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Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

Tom Preston-Werner : Co-founder of GitHub

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Almost every developer in the world has submitted at least one line of code or checked out for coding solutions on the social coding platform GitHub. GitHub is the largest online community of developers where they share programming code with other programmers to help them or seek help from them, to create better software. GitHub is among the fastest growing startups with having over 28 million users and 57 million repositories. It was founded by Tom Preston-Werner, a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur from America.

Early Life

Tom was born on 28 October 1979, in Dubuque, Iowa, US. He lost his father at an early age. His mother was a teacher and his step-father was an engineer. He did his schooling from Dubuque Senior High School and went to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, to pursue his higher education. During his college, he realised that he is more interested in computer programming than the subjects he was pursuing at college. So after studying for two years in the college, he decided to drop out of the course and focus on learning programming languages.

Career

After leaving the college, Tom started with many small coding projects, one of which was based on flash replacement technique. At that time the websites had a limited set of fonts available for the users. His flash replacement project allowed the users to use any font on any website.

Tom Preston-Werner
Image Source: flickr.com

Later in 2004, he came with a new project named as Gravatar. The concept behind it was to maintain a single avatar for dozens of other services. The project was a success, but, without a business model, it was not paying the way it was supposed to. Finally, in 2007, a company named Automattic acquired Gravatar.

In 2005, Tom moved to San Francisco and started working with Powerset. Eventually, Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008, and, offered Preston-Werner a $300,000 bonus and stock options in the company. But he had already started working on GitHub project, so he declined the offer to focus on it.

Founding GitHub

Tom was always in the favour of documenting the software codes so that other developers can easily understand how the codes exactly work. Being an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture he came across with the idea of an open-source development community. Also, with the bad experience of the business with Gravatar, this time he was ready with a better business architecture for his new project. In 2008, he founded GitHub with his co-founders Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon. He had met Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on one of the developer meet-up in San Francisco. GitHub was a commercial success and gained over 46,000 public repositories, in the initial year of its being online. Tom was appointed as the CEO of the company.

In 2014, Tom resigned from the company after he and his wife were accused of harassment by GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath.

After resigning from GitHub, Tom co-founded Chatterbug and Codestarter. Codestarter is a non-profit organization that donates computers to kid coders. He works as the advisor at Codestarter.

Personal Life

Preston-Werner is married to Theresa Preston-Werner, an anthropologist, known for her involvement in much historical research and social subjects.

Apple’s new “Low Cost” MacBook Launch after 4 Years

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MacBook Air 2018
Image Source: igeeksblog.com

It has been more than three years when Apple had launched its last Mac Book laptop in 2014. Also, the MacBook Air was upgraded with a faster processor last year, remaining the cheapest laptop by Apple. The MacBook Air is the only laptop by Apple, without a high-resolution screen, costing about $1000.

Reportedly, Apple is about to launch a new upgraded version of its MacBook, or it can be the upgraded version of MacBook Air. The launch may be by the end of this year, with the launch of other Apple products including the new iPhones and iPad.

Last year the MacBook sale went down by a large scale as the upgraded MacBook cost higher and could not meet the professional needs of the consumers. Since 2010, it sold the fewest number of its MacBooks in a quarter this year. The other companies like Lenovo and Acer also launched high-end laptops that attracted the customers with their new features.

By looking at the reduced sale of the MacBooks and desktop computers, last year, MacBook was planning to launch the new MacBook at the beginning of the year but got delayed. Later, it was set for June and July of this year, but again due to some production issues, the launch is now delayed for October 2018.

The new Apple laptop is going to be similar to the MacBook Air, but, added with a high-resolution, Retina-version display. The screen will be about 13 inches and will include thinner bezels around it. It will including the 14nm Kaby lake processors from Intel. The new MacBook is expected to be cheaper, that may result in the reduced storage for the basic models, up to 128 GB SSD reduced from 256 GB.

Apple considers its laptop and computer lineup as an important part of their company and will continue its production and sale. For now, Apple has not declared anything officially. But the trusting the sources, we can expect the launch of new MacBook by the fall of this year.

Sean Parker : The Co-founder of Napster

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In the advancement of the tech world, the college dropouts have made their different place with their vision and intelligence. Whether it’s the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell from Dell Technologies or Microsoft’s Bill Gates, they have proven that one’s intelligence and talent cannot be judged with a mere degree. Sean Parker an American entrepreneur and philanthropist have also followed their lead and have discarded the worth of a physical degree by his knowledge.

