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Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality, experiencing a parallel world altogether

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We, especially as kids dreamt of exploring so many strange places. The scene from those video games, space movies and especially the animated world in kid’s television shows fascinated us. Back then, we did know very little about animation and boons of technology. But, eventually we grew up and so did science. Have you ever thought, if a Virtual Reality world can be formed in a desktop screen then why not around us? Because every video games, animated movies are based on the manipulation of visual and auditory sensors.

This gave rise to the term ‘Virtual Reality’ where one can be virtually present in a different world and interact. The work on the acreage of virtual reality started a long time ago. The concept of virtual or artificial reality was introduced in the early 1900s. But, everything was proposed in the form of theory or an artistic form. It was all a perspective back then. The real man who is behind converting this literature to true visual illustrations is Jaron Lanier. He is a world-famous computer scientist along with being a man who admires art in the form of music.

What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual Reality can be solely described as visual illustrations along with the auditory system. The main feature of virtual reality is audio and video feedback systems. Today, it can be best described using virtual reality headsets along with a head-mounted display. Once you put it on, it gives an experience of a real-world with 3-D animations where you can walk and interact with other creatures. A virtual reality environment can also be made using large screens. It is often shown in movies that an entire room is converted to a different environment where the illustrations are reflected on those screens.

Virtual Reality has hugely developed in all these years. It has mainly contributed to the gaming industry, education and also in military training. Before Lanier stepped into this domain of technology, some theory and primitive research works were carried out by Morton Heilig (1950), Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull (1968) and David Em (1977).

Researches on how to navigate the virtual world were carried out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1980s. It was in 1985 that Lanier founded a company for virtual reality products and pioneered it.

Jaron Lanier

Born into a Jewish family in 1960, Lanier grew up in New Mexico. He lost his mother in a car accident when he was nine. Lanier didn’t belong to a privileged family and spent his early childhood living in tents. He was a highly brilliant student and hence got enrolled in New Mexico State University at the age of thirteen. Eventually, he started doing a project funded by the National Science Foundation and it introduced him to computer programming.

In 1983, Lanier started working for Atari (an American video game developing company) and later focused more on learning virtual programming language.
In 1985, Lanier finally founded his own company, VPL Research devoted to virtual reality. But, the business failed terribly after a couple of years and he was bankrupted. The company was finally acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

Lanier played his role as chief scientist of Advanced Networks and Services (a non-profit organization), a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Lanier, along with carrying out his research, nurtured his artistic part as well. He is a visiting artist at New York University.

Virtual Reality in the 21st century

A lot of development took place after Lanier introduced to the world of virtual reality. Many video game companies like Sega introduced VR headsets for their game series. In 2007, Google added a new feature, Street View in their maps which gave a panoramic visual effect. In 2010, the prototype of Oculus Rift was created which came with a new feature of rotational tracking. It was the first of its kind in the market which was later acquired by Facebook for $3 billion.

In 2013, Valve Corporation introduced new VR products in the market that provided a smear-free and lag-free display. In the next year, Sony launched VR headsets for Play Station 4. Within the next couple of years, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Google, Sony etc grabbed the VR market. Research is still ongoing on how to make a better user interface, more viable, 360-degree interactive photography, better motion controllers etc.

Counter strike

Counter-strike, celebrating 20-years of video shooter games

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The teenage days are sorely missed when we sat for hours in front of the desktop and played video games. Our generation surely had a craze for video games over today’s obsession with social media. Over the past decade, the world of gaming has gone through a lot of changes. But, there are still some games that bring back the nostalgia among us.

Counter-Strike celebrated its video gaming twenty years anniversary this year. The series was first launched in 1999 only for Windows OS. The first game was created when a couple of university students brainstormed to create something unique. The series of these shooter video games are very popular among the kids. The major developers of Counter-Strike are Minh Le and Jess Cliffe.

Minh Le

Born into a family in Vietnam, Le immigrated to Canada at a very young age. He went to Simon Fraser University and acquired a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Le showed interest in software development, 3-D animation, graphic designing and gradually delved into the gaming world.

He created his first mod, NAVY SEALs in 1996 followed by Action Quake 2. While developing Action Quake, Le came across Cliffe and got the idea of Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike was developed as a mod for Half-Life and the beta version was first released in June 1996.

