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E-commerce giant Alibaba will buy Chinese online video provider Youku Tudou, following months of speculation and an initial offer from Baba in October.

Alibaba already owned a fifth of the company, and will pay $27.60 per share in cash for the company.

Youku CEO Victor Koo says he will continue to lead the company and its operations after the deal closes.

"We are confident that we will strengthen our market position and further accelerate our growth through the integration of our advertising and consumer businesses with Alibaba's platform and Alipay services," added Koo.

Google has purchased Fly Labs, the company behind the popular Clips, Fly, Tempo and Crop on the Fly video editing apps for iOS.

The app maker says current employees will be integrated into the Google Photos team, suggesting at the very least that the search giant is considering adding some video editing features to its cloud-based photo service.

Fly Labs say their apps were downloaded over 3 million times and over 20 million videos were created using the tools. At the end of 90 days from the acquisition, Google will be pulling the apps from the Apple App Store.

Fans of Warcraft now have the first trailer for the upcoming live-action Duncan Jones-directed film based on the franchise.

In the trailer we see orcs fleeing their dying world, en route to the human world.

The movie is scheduled for release in June 2016.

Google has released its updated platform numbers for the end of October, with Android Marshmallow making its first appearance following the launch of the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X.

In addition to the new Nexus phones, the Nexus 6 also got the update to Marshmallow, which is officially 6.0.

KitKat (4.4) and Lollipop (5.0/5.1) remained the big winners, at 37.8 percent and 25.6 percent respectively, but quite a few older versions still have respectable numbers. Google's ultimate goal is to have everyone using the same operating system, but there are too many older phones out there that aren't upgradeable.

Check the full numbers here.

According to new reports, Google has begun thinking about co-developing Android chips from their own designs and the company may begin looking for a partner in the near future.

In doing so, Google will match Apple who uses their own A-series chip set in their iPhones and iPads to ensure a consistent experience across their ecosystem.

For the most part, Android phones are powered by Qualcomm or Samsung chips, so Google would most likely have to develop the new chips with one of them to be able to build at the volume and scale necessary.

The report also speculates that the chips could first be tested with next-generation Nexus flagship devices, before making their way to other OEMs.

The BBC has launched the BBC Store this week, a digital service allowing consumers to buy and download their favorite programs.

Over 30 years of select BBC programming will be available and anything bought from the BBC Store will be playable via the BBC iPlayer.

Additionally, you can search and buy directly through the BBC iPlayer, as well, giving you the option to download a legacy catalog and stream new content too.

"Of course, BBC Store will feature current BBC favourites including Doctor Who, Sherlock, Top Gear and David Attenborough's natural history programmes as well as recent hits like Poldark and The Fall and children's favourites like Sarah & Duck," adds the company.

In relatively shocking news, research firm Strategy Analytics has said today that Samsung's fledgling Tizen OS has surpassed BlackBerry in global market share.

After years of delays, Samsung finally launched Tizen this year on commercial devices, including two smartphones, the Gear S2 smartwatch and some TV.

Says the company: "According to the latest published report from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) services: Global Smartphone OS Market Share by Region : Q3 2015, Android registered a slight year-on-year increase in marketshare, while Apple gained traction, driven by strong demand for new iPhone models. Microsoft, BlackBerry and Firefox drifted down, while Tizen posted tangible growth and overtook BlackBerry being the fourth largest OS platform for the first time ever." The actual figures are behind a paywall, but it's hard to imagine that Tizen has market share above 2 percent, meaning BlackBerry has fallen very, very far.

Source:
Strategy Analytics

The MPAA has confirmed this week that they were responsible for the shutdown of scene release group YIFY and its parent site YTS following lawsuits against Popcorn Time devs.

The studios that back the MPAA sued three Popcorn Time developers in Canada, leading to the shutdown of the service's main fork at popcorntime.io in late October. There had been rumors that internal strife between the founding team over whether or not some features would bring a lawsuit and those rumors were true.