Early Life

Sean Parker was born on 3 December 1979, to Bruce Parker and Diane Parker in Herndon, Virginia. His father was a U.S. government oceanographer and mother was a TV advertising broker. As a kid, Sean was an avid reader and started learning computer programming from his father on an Atari 800 at an early age of 7. The exposure to programming grew his interest in hacking and at the age of 15, he hacked into the network of a Fortune 500 company. His IP address got tracked by FBI and as a result, being an under-age, he was sentenced to community service.

Sean Parker
Image Source: wikimedia.org

Parker did his High School from Fairfax County, Virginia and Chantilly High School. During his school, he used to spend most of his time in the computer labs learning new programming skills. During his final year of high school, he got an internship at Zynga, Pincus’s Washington D.C. and later, got employed at CIA, while he was still a teen. Until the completion of his school, he was earning enough to be able to decide to become an entrepreneur.

Career

During his teenage, Parker met his future partner Shawn Fanning, and the two bonded with each other by their common interest- Hacking. After a few years, the two launched their startup as a free music file-sharing service Napster. At the time Parker was just 19 and he invested $50000 in their startup. Within the first year of its launch, Napster got millions of users, along with a few lawsuits by recording companies like Recording Industry Association of America. Even with the fastest growth of the company it got shut down in only two years.

In 2002, Sean founded Plaxo, a social networking tool that later got integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Plaxo also became viral in a short span of time, but this time Parker was driven out of his position in Plaxo by its investor over some argument.

Later, in 2004, Parker became familiar with a networking website The Facebook and managed to meet Mark Zuckerberg. After a few months of this meeting, he was appointed as the president of the 5-months old company. Sean played a pivotal role in creating the clean interface and the picture sharing features in Facebook. In 2005, he was arrested from a private party as the police founded cocaine in his rented house. After a few days, he was released from all the allegations, but, this brought a bad impact on the other investors and he had to resign from his post. Even after the resignation and the controversy, he has always been in touch with Mark Zuckerberg unofficially.

Being a music lover and after a bad experience with Napster, he got to know about Spotify and invested the US $15 million in it. Now he is serving as one of the board members of Spotify.

After investing in Spotify, he started a few new ventures like Airtime.com, Brigade and invested in other startups like Willcall, Quantcast, Path, and Knewton with its venture capital The Founders Fund based in San Francisco founded by Peter Thiel.

Donations and Charity

Sean Parker is associated with cancer research donations since 2005 and has created Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, in April 2016, with a grant of $250 million. He has donated $24 million to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford and $5 million grant to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute. His foundation focuses on three areas: Life Sciences, Global Public Health and Civic Engagement.

Parker has got an interest in the politics and has also funded both sides of US political parties and spoke in favour of rich people paying higher texas. He has also been a part of many political campaigns and has supported them financially.

Personal Life

Sean got engaged to Alexandra Lenas, a singer-songwriter and the two got married in 2013. Their wedding was based on lord of rings theme and created news as it cost more than $10 million. The two have a daughter named Winter Victoria Parker and a son named Zephyr Emerson Parker.

He was featured on the cover of the Forbes 400 issue in 2011 and was ranked number 722 in the Forbe’s list of the world’s billionaires in 2016.

Samsung’s $300 Bixby Smart Speaker to be Launched by the End of the Year

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Samsung Galaxy Home Speaker
Image Source: hiconsumption.com

Following the lead of its rivals, Apple, Microsoft and Google, Samsung has announced the launch of its new smart speaker Galaxy Home powered by Bixby. Bixby was released by Samsung last year, which is a voice robot embedded in a few of the smartphones and home appliances of Samsung, which is similar to the Google assistant and Apple’s infamous Siri. The automated smart speaker by Samsung will provide a surround sound and can be controlled manually or by voice commands.

1. Design: Since the announcement of the Galaxy Home speaker there has been a chaos about the look of the speakers. Some have compared it with a witch’s cauldron, a fondue pot and also with a backyard grill. It has a three-legged stand and is equipped with eight far-field microphones, to take the commands from the user. It has full-range speakers and an onboard subwoofer for surround sound, with a sound steering and audio tuning by AKG. The size of the Galaxy Home is considerably space-age and larger than Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa.