Jess Cliffe

Cliffe completed his education from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a reputed gaming website designer and gained popularity after co-creating Counter-Strike. In 1997, Cliffe designed a gaming website called Jedi Knight Multiplayer Addon Group. After a year, Cliffe started working on the website for Action Quake 2 and came in touch with Le. Eventually, Cliffe and Le became a team and worked hard to launch Counter-Strike.

Within a year, after launching the fourth beta version of the game, Counter-Strike was acquired by Valve Corporation. Valve Corporation is the owner of Half-Life. Along with buying the game, they hired the two developers as well.

History of Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike is all about first-person shooting games and over these twenty years the uniqueness is still conserved. The game has powerful weapons, that is, guns creating a more attracted animation for the shooters. Counter-Strike game provided a more realistic gaming environment and implemented specific patterns for shooting. Le, in one of his interview, said that it is more about the code of the game than Photoshop.

The developers didn’t have anything specific in mind to where to take Counter-Strike. That is basically the advantage of open source and hence welcoming new concepts and ideas. Both the developers wanted to make a strong game community and hence none of the levels was pre-decided. Gamers from the community built them, submitted them and the best one would be picked up as the new version.

New Versions

After Valve acquired Counter-Strike, the game was re-launched in 2000. Since then a lot of new versions have been released. Soon after this release, Counter-Strike: Source was released which used the source engine of Half-Life 2. A lot of modifications came into play which to some extent created a gap between the two generation players.

To cool down the virtually heated up situation for bringing modifications, both Le and Cliffe tried hard to bring balance. They made some changes related to weapons in the games but the strategy backfired terribly. After a few months of experimentation, the developers had to remove DWP (Dynamic Weapon Pricing) from the games.

After a huge gap of four years, a new version of the game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released. And, this time it was released for Windows, PlayStation 3, OS X and Xbox 360.

The current era

The community of Counter-Strike is growing bigger and stronger every day. Currently, the community consists of around 600,000 players and it’s definitely not going down in the near future. With modifications being added continuously, competitive gaming is also getting more popular. In 2011, the Counter-Strike series sold around 25 million copies of the game.

SeparatorThe community of Counter-Strike is growing bigger and stronger every day. Currently, the community consists of around 600,000 players and it’s definitely not going down in the near future. With modifications being added continuously, competitive gaming is also getting more popular. In 2011, the Counter-Strike series sold around 25 million copies of the game.

Witnessing the popularity of competitive gaming, some organizations like IEM (Intel Extreme Masters) started hosting big Counter-Strike tournaments. And, big means literally a generous amount of prize money like $130,000. These tournaments attracted more gamers and Counter-Strike finally went outside the European markets. With this remarkable amount of success, the future of Counter-Strike is truly unpredictable.

cleverbot

Story of Cleverbot and Rollo Carpenter

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Google Assistant surely helps us by setting reminders, sending texts, playing music and calling people on behalf of us. These are just a few things from the ample of benefits it provides. But, have you ever experienced a friendly conversation with a machine without realizing that you are talking to one.

Almost every smartphone users at least once tried to have a funny conversation with either Google or Siri, but after some point, it becomes evident that we are talking to a human-built program. The replies from the bot are not always friendly and not how humans speak to each other. This is where the true power of AI was unleashed by Rollo Carpenter when he came up with Cleverbot.

Cleverbot, a web application to serve the purpose of a chatbox was created by Rollo Carpenter. The application went public in 1997 and even passed the Turing Test with 59.3% accuracy while the minimum criterion is 30%. The application is developed entirely based on AI algorithm. It was built to serve the humans by chatting where the latter one won’t feel like it is speaking to a bot at all.

Rollo Carpenter

Having played the role of managing director for more than one company, Rollo Carpenter did some excellent works throughout his career. Born in 1965, Carpenter started his career as the co-founder of Bizfinity Inc. Through the years, Carpenter vehemently experimented with AI and ML and came up with the idea of developing a chatbox.

His main motive was to build AI-based software that can learn from the conversations carried out with humans and reply accordingly. When Cleverbot was developed, it initially conversed with Carpenter and his associates and it turned out to be very friendly and entertaining.

