Android

Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google, based on the Linux kernel and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android's user interface is mainly based on direct manipulation, using touch gestures that loosely correspond to real-world actions, such as swiping, tapping and pinching, to manipulate on-screen objects, along with a virtual keyboard for text input. In addition to touchscreen devices, Google has further developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars, and Android Wear for wrist watches, each with a specialized user interface. Variants of Android are also used on notebooks, game consoles, digital cameras, and other electronics.

Android has the largest installed base of all operating systems (OS) of any kind.Android has been the best selling OS on tablets since 2013, and on smartphones it is dominant by any metric.

Initially developed by Android, Inc., which Google bought in 2005,Android was unveiled in 2007 along with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance – a consortium of hardware, software, and telecommunication companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices.As of July 2013, the Google Play store has had over one million Android applications ("apps") published – including many "business-class apps"that rival competing mobile platforms – and as of May 2016 over 65 billion applications downloaded.An April–May 2013 survey of mobile application developers found that 71% of developers create applications for Android,and a 2015 survey found that 40% of full-time professional developers see Android as their priority target platform, which is comparable to Apple's iOS on 37% with both platforms far above others.In September 2015, Android had 1.4 billion monthly active devices.

Android's source code is released by Google under an open source license, although most Android devices ultimately ship with a combination of free and open source and proprietary software, including proprietary software required for accessing Google services.Android is popular with technology companies that require a ready-made, low-cost and customizable operating system for high-tech devices.Its open nature has encouraged a large community of developers and enthusiasts to use the open-source code as a foundation for community-driven projects, which deliver updates to older devices, add new features for advanced users or bring Android to devices originally shipped with other operating systems. The success of Android has made it a target for patent (and copyright) litigation as part of the so-called "smartphone wars" between technology companies.

History

Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California in October 2003 by Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger),Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.),Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile), and Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTV to develop "smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's [sic] location and preferences".The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras. Though, when it was realized that the market for the devices was not large enough, the company diverted its efforts toward producing a smartphone operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.Despite the past accomplishments of the founders and early employees, Android Inc. operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.That same year, Rubin ran out of money. Steve Perlman, a close friend of Rubin, brought him $10,000 in cash in an envelope and refused a stake in the company.

In July 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million. Its key employees, including Rubin, Miner and White, stayed at the company after the acquisition.Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move.At Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradeable system. Google had lined up a series of hardware component and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation on their part.

Speculation about Google's intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.An earlier prototype codenamed "Sooner" had a closer resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen, and a physical, QWERTY keyboard, but was later re-engineered to support a touchscreen, to compete with other announced devices such as the 2006 LG Prada and 2007 Apple iPhone.In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony.

Eric Schmidt, Andy Rubin and Hugo Barra at a 2012 press conference announcing Google's Nexus 7 tablet

On November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies including Google, device manufacturers such as HTC, Sony and Samsung, wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile, and chipset makers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, unveiled itself, with a goal to develop open standards for mobile devices.That day, Android was unveiled as its first product, a mobile device platform built on the Linux kernel.The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, released on October 22, 2008.

Since 2008, Android has seen numerous updates which have incrementally improved the operating system, adding new features and fixing bugs in previous releases. Each major release is named in alphabetical order after a dessert or sugary treat; for example, version 1.5 "Cupcake" was followed by 1.6 "Donut". In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices – a line of smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system, and built by manufacturing partners. HTC collaborated with Google to release the first Nexus smartphone,the Nexus One. Google has since updated the series with newer devices, such as the Nexus 5 phone and the Nexus 7 tablet. Google releases the Nexus phones and tablets to act as their flagship Android devices, demonstrating Android's latest software and hardware features. From 2013 until 2015, Google offered several Google Play Edition devices over Google Play. While not carrying the Google Nexus branding, these were Google-customized Android phones and tablets that also ran the latest version of Android, free from manufacturer or carrier modifications.

From 2010 to 2013, Hugo Barra served as product spokesperson, representing Android at press conferences and Google I/O, Google’s annual developer-focused conference. Barra's product involvement included the entire Android ecosystem of software and hardware, including Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and KitKat operating system launches, the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 smartphones, the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets,and other related products such as Google Now and Google Voice Search, Google’s speech recognition product comparable to Apple’s Siri.In 2013, Barra left the Android team for Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.The same year, Larry Page announced in a blog post that Andy Rubin had moved from the Android division to take on new projects at Google.He was replaced by Sundar Pichai who became the new head of Android and Chrome OS,and, later, by Hiroshi Lockheimer when Pichai became CEO of Google.