It turns out that the MPAA obtained an injunction on October 16th for the Popcorntime.io site. The lawsuit accuses the devs of copyright infringement and also names the service's VPN provider, VPN.ht. At the same time, the MPAA was threatening a multi-million lawsuit against the alleged operator of YTS, who lives in New Zealand.

"This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft," MPAA head Chris Dodd touted. "Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion picture and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them."

Konami has confirmed the closure of Kojima Productions LA, with 35 people losing their jobs.

The publisher did note that it will still continue to support Metal Gear Online mode for Phantom Pain, which had been the main reason that Kojima LA was still open.

"Konami has made the decision to close its Los Angeles Studio, effective immediately, due to the product development resources being restructured into a more centralized unit. This facility contributed to the recent Metal Gear Solid games. Konami will continue its operations to support all Metal Gear Solid titles, including the recently launched Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Online. Metal Gear Online is still scheduled to release for PC Steam in January 2016," added the publisher.

The latest move is just the next step in an escalating feud between Konami and legendary developer Hideo Kojima in which the new Silent Hill sequel was canceled and Kojima was allegedly fired during the development of Metal Gear.

Activision has acquired 'Candy Crush' maker King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion, betting large on the casual mobile gaming market.

The selling price was $18 per share, way below the price King priced at last year went it went public, rough for most investors but still at a price much higher than what shares traded at earlier this week.

Candy Crush has been in decline for most of the last two years but is still played by millions every month.

Combined, the two companies now have over 500 million active monthly users for their games. "Other than YouTube or Facebook there isn't a worldwide network that has a bigger number of audience members," said Bobby Kotick, Activision's chief executive. "A big part of the opportunity is to explore the intellectual property that exists at Activision Blizzard and see if it makes sense in that network."

According to Nest founder and former Apple SVP Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs actively spoke about the potential for building an Apple Car back in 2008.

"We had a couple of walks," Fadell said, in which they asked questions such as, "If we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? And what would this be? What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?"

Of course, at that time the company was busy introducing the device that would change the smartphone world - the iPhone, and Jobs decided against building a car at that time. Rumors have remained practically every year since then, however, with plenty of people still expecting an Apple Car in the coming years.

No matter what, Fadell believes we are still in the "early days" for the evolution of the car, and the tech industry will likely be at the forefront of this new revolution although that can be up to 10 years away, he notes.

Following the major takedown of scene release group YIFY, it seems that the large public torrent tracker Demonii will shut down, as well.

The YIFY group, an icon in the movie piracy world, also ran the YTS website and apparently operated Demonii also.

Demonii says it had 44,682,991 peers and over 4.8 million torrents, making it one of the largest public torrent trackers available.

For the time being, the tracker remains up, but expect it to be down within the week.

If you're a fan of the Fallout series, you will be able to try out Nuka-Cola Quantum soon thanks to a new partnership.

Fallout developer Bethesda has teamed up with Jones Soda to release the soda on November 10th at Target stores.

The release coincides with the release of Fallout 4, and Bethesda has been offering fans quite a few collectibles ahead of the game's release.

Major European carrier Vodafone UK announced today that hackers had accessed 1827 customer accounts this week, taking names and mobile telephone numbers.

Additionally, the attackers potentially had access to bank sort codes and the last four digits of bank account numbers, as well.

"This incident was driven by criminals using email addresses and passwords acquired from an unknown source external to Vodafone," said Vodafone in a statement.

Everyone affected has been notified and have told to expect more phishing attempts.

The event marks the second time this week that a British telecom company has been hacked. TalkTalk recently saw information on 1.2 million customers stolen including over 20,000 bank account numbers.

Proving yet again that consumers are willing to try most things if the price is right, HTC lowered the price of their flop, the Re Camera, to $50 and it quickly sold out.

The camera was built to compete against GoPro with supposedly easier ergonomics shaped like a periscope, but sales have been non-existent at its $200 MSRP.

HTC dropped the price to $50 temporarily, possibly to clear inventory, and the ploy worked, as the Re is now sold out but showing the original $199 price tag.

The camera offers a 146-degree wide-angle lens, a 16-megapixel 1/2.3-inch sensor and lets you use your Android or iOS phone as a viewfinder.

Source:
HTC