In 2005 and 2006, Carpenter acquired the first position in Loebner Prize Contest for his AI-based software. In October 2005, Carpenter joined Icogno Ltd as its Managing Director followed by acquiring the same position in Existor Ltd after three years. Carpenter launched his project, Jabberwacky to create AI-based entertaining chatbox and hence Cleverbot was launched as one of its product.

About Jabberwacky

Carpenter started working on Jabberwacky since 1986. He launched Cleverbot in 1997 as a product of his project, Jabberwacky. Today, Cleverbot is nothing but the updated and modified version of Jabberwacky in the market.

Carpenter started programming for a very young age and became quite impressive in managing databases at an early teen. The idea of programming a chatbot clicked in his mind when he was working with these hardcore programming languages.

The first strategy that came into his mind was building a feedback system for the bot which will help it learn from the humans. His main goal was to make the chatbot learn from humans today and implement on them tomorrow.

When Jabberwacky went online in 1997, the bot received almost 20,000 entries and carried out different conversations with every individual. In 2003, Jabberwacky crossed more than a million interactions which turned up to 150 million in 2019.

The most unique feature of this chatbot is its model is based on AI. When you speak to Google Assistant you might notice that after a certain point of time it keeps repeating a particle sequence. This elaborates the fact that any normal chatbot has a particular pattern easily distinguishable by humans. But, Jabberwacky has proved that its borrowed intelligence makes it different from most of them.

Jabberwacky’s new version, Cleverbot performed so well in convincing humans that they are not talking to a program that it passed the Turing Test with a whopping 59%.

Cleverbot

After the Cleverbot went online and passed the Turing Test a lot of modifications have been done to it. The test was conducted by IIT Guwahati on 3rd September 2011. It was declared a success when it entertained and fooled around 59.3% of participants to be exact. Since Cleverbot saved the responses from previous human interactions it improvised itself every day.

Today, Cleverbot can easily carry out around 7 million interactions at a time efficiently. Since 2014 Cleverbot has started using GPU techniques. The entire team is working on launching a new version of the chatbox implementing machine learning. Carpenter, in an interview, said that the data accumulated is more important for the software since the stored data helps it responds differently.

Broadcom

Broadcom, Success story of the communication industry

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Semiconductors are an integral part of the broadband communication industry. Products like integrated circuits, wireless networks, cable modems are in huge demand today because of the rising efficient in existing technology and making it accessible to every corner of the world.

Pioneering in the world of communication engineering, Henry Samueli along with Henry Nicholas co-founded Broadcom Corporation in 1991. The company was built mainly to produce semiconductors and products that can contribute to today’s communication system.

The company came under the acquisition of Avago Technologies in 2016 and is currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. Headquartered in Irvine, California; Broadcom has made more than twenty big acquisitions till date and listed as Gartner’s Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors.

Henry Samueli

Samueli’s Jewish parents moved to the United States with nothing but lucky enough to survive in the Nazi terror land. The family ran a liquor store in Los Angeles and this is where Samueli grew up. He went to Bancroft Junior High School followed by Fairfax High School.

His great interest in electronics started growing inside him since he was a child and he built a radio all by himself in junior school. He went to UCLA School of Engineering to complete his graduation and passed with all the three successive degrees from Bachelor’s to PhD from this very place.

Samueli studied Electrical Engineering and after completing his PhD he joined UCLA as a professor. This is where he met Henry Nicholas who was a PhD scholar at UCLA. Apart from being an engineer, Samueli is also a great philanthropist who is the founding director of the Samueli Foundation, a non-profit organization. Recently, Samueli has donated $100 million for the development of UCLA.

Henry Nicholas

Nicholas was born to a prosperous family in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was four years old, his parents got divorced and he moved to Los Angeles, California with his mother and sister. Nicholas did his junior years schooling from Malibu and later went to Santa Monica High School.

Nicholas pursued his degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA and before that went to the United States Air Force Academy. Nicholas received his Master’s degree from UCLA as well and got admitted for the PhD program under Samueli.

After completing his PhD, Nicholas moved to Cerritos and joined PairGain Technologies as Director of Microelectronics. But he left the company soon and joined his business partner who was also his advisor to co-found Broadcom.

