Apple Unveils Streaming Music
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)
AAPL recently unveiled its new streaming music service at the WWDC (World Wide Developer’s Conference), “Apple Music,” which will cost subscribers $9.99 per month. The price point falls in line with many other streaming services such as Spotify, the main rival.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, commented on Monday in San Francisco at the WWDC and noted. “It will change the way you experience music forever.”
The Apple Music service will become available for purchase on June 30 with an offer for a 90 day free trial. AAPL stands to benefit significantly as they already have tens of millions of credit cards on file from existing users alleviating the headache of having to subscribe to a 3rd party provider for music.
BlackBerry Continues To Sour
BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ: BBRY)
BlackBerry recently announced its plans to buy back up to 12 million shares of stock. The full 12 million would equate to nearly 3% of the float, or, tradable shares in the market.
Chief Executive Officer John Chen said, “The purpose of this repurchase program will be to offset dilution that may result from our proposed employee share purchase plan and from proposed amendments to our equity incentive plan.”
Although this may appear to be great news for shareholders, the truth is that BBRY is experiencing significant headwinds with the obvious rivals of Samsung and Apple and for this reason BBRY stock is among the top 5 most shorted stocks in the Nasdaq. Over 85 million shares as of May were held short making for a whopping short interest of nearly 18%.
Can Twitter Fly High Again?
Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR)
TWTR recently suffered an unfortunate event when its financials were exposed by an algorithm that constantly crawled Twitter’s investors relations page searching for releases. This program was able to capture the earnings release that was unintentionally posted for a very short period, and when investors caught wind on April 28, 2015 big profits were realized. Shares of TWTR stock fell from over $50 to a low of $38.38 on heavy volume all in the midst of being halted for trading. Since this sharp drop in TWTR’s share price it has continued its slide on various other concerns, many of which believe is related to the lack of productivity by key leaders.
Chris Sacca, a large investor in TWTR and owner of Lowercase Capital, presented a rather lengthy proposal on how he believes TWTR can shore up its business and turn the stock price around.
Sacca had the following comments: “My biggest concern is the abundance of public doubt and misunderstanding when it comes to Twitter’s vision and the near future for the service. If the company has a bold vision for the future, it doesn’t come across in their communication with us on the outside.”
Final Thoughts
What are your thoughts on these Tech titans and the direction in which they are headed? Please leave your comments below!