In 2014, Google launched Android One, a line of smartphones mainly targeting customers in the developing world. In May 2015, Google announced Project Brillo as a cut-down version of Android that uses its lower levels (excluding the user interface), intended for the "Internet of Things" (IoT) embedded systems.

University of Cambridge research in 2015, concluded that almost 90% of Android phones in use had known but unpatched security vulnerabilities due to lack of updates and support.In a year since (mid-2015) that report, well over a billion Android smartphones have been sold (more than the just over billion sold in 2014); and Android 5.0 (with better security) and later, went from 5.4% market share to currently over half, which means that the 90% number must be very outdated; those phones now very likely represent less than half of all Android phones. Recent devices do get security updates;Android 5.0 introduced an improved centralized update system.

iOS

iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that presently powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is the second most popular mobile operating system globally after Android. iPad tablets are also the second most popular, by sales, against Android since 2013.

Originally unveiled in 2007 for the iPhone, iOS has been extended to support other Apple devices such as the iPod Touch (September 2007) and the iPad (January 2010). As of January 2017, Apple's App Store contains more than 2.2 million iOS applications,725,000 of which are native for iPads.These mobile apps have collectively been downloaded more than 130 billion times.

The iOS user interface is based upon direct manipulation, using multi-touch gestures. Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons. Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface. Internal accelerometers are used by some applications to respond to shaking the device (one common result is the undo command) or rotating it in three dimensions (one common result is switching between portrait and landscape mode).

Major versions of iOS are released annually. The current version, iOS 10, was released on September 13, 2016.It runs on the iPhone 5 and later, iPad (4th generation) and later, iPad Pro, iPad Mini 2 and later, and the 6th-generation iPod Touch. In iOS, there are four abstraction layers: the Core OS, Core Services, Media, and Cocoa Touch layers.

History

In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and iPod teams, led by Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell, respectively, against each other in an internal competition, with Forstall winning by creating the iPhone OS. The decision enabled the success of the iPhone as a platform for third-party developers: using a well-known desktop operating system as its basis allowed the many third-party Mac developers to write software for the iPhone with minimal retraining.Forstall also was responsible for creating a software developer's kit for programmers to build iPhone apps, as well as an App Store within iTunes.

The operating system was unveiled with the iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo, January 9, 2007, and released in June of that year.At first, Apple marketing literature did not specify a separate name for the operating system, stating simply what Steve Jobs claimed: "iPhone runs OS X" and runs "desktop applications"when in fact it runs a variant of [Mac] OS X, that doesn't run OS X software unless it has been ported to the incompatible operating system. Initially, third-party applications were not supported. Steve Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications that "would behave like native apps on the iPhone".On October 17, 2007, Apple announced that a native Software Development Kit (SDK) was under development and that they planned to put it "in developers' hands in February".On March 6, 2008, Apple released the first beta, along with a new name for the operating system: "iPhone OS".

On September 5, 2007, Apple released the iPod Touch, which had most of the non-phone capabilities of the iPhone. Apple also sold more than one million iPhones during the 2007 holiday season.On January 27, 2010, Apple announced the iPad, featuring a larger screen than the iPhone and iPod Touch, and designed for web browsing, media consumption, and reading.

In June 2010, Apple rebranded iPhone OS as "iOS". The trademark "IOS" had been used by Cisco for over a decade for its operating system, IOS, used on its routers. To avoid any potential lawsuit, Apple licensed the "IOS" trademark from Cisco.

In October 2016, Apple opened its first iOS Developer Academy in Naples inside University of Naples Federico II's new campus.

History of technology

The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques and is similar to other sides of the history of humanity. Technology can refer to methods ranging from as simple as language and stone tools to the complex genetic engineering and information technology that has emerged since the 1980s.

New knowledge has enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors are made possible by technologies which assist humans in travelling to places they could not previously reach, and by scientific instruments by which we study nature in more detail than our natural senses allow.