2. Cost: As Galaxy Home is competing with its contemporaries Google, Apple and Amazon, that are already are at the higher end of the prices ranging from $250 to $400. The price of Samsung Galaxy Home is yet be announced but is expected to be around $300. Before galaxy Home, Samsung has launched the Alexa-powered Samsung VL350 that cost $250.

Samsung is ready to give a tough competition to its competitors now in the music and speaker industry. Also, it has announced a partnership with Spotify and will add the live music streaming to Galaxy Home. The other features, launch date and the price of the Galaxy Home smart speakers will be announced in its Developer’s conference in the November month of this year, until then we can only guess what it will bring different from other smart speakers.

New Xbox Avatars Rolling Out to Windows 10 Testers

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Xbox Avatars
Image Source: xbox.com

Microsoft has been working on its Xbox avatars for more than a year now and, had announced its launch the last fall. The plan did not work out and the launch got postponed. Also, in the mid of April 2018, the promotional video of the Avatars was leaked that faded away all the suspense.

In June 2018, Microsoft started testing Xbox Avatars. The Avatars were unveiled for the insiders for testing on the Alpha and Alpha Skip Ahead rings. Now, after two months of the unveiling for the insiders, on 16 August, Microsoft has made it available for the Windows 10 testers as well. The testing for the Avatars is done through an app named as Xbox Avatar Editor that is available for download from the Microsoft Store. Also, the Windows 10 testers must be a part of Microsoft’s Xbox Insider program, so that, they can have the full access to all the functions of the Avatars.

The Xbox Avatar Editor is fledged with various new Avatar customization features, like body type options, clothing, props and even fingernails, to customize your Avatar accordingly. By the launch of these new live-Avatars Microsoft is going to add some more dynamic features to make the Avatars look more realistic.

Using the new Xbox Avatars, the users will be able to create a unique representation of themselves through the different options of clothing, appearance, colour, mood etc., according to their personalities, or otherwise. The new Avatars will be integrated into the Xbox One Dashboard and will be displayed on the Gamertag Profiles.

The testing of these Avatars has been going on for two months now, and there has been no announcement of any fixed date on which the Avatars will be launched officially. But according to the sources, the month has been decided and the Avatars will be available for the Xbox users by the October this year.

Google One Launched : Replacing Google Drive?

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Google One
Image Source: techcrunch.com

In May 2018, Google had announced its new cloud storage product Google One and had been working on it for past few months. Finally, it has launched Google One, on the 15 August of this year. The ones, who have already used Google Drive, might know that Google provides you with 15 GB of free storage on Google Drive and after 15 GB, you have to pay for more storage.

Google One is similar to Google Drive and is a paid cloud storage provided for the users all over the world. No! It is not replacing Google Drive, but, Google Drive will be upgraded to Google One after its 15 GB free plan with some added perks for its Consumer.

1) Increased Data Storage: Google has been working on its newly launched Google One for a quite some time now and, has already been updating the Google Drive’s paid user’s subscriptions for the last few months. Google has come with many subscription plans, according to the user’s requirements and, that too at a good price.

The monthly plan of Google One starts with 100 GB of storage for $1.99, followed by 200 GB tier for $2.99, a 2 TB option for $9.99 and the plan ends at 30 TB of storage that will cost $299.99. Interestingly, Google has reduced the price of 2 TB storage by $10, i.e. $9.99 that was the previous price of 1 TB storage. The consumers can subscribe to any of the plans according to their need. Also, the subscription can be shared with five of the family members without paying any extra money and equal storage for all of them.

2) Customer Support: This time Google has also come with a one-tap help button, that is for the live-customer support. Meaning that the Google users can connect with the real experts, for their queries related to any Google product, instead of any AI chatbots. The customer-support will be available 24/7 and, you can contact them via a phone call or through an e-mail.

Right now, Google One is only available in the US. But, it will soon be rolling out for the consumers across other countries too. Also, the G-Suite users with the business account will get no additional benefits and their plans will remain as it is.

Google has come with some other perks for its subscribers and, will offer credits on their purchase on Google Play and Google Express. Also, if the user will search and book the Hotels through Google maps, they can earn good deals on the bookings.

So, now you can share more data like high-resolution pictures, 4K videos, documents with your family and friends with any of the above-mentioned subscription plans. And, if you are not a US citizen, you have to wait for sometime. Google is also working on launching an app for the users, to help them choose for their easy subscription to the different plans. So, hopefully, the app and Google One will be launched together in the other countries soon.