History of Broadcom

In the beginning, both Samueli and Nicholas invested $5,000 from their pocket to start this business. They didn’t have a proper workplace and temporarily worked at Nicholas’s beach house. It’s a good thing one of them was a bit richer. After a year of rigorous hard work, both of them were finally able to rent an office in Westwood.

This was Broadcom Corporation’s first office which was shifted to Irvine three years later. The company went public in 1998 and made a kick-off start with serving more than fifteen countries around the world.

In 2009, the company was listed in the Fortune 500 and by this time Broadcom hired more than 11,000 employers. At the end of 2013, the company’s annual revenue summed up to a massive figure of $8.01 billion with its ranking coming down to 327 in Fortune 500.

Acquisitions

Broadcom has got a never-ending list of acquisitions starting from 1999. The company mainly bought other small semiconductor companies and networking companies like Maverick Networks, Epigram, Altocom, BlueSteel Networks and many more. Some biggest acquisitions before the company was sold were in 2000 and 2011. The company bought Silicon Spice and NetLogic Microsystems for $1 billion and $3.7 billion respectively.

End of an Era

The company which achieved a great deal of success for more than two decades came under the acquisition of Avago Technologies in 2015. The company was sold for $37 billion with Samueli becoming the CTO of the newly merged company and Nicholas playing the role of strategic advisor. After all the legal works were completed by February 2016, Cypress Semiconductor bought Broadcom’s entire IoT sector in May 2016. The acquisition was made for $550 million.

It was estimated that after the merging, Broadcom Inc. (present parent company) would have an estimated market value of $77 billion.

Broadcom Inc

The company was formerly known as Avago Technologies, that is, from 1961. Tan Hock Eng is the current CEO of the company with more than 15,000 employers to date. According to the records of 2018, the company’s annual revenue is $20.84 billion.

Oneplus

Oneplus, A Company To Outweigh All Its Competitors In Six Years

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Well, I admit there is a particular group of people who drools over the products of Apple but did you guys not see how strategically OnePlus became the premium mobile brand around the world. Leaving iOS aside, OnePlus to date has become the best mobile company with Android OS because the founders wanted to improve the existing user experience cost-effectively.

Before OnePlus was launched in 2013, Samsung and Nokia mobiles ruled in the world of Android OS smartphones. But, brands like these faced an unexpected downfall when OnePlus started setting the market on fire with its alluring flagship products.OnePlus was launched in 16th December 2013 by Pete Lau and Carl Pei. The company is based on China and currently, its annual revenue is $1.9 billion.

Pete Lau

Lau passed out from Zhejiang University in 1998 and joined Oppo Electronics. He worked there as a hardware engineer and with time became the director of Oppo’s Blu-ray division. Attaining the peak of his career just started with his promotion to the position of head of marketing of Oppo. Lau was soon named as the Vice President of the company and he was solely responsible for incorporating Android OS in Oppo smartphones. He stepped down from his position and quit Oppo in November 2013.

Carl Pei

Pei went to Stockholm School of Economics to pursue his Bachelor’s degree in Science but he dropped out soon and started working in the smartphone industry. Before he dropped out of college, he started working at Nokia and continued for three months. In 2011, Pei joined Meizu and worked there as a full-time employee. After a year, Pei joined Oppo in 2012 and started working there as an international market manager. Pei worked under Lau and both of them together came up with the idea of OnePlus.

A café conversation

The idea of OnePlus exclusively and solely came out of a coffee table conversation while discussing smartphones and how the user experience can be made better. The founders noticed that most of the population tends to use the iPhone and not Android. The question was why? Aftermarket research and recording the feedbacks of users, they concluded that most of them either have faulty software or the quality is not up to the mark. So, both of them started their new start-up and at the beginning OnePlus only had five employees.

Launch and Success

When the two of them were working on their new project of OnePlus, their main motive was to build a product with a minimal amount of cost and which can provide the best user experience. When they were ready with the product, the strategy of launching was very off-track. They didn’t want to sell the product through conventional retailers and pursued the audience in an only way.

The marketing experts said that the idea might face a strict downfall as the model was based on high priced subscription method. But, the prediction was proved wrong when OnePlus breaking the records of every successful mobile company ever sold 1.5 million OnePlus smartphones in a single year.