Since much of technology is applied science, technical history is connected to the history of science. Since technology uses resources, technical history is tightly connected to economic history. From those resources, technology produces other resources, including technological artifacts used in everyday life.

Technological change affects, and is affected by, a society's cultural traditions. It is a force for economic growth and a means to develop and project economic, political and military power.

Measuring technological progress

Many sociologists and anthropologists have created social theories dealing with social and cultural evolution. Some, like Lewis H. Morgan, Leslie White, and Gerhard Lenski have declared technological progress to be the primary factor driving the development of human civilization. Morgan's concept of three major stages of social evolution (savagery, barbarism, and civilization) can be divided by technological milestones, such as fire. White argued the measure by which to judge the evolution of culture was energy.

For White, "the primary function of culture" is to "harness and control energy." White differentiates between five stages of human development: In the first, people use energy of their own muscles. In the second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In the third, they use the energy of plants (agricultural revolution). In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In the fifth, they harness nuclear energy. White introduced a formula P=E*T, where E is a measure of energy consumed, and T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilizing the energy. In his own words, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased". Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extrapolated his theory, creating the Kardashev scale, which categorizes the energy use of advanced civilizations.

Lenski's approach focuses on information. The more information and knowledge (especially allowing the shaping of natural environment) a given society has, the more advanced it is. He identifies four stages of human development, based on advances in the history of communication. In the first stage, information is passed by genes. In the second, when humans gain sentience, they can learn and pass information through by experience. In the third, the humans start using signs and develop logic. In the fourth, they can create symbols, develop language and writing. Advancements in communications technology translates into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of wealth, social inequality and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy:

• hunter-gatherer,
• simple agricultural,
• advanced agricultural,
• industrial,
• special (such as fishing societies).

In economics productivity is a measure of technological progress. Productivity increases when fewer inputs (labor, energy, materials or land) are used in the production of a unit of output.Another indicator of technological progress is the development of new products and services, which is necessary to offset unemployment that would otherwise result as labor inputs are reduced. In developed countries productivity growth has been slowing since the late 1970s; however, productivity growth was higher in some economic sectors, such as manufacturing.For example, in employment in manufacturing in the United States declined from over 30% in the 1940s to just over 10% 70 years later. Similar changes occurred in other developed countries. This stage is referred to as post-industrial.

In the late 1970s sociologists and anthropologists like Alvin Toffler (author of Future Shock), Daniel Bell and John Naisbitt have approached the theories of post-industrial societies, arguing that the current era of industrial society is coming to an end, and services and information are becoming more important than industry and goods. Some extreme visions of the post-industrial society, especially in fiction, are strikingly similar to the visions of near and post-Singularity societies.

Skype

Skype is an application that provides video chat and voice call services. Users may exchange such digital documents as images, text, video and any other, and may transmit both text and video messages. Skype allows the creation of video conference calls.

Skype is based on a freemium model. Much of the service is free, but Skype Credit or a subscription is required to call a landline or a mobile phone number. At the end of 2010, there were over 660 million worldwide users, with over 300 million estimated active each month as of August 2015.At one point in February 2012, there were thirty four million users concurrently online on Skype.

First released in August 2003, Skype was created by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Estonians who developed the backend that was also used in the music-sharing application Kazaa. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.

In September 2009,Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Skype division headquarters are in Luxembourg but most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.

Skype allows users to communicate over the Internet by voice using a microphone, by video using a webcam, and by instant messaging. Skype-to-Skype calls to other users are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones (over traditional telephone networks) are charged via a debit-based user account system called Skype Credit. Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks,citing such reasons as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage and security concerns.

Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system.Skype has been powered entirely by Microsoft-operated supernodes since May 2012.The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that Microsoft had granted intelligence agencies unfettered access to supernodes and Skype communication content.

History

Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark.The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003.

In June 2005, Skype entered into an agreement with the Polish web portal Onet.pl for an integrated offering on the Polish market.On 12 September 2005, eBay Inc. agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA for approximately US$2.5 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

On 1 September 2009, it was announced that eBay was selling 65% of Skype to Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for US$1.9 billion, valuing Skype at US$2.75 billion.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware, cross-platform and end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application for smartphones.It uses the Internet to make voice calls, one to one video calls; send text messages, documents, PDF files, images, GIF, videos, user location, audio files, phone contacts and voice notes to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers.

WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion.By February 2016, WhatsApp had a user base of over one billion,making it the most popular messaging application at the time.

History

WhatsApp, was incorporated in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo traveled to South America as a break from work.At one point they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the App Store would soon create an industry of apps, Koum started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "... having statuses next to individual names of the people", but this was not possible without an iPhone developer. Fishman found a Russian developer on RentACoder.com, Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. Koum named the app "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, because early versions of WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".

In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. Koum changed WhatsApp so that when a user's status is changed, everyone in the user's network would be notified.WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Acton was still unemployed and managing another startup, and he decided to join the company.In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends in Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined on November 1.After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.

WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to WhatsApp for the iPhone. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.

In April 2011, Sequoia Capital was the only venture investor in WhatsApp and paid approximately $8 million for more than 15 percent of the company, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.

By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.

In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.^[17] As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more than 10 billion messages each day.On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day.With 65 million active users representing 10% of the total worldwide users, India has the largest number of consumers.

Snapchat

Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown,former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal concepts of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are only available for a short time before they become inaccessible. The prototype for Snapchat was started by Brown and Spiegel as a project for one of Spiegel's classes at Stanford, where Spiegel was a product design major. Beginning as "Picaboo", the idea was to create a selfie app (application) which allowed users to share images that were explicitly short-lived and self-deleting. The temporary nature of the pictures would therefore encourage frivolity and emphasize a more natural flow of interaction.When, in April 2011, Spiegel floated the product idea in front of his class as a final project, the classmates focused on the impermanent aspect of the potential product, and balked at the thought of temporary photos.Murphy was eventually brought into the project to write the source code for the application, and Picaboo first launched as an iOS-only app in July 2011 from Evan Spiegel's living room (who was still staying at home with his father when not away at school). The application was relaunched two months later under the name Snapchat.

Snapchat evolved into a mix of private messaging and public content, including brand networks, publications, and live events such as sports and music. Nevertheless, according to survey studies conducted in March 2016, the personal oriented messaging was still being accessed by users more than the publicly offered content that was being presented. 71% of users surveyed said that they preferred the app for its chat, messaging, and imaging services, versus 5% who almost exclusively chose the various events, published features, and media content on a daily basis. 24% responded that they accessed all features equally. However, about three quarters of those surveyed were also familiar with the events, media brands, and celebrity content, having a favorable opinion of those areas.

Twitter

Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, "tweets," restricted to 140 characters. Registered users can post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, SMS or a mobile device app.Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, United States, and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July, whereby the service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day,and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day.In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet".As of March 2016, Twitter had more than 310 million monthly active users.On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news, with 40 million tweets sent by 10 p.m. (Eastern Time) that day.

History

Creation and initial reaction

A blueprint sketch, c. 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter.The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability".Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was.

The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders.Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011.Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview:

With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.

The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000."The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it."

Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter was "absolutely ruling" SXSWi. Social software researcher danah boyd said Twitter was "owning" the conference.Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010.By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network as president of revenue.

Facebook

Facebook (FB) is an American for-profit corporation

 and online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students; however, later they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to high school students as well. Since 2006, anyone age 13 and older has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement, depending on applicable local laws.The Facebook name comes from the face book directories often given to United States university students.

Facebook may be accessed by a large range of desktops, laptops, tablet computers, and smartphones over the Internet and mobile networks. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Users can add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and digital photos, share digital videos and links, use various software applications ("apps"), and receive notifications when others update their profiles or make posts. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". In groups, editors can pin posts to top. Additionally, users can complain about or block unpleasant people. Because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for its privacy policies. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements which appear onscreen.

Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion.Facebook has more than 1.86 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2016.As of April 2016, Facebook was the most popular social networking site in the world, based on the number of active user accounts.Facebook classifies users from the ages of 13 to 18 as minors and therefore sets their profiles to share content with friends only.

