Apple Inc. Has a New Expansion Strategy For the Indian Market

The technology organization plan to import its old iPhone to India as most of the customers prefer to buy phones under $150;  however the company has been targeted with increased criticism over the plan.

Apple Inc. has become the first ever smartphone maker that can legally export used phone in India for direct sales. The ugly truth currently is that the world’s largest market which is the smartphone market is coming to a saturation point; this point is hitting many high-end smartphone makers in the industry especially Apple Inc. 2015 was the second year in which the technology giant faced its declining sales.

In an attempt to tackle this issue of declining iPhone sales, the Silicon Valley giant is trying to develop newer marker especially in India, as due to regulations and import duties, the price of a high-end device hits the roof. However, to gain back its faith in the market the tech organization is implementing another strategy of selling old and refurbished smartphones. Many believe that even before the company comes around to implementing this strategy it will fail, as it has been opposed by the government and regulatory authorities in the country as well as iPhone maker’s rivals in the industry, some of which include Samsung, Micromax and Intex.  

Companies that make mid-range and low-range smartphones is the primary reason as to why the idea has come across resistance; they are mainly concerned that if Apple is allowed to go forward with this it will face increased competition in the specific smartphone category. Many people have stated that if the tech giant starts importing these phones to India, they will require a change of battery and display screen however people have pointed out that discarding these components could release toxic materials in to the already polluted Indian environment.

Since India has been one of the fastest growing markets in the smartphone business; it is highly unlikely that Apple would pull out its expansion plans so easily. Apple Inc. had a 76% iPhone sales growth in the region during the previous year; despite of the fact that most of these sales from its discounted iPhone 5 series. IPhone customers in the region prefer phones that are under $150 or less and hardly ever prefer phones that are above $600 at which the latest iPhones are usually priced at.

The recent iPhone SE that has been launched has been given a lower price tag however despite of that it is likely not going to impress the Indian customer; as at a price of 35,000 rupees it does not appeal to the Indian crowd since they would opt to buy an iPhone 6s which is just $75 more than that price.

However, if other rival manufacturers try to place the environment-centric argument game, they might just lose this battle as the tech company follows strict rules when it comes to recycling its old iPhones. The fact that the tech giant follows strict rules on recycling can soften some criticism that has been brought up on the topic of environment. Apple has an intelligent recycling robot by the name of Liam that recycles 85% of its products that were manufactured over seven years ago. 

Microsoft Corporation Artificial Intelligence Chatbot goes Haywire on the Internet

The technology giant has addressed this issue of Al chatbat and apologized publicly for its misconduct.

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence powered chatbot, Tay caused some trouble for the technology company earlier last week. The specific bot apparently messages like a teenage girl and last week it posted some offensive content that it learnt from the users. The chatbot Tay turned into a hate-speech propagating, ‘Hitler-sympathizing’ messaging robot instead which seemed offensive to many.

Users exploited the glitch in the system and took advantage of it which in turn portrayed the chatbot as a hate-speech initiator. Tay made this mistake on the micro-blogging website Twitter, Inc. In a blog post, the technology organization released a statement regarding this misconduct on Tay’s part.

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president at Microsoft Corporation, was the author of the specific post in which he expressed that the management of the tech giant was deeply sorry for the ‘unintended offensive and hurtful’ tweets that were made by its AI powered chatbot. Furthermore, he added that the chatbot’s tweet, in any way, did not represent the technology business and neither did it portrays what the company stands for. In addition to that, he even stated that, the conduct by Tay is not how the company designed it.

The chatbot was officially given permission to interact with users online on Wednesday, it’s built to become smarter by interacting with the millennial users and how they talk and interact with each other online. It has the ability to copy how the users type, their ideas and how they conduct speech. However, this ability to learn from the users led the bot to show a slate of anti-Semitic and hateful comments on the social media website; in addition to that other social media networks were involved in this as well including KiK, Snapchat as well as GroupMe.

In counter the reaction that the tweets created on the Internet, the technology giant deleted the tweets and closed down Tay on Thursday. The company has stated that it will be back on only when the engineers have fixed this problem and when they figure out how to avoid such incidents in the future. The engineer’s first task will be to prevent the bot from getting influenced by the users online so that it doesn’t misrepresent the missions and values of the company.

The Chief corporate VP also stated that this problem occurred despite of the engineers testing the artificial intelligent bot in various scenarios. This problem only surfaced after they made the service live on the internet. He added that even though the company tested it with many types of abuses on the system, it had this issue. 

Intel Corporation Leaves Behind its 'Tick-Tock' Approach

The technology giant is moving towards a new three-step development strategy and moving away from its previous, more successful Tick-Tick Strategy.

Intel Corporation’s ‘Tick-Tock’ strategy has dominated the market for over a decade now despite the fact that during this time period, the technology giant has worked on a number of different chip development methodologies. However, recently the chip maker has decided to say farewell to its ‘tick-tock’ strategy that has always seemed to work for it.

The era of relying on the ‘Tick-tock’ strategy is officially over as the technology organization is moving towards a three step development process which is called Process Architecture Optimization (PAO). This latest shift by the company didn’t come as a surprise to many since last year the company had stated that it was having issues with its 10-nanometer technology because of which it failed to go into production which it had planned to do so initially by the end of the year.

The Tick-Tock strategy basically referred to nodes, in which the new process nodes were known as the ‘ticks’ while the new architectures that were built on these process nodes were known as ‘tocks’. However, in its 10-K filing, the company declared that strategy officially dead. Furthermore, the filing also stated some of company’s future plans which included the introduction of new product families by the chip manufacturing organization.

In the filing, the company mentioned the introduction of ‘Kaby Lake’ which will be the third 14 nanometer product and is expected to have key performance enhancements in comparison to the 6^th generation Intel Core Processor. In addition to that, they are also working on their next-generation process technology which will be a 10 nanometer manufacturing process technology.

Intel Corporation is quite optimistic about its latest development strategy – however it is still too soon to say whether this new strategy will be impactful and will be able to generate the kind of response the company is hoping for it. Furthermore, we are yet to find out if it will be as successful as the initial Tick-Tock Strategy.

On March 21, Intel Stock witnessed a decline of 2% in the pre-market trading as Bernstein downgraded the company’s stock to Underperform from an initial rating of Market Perform. Stacy Rasgon, analyst at Bernstein believes that since the tech organization has not shared its quarter’s results as yet, it might not be ‘out of the woods’ as yet. Furthermore, the analyst also predicts that since the company has failed to live up to its guidance for the first quarter of the current fiscal year and hence has not yet shared anything in the pre-announcement.

The tech giant is supposed to report its financial earnings for the three month period on March 31. The analysts at the Street are hoping for the company to report profit of 50 cents per share and have estimated revenue of $13.95 million.