The product became famous as the “Flagship killer” and the magnitude of success was enormous. Lau expected 50,000 units sell and it crossed millions. The first product was OnePlus One and it was first marketed outside China in 2015. OnePlus expanded to South-East Asia after they partnered with Lazada Indonesia.

The next product of OnePlus, OnePlus 2 was released in July 2015. The next year company lifted the invite-only system on OnePlus 3 followed by making it available in the markets of China, North America, the European Union and also in Amazon India.

The company’s profit became thrice in the financial year 2017-2018 and the annual revenue almost increased to five times within a single year. The company’s goal turned out to become a huge success as most of the users rated their smartphones 4 stars or more.

In early 2018, the launch of OnePlus 6 broke into the market like a plague and even outran the market for Apple iPhone. Within the next half of the year, OnePlus 6 became the highest selling flagship product of the company.

India majorly contributes to the success of OnePlus products as Lau (CEO of OnePLus) said in an interview that India is accountable for OnePlus’s 2018s global revenue of $1.4 billion.

Success Story of Xender, Sharing Files Without The Expense of Mobile Data

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India is surely a developing country but still, the internet has not reached every corner of the nation. Even today, it is a part of luxury for some people to be able to use mobile data. Now, mobile phone users without the internet can transfer a file through Bluetooth easily but it also has limitations.

When sending files from an Android OS to iOS, it is not possible via Bluetooth. In this kind of crisis, a software that can help users to transfer files from one device to another without using data and also allowing transfer between different OS is absolutely a blessing.

And to meet these needs of the people, Xender was developed in 2011. Xender is a software written in languages Java and Objective-C which helps connect two smart devices and transfer files without turning on data. The application is currently available on four operating systems, Windows, iOS, Android and Tizen.

  • Xender Founder Peter Jiang

A Chinese Start-up

Xender was developed in 2011 by three developers, namely, S.S Chandwara, Lokesh Narwani, and Tingu Urf Tikiya and was founded by Peter Jiang. Apart from the main advantage of application being running without mobile data, Xender connected with computers as well. And, in the case of computers, Xender was made available for both Windows and MAC.

The main feature of the application was the personal hotspot feature that also assured high speed for the file transfer system. With Xender launching in the market, the two main problems often faced by the users were resolved. First, people didn’t need to think about the cost of data anymore and second, file transfer was made possible between dissimilar operating systems.

The obstacles

After a couple of years of launching Xender, the main competitors of the application were Zapya and SHAREit. Though Xender managed to bag 200 million users by 2015, the stock market of China slowed down during these years. The biggest impact of this sudden change in the economy of the Chinese market was suffered by the tech start-ups as they were unable to find suitable investors. Raising funds became a living nightmare for the company but they didn’t stop looking for investors.

But, after many struggles, this four-year-old start-up raised a good amount of undisclosed funding from angel investors, Linear Venture and investors of WeChat.

Expansion of the market

Xender has been launched in more than 22 countries by now but most of its active users are from Mexico, Brazil, and India. One of the biggest markets for Xender is India given those big companies like Micromax pre-install the application before selling it to the customers. India is Xender’s biggest oversea success and the largest market after China itself. The company is expected to grow exponentially as the production of smartphones is also increasing over the years.

Xender in India

By 2016, Xender announced that it has hit a 50 percent share in the market of India and along with that revealed the growth rate of users, that is, 100 percent. Xender witnessed around 170 million active users of the application blooming in the Indian market. Xender reached 500 million global users by this year and Jiang announced that their goal was to reach 800 million by the next couple of years.

The main users of Xender were from the expected metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi. But, the application was also gaining popularity in the northern parts of India especially in the areas where internet connections were not so strong. After the next couple of years, Xender took a gigantic step by coming into a partnership with SONY India for MovieChain Project.

An offline distribution system for movies was a huge change in the business model as compared to the conventional way. But, this sudden change would have definitely increased the Indian Xender user base as transferring movies through mobile terminals without turning on data definitely sounds advantageous in every way.

Jiang, after successfully starting a joint venture with SONY India announced that he plans to expand his partnership with major movie studios around the globe and explore new ways to expand the business. By this time, Xender was used in more than 190 countries with its availability in more than thirty languages.