Instagram

Instagram is a mobile photo-sharingFacebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. Originally, a distinctive feature was that it confined photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid SX-70 images, in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras. In August 2015, version 7.5 was released for mobile devices, allowing users to upload media captured in any aspect ratio, but not at full size.Users can also apply various digital filters to their images. In June 2013, Instagram added support for videos, allowing prerecorded square standard definition resolution clips of up to 15 seconds to be shared; later updates introduced support for widescreen resolutions of up to 1080p and longer recording times for either pre recorded (up to one minute) or disappearing live videos (up to one hour).
 application that allows users to share pictures and videos either publicly or privately in the app, as well as through a variety of other social networking platforms, such as 

Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and was launched in October 2010 as a free mobile app, exclusively for the iOS mobile platform via the Apple App Store, but was later released for Android devices two years later, on April 3, 2012.The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014.Support for the app is available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows 10 devices and Android handsets, while third-party Instagram apps are available for BlackBerry 10 and Nokia-Symbian Devices.

The service was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.In 2013, Instagram grew by 23%, while Facebook, as the parent company, only grew by 3%.

History

Instagram began development in San Francisco, when Systrom and Brazilian Krieger chose to focus their multi-featured HTML5 check-in project, Burbn, on mobile photography.

As Krieger reasoned, Burbn became too similar to Foursquare, and both realized that it has gone too far. And for that, Burbn pivoted to become more focused.The word Instagram is a portmanteau of instant camera and telegram.

On March 5, 2010, Systrom closed a $500,000 seed funding round with Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while working on Burbn.Josh Riedel then joined the company as Community Manager.Shayne Sweeney joined in November 2010 as an engineer and Jessica Zollman was hired as a Community Evangelist in August 2011.

In January 2011, Instagram added hashtags to help users discover both photographs and each other.^[27] Instagram encourages users to make tags both specific and relevant, rather than tagging generic words like "photo", to make photographs stand out and to attract like-minded Instagram users.In September, version 2.0 went live in the App Store (iOS) and included new and live filters, instant tilt–shift, high resolution photographs, optional borders, one-click rotation, and an updated icon.On February 2, 2011, an announcement revealed that Instagram had raised $7 million in Series A funding from a variety of investors, including Benchmark Capital, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through Capital fund), and Adam D'Angelo.The deal valued Instagram at around $25 million.

On April 3, 2012, Instagram was released for Android phones running the 2.2 Froyo version of the OS,and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day.^[That same week, Instagram raised $50 million from venture capitalists for a share of the company; the process valued Instagram at $500 million.Over the next three months, Instagram was rated more than one million times on Google Play and was the fifth app to ever reach one million ratings on Google Play—as of April 2013, it had been rated nearly four million times.

Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram, along with its 13 employees, for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock in April 2012,with a plan to keep the company independently managed.Britain's Office of Fair Trading approved the deal on August 14, 2012,and on August 22, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. closed its investigation, allowing the deal to proceed.On September 6, 2012, the deal between Instagram and Facebook was officially closed.

On April 12, 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.The deal, which was made just prior to Facebook's scheduled IPO, cost about a quarter of Facebook's cash-on-hand, according to figures documented at the end of 2011. The deal was for a company characterized as having "lots of buzz but no business model", and the price was contrasted with the $35 million Yahoo! paid for Flickr in 2005,a website that has since become among the 50 most popular in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook was "committed to building and growing Instagram independently", in contrast to its past practice. According to multiple reports, the deal netted Systrom $400 million based on his ownership stake in the business.The exact purchase price was $300 million in cash and 23 million shares of stock.

On December 17, 2012, Instagram updated its Terms of Service, granting itself the right—starting on January 16, 2013—to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation.The criticism from privacy advocates, consumers, the National Geographic Society,and celebrities like Kim Kardashian prompted Instagram to issue a statement retracting the controversial terms; regardless, the issue resulted in the loss of a portion of Instagram's user-base, as former users switched to other photo-sharing services, which reported an increase in usage.

In January 2013, it was confirmed that Instagram had asked for photo identification as a form of verification due to unspecified violations.

Following Emily White's appointment to the position of chief operating officer in March 2013, she stated in September 2013 that the company should be ready to begin selling advertising by September 2014 as a way to generate business from a popular entity that had not yet created profit for its parent company.In September 2013, Instagram reaffirmed its commitment to free and open access to its smart-phone app for users.During an interview with Women's Wear Daily (WWD), White cited "the sophistication of cameras on smartphones as one reason for ushering in the transformative change", and she used her observation of the replacement of large cameras with mobile smartphones during a fashion show as an example.On October 3, 2013, Instagram announced that it would be adding advertising to its platform.

