions as its home market has been divided up between YY itself, its spin-off Huya that focuses on esports streaming and Huya’s archrival Douyu. Curiously, both Douyu and Huya are backed by Tencent, the company best known for the WeChat messenger but is also China’s largest games publisher.
To bring the domestic rivalry into perspective, Nasdaq-listed YY recorded a monthly mobile user base of 90.4 million in the fourth quarter. Huya, which priced its U.S. initial public offering at $180 million last August, posted a monthly of 50.7 million users from the same period. Douyu hasn’t recently unveiled its size as the company is reportedly mulling to go public in the U.S., but third-party data analytics company QuestMobile put its MAU in December at 43 million.
“We are very excited to announce the completion of the acquisition of Bigo. It is an important milestone for YY group which demonstrated our confidence and commitment to the globalization strategy,” said Li of YY in a statement.
While anchoring in Southeast Asia, Bigo has debuted in over 100 countries worldwide and been in the top ten of Apple’s app store not just in neighboring countries like Vietnam and Cambodia but also in Paraguay, Yeman and Angola, according to data collected by app tracking service App Annie.
Li estimated in 2017 that Bigo was generating an annual revenue of $300 million at the time. Bigo claims 200 million registered users to date with MAUs reaching almost 37 million worldwide. Its popularity has, however, gone hand in hand with its reputation for hosting offensive content, but the startup has assured it deploys resources to closely screen content. Back in China, YY, Huya, Douyu and the likes are constantly grappling with the government’s tightening grip over online information, which puts the burden on media companies to keep a robust content monitoring team to not only rid illegal videos but also parse the country’s opaque definition of what’s considered “inappropriate”.
Tech News
Here’s Why The Cantilever Aero Bullet Is Considered The Worst Planes Ever Built

The Wrights were engineers all over the world trading notes and testing prototypes with the shared goal of powered flight. Alberto Santos-Dumont flew a manned airship in a neat circle around the Eiffel Tower in 1901. Wilhelm Kress’s Drachenflieger might have etched its name in the Austrian sky in the same year, had its power-to-weight ratio not been thrown off by errors at a fledgling engine builder called Daimler.
All that seems to have sounded too much like work for Christmas. He did not study aerial flight. He carried out no experiments. He decided to skip to the part where people would pay him and a flying machine would appear. To that end, he founded the Christmas Aeroplane Company in 1909. In 1918, it would be known as the Cantilever Aero Company.
Christmas had nothing to sell but a story to the Continental Aircraft Corporation and New York Senator James Wolcott Wadsworth when World War I broke out.
[Featured image by Flight Archive at FlightGlobal via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0 ]
Tech News
Samsung SmartThings Station Review: One-Button Connected Home Control

The SmartThings Station looks very similar in size and shape to Samsung’s Galaxy 15W Wireless Charger, with a couple of key extras. First, the “Smart Button” on the top panel lets you trigger up to three automated sequences involving any of your connected smart home devices. And two indicator lights on the front face of the unit show the status of the wireless charger and the status of the Station as a smart hub, such as: working normally, restarting, can’t connect to the Internet, or scanning for new devices to add to SmartThings.
The unit I tested came with a USB-C to USB-C cable, and an AC power adapter. There is also a lower-priced SKU that does not include the power adapter, but be wary of that, as many online commenters complained that it did not work with their third-party power adapters.
Once I plugged in the SmartThings Station, and it booted up for the first time, a pop-up on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra phone prompted me to go to the SmartThings app, where I connected the Station to the same Wi-Fi network as the phone. You can opt to save the Station’s network connectivity info to Samsung’s SmartThings cloud while you’re at it.
After setup, the app shows the Station device info, such as its location (My home, My office, etc.) and room (living room, bedroom, kitchen, and so forth).
Tech News
Reasons To Like An Affordable Electric Pony

All of the settings are accessed through Ford’s oversized infotainment screen, a 15.5-inch portrait aspect touchscreen floating within easy reach of the driver. Ford has trimmed physical controls to a minimum, though there’s a volume knob integrated into the touchscreen — and which can also adjust temperature and other settings, depending on mode — plus a drive mode selector knob, and steering wheel controls.
SYNC 4A, Ford’s infotainment system, generally makes good use of that screen real estate, though it can take a little familiarizing as there are a lot of menus, slide-down trays, and different views. The core HVAC controls are persistent across the bottom, while buttons at the top jump into the settings, a wireless Apple CarPlay or Android Auto connection, pull up the cameras, or trigger Amazon Alexa.
It’s all fast and reasonably slick — Ford has pushed out a number of updates to the UI since the EV first launched — and the rest of the Mustang Mach-E’s cabin holds up, too. Select models do without some of the fancier trim and materials, but it still feels sturdy and spacious. Even this base model gets a wireless phone charger and multiple USB ports in both A and C flavors, and while the color scheme may not be exactly colorful, it feels like it could hold up to family use.
The same goes for the storage. Alongside plenty of cabin cubbies, there’s a 29.7 cu-ft trunk, which expands to 59.7 cu-ft with the rear split seats folded. Under the hood is a further 4.7 cu-ft of space, both waterproof and with a useful drainage plug if you need to hose it down after storing muddy boots there.
-
Social12 months ago
Web.com website builder review
-
Social3 years ago
CrashPlan for Small Business Review
-
Gadgets4 years ago
A fictional Facebook Portal videochat with Mark Zuckerberg – TechCrunch
-
Cars4 years ago
What’s the best cloud storage for you?
-
Social4 years ago
iPhone XS priciest yet in South Korea
-
Mobile4 years ago
Memory raises $5M to bring AI to time tracking – TechCrunch
-
Security4 years ago
Google latest cloud to be Australian government certified
-
Social4 years ago
Apple’s new iPad Pro aims to keep enterprise momentum