On October 22, 2013, during the Nokia World event, held at Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Systrom confirmed the impending release of the official Instagram app for the Windows Phone.On November 21, 2013, the official Instagram Beta for Windows Phone was released to Windows Phone 8 to allow Windows Phone users faster access to Instagram services; although, at the time of release, the app was still under development.

Instagram introduced sponsored post advertising targeting US users in November 2013,and UK users in September 2014.

On December 12, 2013, Instagram added Direct, a feature that allows users to send photos to specific people directly from the app. Instagram's primary intention with the Direct feature is to compete against messaging services, including Snapchat.

On March 11, 2014, Instagram released an updated Android app with performance improvements and a flatter interface. The update was primarily intended to reduce the app's file size and resource usage, and it was optimized for and tested on low-end smartphones sold in emerging markets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Y, which was popular in Brazil at the time.

The company's Global Head of Business and Brand Development—a new position for Instagram—was announced in mid-August 2014. Facebook's former Regional Director James Quarles was assigned the role, which manages Instagram’s revenue strategy, in addition to both the marketing and sales teams. Quarles will report directly to Systrom during a tenure in which he will develop new “monetization products”, as explained by a company representative to the media.

Since the app's launch it had used the Foursquare API to provide named location tagging. In early 2014, after being purchased by Facebook, the company was switched to using Facebook Places.

On October 22, 2015, Instagram launched Boomerang,an app where you shoot a one-second burst of five photos that are turned into a silent video that plays forwards and then reverses in a loop.

During April 2016, Instagram began changing the strictly chronological timeline view to one driven by an algorithm reminiscent of Facebook's.

On May 11, 2016, Instagram updated its app design with thinner icons and a pinker, more abstract logo.

On August 2, 2016, Instagram launched Instagram Stories, a Snapchat-like feature which allows users to take photos, add effects and layers on top of said photos, and add them to said user's Instagram story. Images uploaded to a user's story expire after 24 hours.

In September, 2016, Instagram removed the Photo Maps feature from its mobile apps, claiming that the feature was not widely used on the platform.

On October 13, 2016, Instagram launched a desktop client for the first time on the Windows 10 platform, which can be downloaded via the Windows Store.

On November 21, 2016, Instagram launched live video, which allows users to broadcast live on Instagram, for up to one hour. Live videos on Instagram are not preserved, and are removed from the service once a user is done broadcasting. Instagram also launched disappearing photos and videos for the Instagram Direct feature on the same day, and images and videos sent using this method disappear after a certain amount of time.

Vodafone

Vodafone Group plc is a British multinational telecommunications company, with headquarters in London.Among mobile operator groups globally, Vodafone ranked fifth by revenue and second (behind China Mobile) in the number of connections (435.9 million) as of 2014.

Vodafone owns and operates networks in 26 countries and has partner networks in over 50 additional countries.Its Vodafone Global Enterprise division provides telecommunications and IT services to corporate clients in 150 countries.

Vodafone has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It had a market capitalisation of approximately £89.1 billion as of 6 July 2012, the third-largest of any company listed on the London Stock Exchange.It has a secondary listing on NASDAQ

YouTube

YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion.YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

The site allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favorites, report and comment on videos, and it makes use of WebM, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program.Unregistered users can only watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments to videos. Videos deemed potentially offensive are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old. In December 2016, the website was ranked as the second most popular site by Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis company.

YouTube earns advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. The vast majority of its videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals, as well as YouTube Red, a subscription service offering ad-free access to the website and access to exclusive content made in partnership with existing users.

HTC

HTC Corporation, stylised as hтc, is a Taiwanese consumer electronics company headquartered in Xindian District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Founded in 1997, HTC began as an original design manufacturer and original equipment manufacturer, designing and manufacturing devices such as mobile phones and tablets.

After initially making smartphones based mostly on Windows Mobile, HTC became a co-founding member of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of handset manufacturers and mobile network operators dedicated to the development of the Android mobile operating system.The HTC Dream, marketed by T-Mobile in many countries as the T-Mobile G1, was the first phone on the market to run Android. HTC later shifted to marketing its own devices, including the HTC One series. In 2011, HTC ranked as the 98th top brand on Interbrand's Best Global Brands report.A September 2013 media report stated that HTC's share of the global smartphone market is less than 3 percent. While rising back to 7.2 percent in April 2015 due to its strong sales of recent devices, its stock price had fallen by 90 percent since 2011, and the company experienced consecutive net losses.

In 2016, HTC expanded into virtual reality hardware with the release of HTC Vive.

Smartphone

A smartphone is a mobile phone (also known as cell phones or cell mobiles) with an advanced mobile operating system that combines features of a personal computer operating system with other features useful for mobile or handheld use.Smartphones, which are usually pocket-sized, typically combine the features of a mobile phone, such as the abilities to place and receive voice calls and create and receive text messages, with those of other popular digital mobile devices like personal digital assistants (PDAs), such as an event calendar, media player, video games, GPS navigation, digital camera and digital video camera. Smartphones can access the Internet and can run a variety of third-party software components ("apps" from Google Play, Apple App Store, etc). They typically have a color display with a graphical user interface that covers more than 76% of the front surface. The display is almost always a touchscreen and sometimes additionally a touch-enabled keyboard like the Priv/Passport BlackBerrys, which enables the user to use a virtual keyboard to type words and numbers and press onscreen icons to activate "app" features.

In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country.Smartphones became widespread in the late 2000s. Most of those produced from 2012 onward have high-speed mobile broadband 4G LTE, motion sensors, and mobile payment features. In the third quarter of 2012, one billion smartphones were in use worldwide. Global smartphone sales surpassed the sales figures for regular cell phones in early 2013.

10 Upcoming Technology That May Change The World

We have seen great leaps in digital technology in past the past five years.Smartphones, cloud computing, multi-touch tablets, these are all innovations that revolutionized the way we live and work. However, believe it or not, we are just getting started. Technology will get even better. In the future, we could live like how people in science fiction movies did.Today’s post is about 10 upcoming, real-life products that is set to revolutionize the world as we know it. Get ready to control the desktop and slice Ninja fruits with your eyes. Get ready to print your own creative physical product. Get ready to dive into the virtual world, and interact with them. Come unfold the future with us.

1. Google Glass

Augmented Reality has already gotten into our life in the forms of simulated experiment and education app, but Google is taking it several steps higher with Google Glass. Theoretically, with Google Glass, you are able to view social media feeds, text, Google Maps, as well as navigate with GPS and take photos. You will also get the latest updates while you are on the ground.

2. Form 1

Just as the term suggests, 3D printing is the technology that could forge your digital design into a solid real-life product. It’s nothing new for the advanced mechanical industry, but a personal 3D printer is definitely a revolutionary idea.

Everybody can create their own physical product based on their custom design, and no approval needed from any giant manufacturer! Even the James Bond’s Aston Martin which was crashed in the movie was a 3D printed product!

Form 1 is one such personal 3D printer which can be yours at just $2799. It may sound like a high price but to have the luxury of getting producing your own prototypes, that’s a reaonable price.

Imagine a future where every individual professional has the capability to mass produce their own creative physical products without limitation. This is the future where personal productivity and creativity are maximized.

3. Oculus Rift

Virtual Reality gaming is here in the form of Oculus Rift. This history-defining 3D headset lets you mentally feel that you are actually inside a video game. In the Rift’s virtual world, you could turn your head around with ultra-low latency to view the world in high resolution display.

There are premium products in the market that can do the same, but Rift wants you to enjoy the experience at only $300, and the package even comes as a development kit. This is the beginning of the revolution for next-generation gaming.

The timing is perfect as the world is currently bombarded with the virtual reality topic that could also be attributed to Sword Art Online, the anime series featuring the characters playing games in an entirely virtual world. While we’re getting there, it could take a few more years to reach that level of realism. Oculus Rift is our first step.

4. Leap Motion

Multi-touch desktop is a (miserably) failed product due to the fact that hands could get very tired with prolonged use, but Leap Motion wants to challenge this dark area again with a more advanced idea. It lets you control the desktop with fingers, but without touching the screen.

It’s not your typical motion sensor, as Leap Motion allows you to scroll the web page, zoom in the map and photos, sign documentss and even play a first person shooter game with only hand and finger movements. The smooth reaction is the most crucial key point here. More importantly, you can own this future with just $70, a price of a premium PS3 game title!

If this device could completely work with Oculus Rift to simulate a real-time gaming experience, gaming is going to get a major make-over.

5. Eye Tribe

Eye tracking has been actively discussed by technology enthusiasts throughout these years, but it’s really challenging to implement. But Eye Tribe actually did this. They successfully created the technology to allow you to control your tablet, play flight simulator, and even slice fruits in Fruit Ninja only with your eye movements.

It’s basically taking the common eye-tracking technology and combining it with a front-facing camera plus some serious computer-vision algorithm, and voila, fruit slicing done with the eyes! A live demo was done in LeWeb this year and we may actually be able to see it in in action in mobile devices in 2013.

Currently the company is still seeking partnership to bring this sci-fi tech into the consumer market but you and I know that this product is simply too awesome to fail.

6. SmartThings

The current problem that most devices have is that they function as a standalone being, and it require effort for tech competitors to actually partner with each other and build products that can truly connect with each other. SmartThings is here to make your every device, digital or non-digital, connect together and benefit you.

With SmartThings you can get your smoke alarms, humidity, pressure and vibration sensors to detect changes in your house and alert you through your smartphone! Imagine the possibilities with this.

You could track who’s been inside your house, turn on the lights while you’re entering a room, shut windows and doors when you leave the house, all with the help of something that only costs $500! Feel like a tech lord in your castle with this marvel.

7. Firefox OS

iOS and Android are great, but they each have their own rules and policies that certainly inhibit the creative efforts of developers. Mozilla has since decided to build a new mobile operating system from scratch, one that will focus on true openness, freedom and user choice. It’s Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is built on Gonk, Gecko and Gaia software layers – for the rest of us, it means it is built on open source, and it carries web technologies such as HTML5and CSS3.

Developers can create and debut web apps without the blockade of requirements set by app stores, and users could even customize the OS based on their needs. Currently the OS has made its debut on Android-compatible phones, and the impression so far, is great.

You can use the OS to do essential tasks you do on iOS or Android: calling friends, browsing web, taking photos, playing games, they are all possible on Firefox OS, set to rock the smartphone market.

8. Project Fiona

Meet the first generation of the gaming tablet. Razer’s Project Fiona is a serious gaming tablet built for hardcore gaming. Once it’s out, it will be the frontier for the future tablets, as tech companies might want to build their own tablets, dedicated towards gaming, but for now Fiona is the only possible one that will debut in 2013.

This beast features next generation Intel® Core i7 processor geared to render all your favorite PC games, all at the palm of your hands. Crowned as the bestgaming accessories manufacturer, Razer clearly knows how to build user experience straight into the tablet, and that means 3-axis gyro, magnetometer, accelerometer and full-screen user interface supporting multi-touch. My body and soul are ready.

9. Parallella

Parallella is going to change the way that computers are made, and Adapteva offers you chance to join in on this revolution. Simply put, it’s a supercomputer for everyone. Basically, an energy-efficient computer built for processing complex software simultaneously and effectively. Real-time object tracking, holographic heads-up display, speech recognition will become even stronger and smarter with Parallella.

The project has been successfully funded so far, with an estimated delivery date of February 2013. For a mini supercomputer, the price seems really promising since it’s magically $99! It’s not recommended for the non-programmer and non-Linux user, but the kit is loaded with development software to create your personal projects.

I never thought the future of computing could be kick-started with just $99, which is made possible using crowdfunding platforms.

10. Google Driverless Car

I could still remember the day I watch the iRobot as a teen, and being skeptical about my brother’s statement that one day, the driverless car will become reality. And it’s now a reality, made possible by… a search engine company, Google.

While the data source is still a secret recipe, the Google driverless car is powered by artificial intelligence that utilizes the input from the video cameras inside the car, a sensor on the vehicle’s top, and some radar and position sensors attached to different positions of the car. Sounds like a lot of effort to mimic the human intelligence in a car, but so far the system has successfully driven 1609 kilometres without human commands!

“You can count on one hand the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this.” Google co-founder, Sergey Brin said. However, innovation is an achievement, consumerization is the headache, as Google currently face the challenge to forge the system into an affordable gem that every worker with an average salary could benefit from.