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.
Maybe it is an
attempt to eliminate the need for more manpower or maybe to increase
the work efficiency, but Amazon is trying to get robots to its work
field. The company has been testing its new blue coloured robots for
a few months now. After making its new little delivery scouts stroll
in the streets of Seattle (Amazon’s headquarter city), the company
has started the tests for the same on the roads of California, now.
The little robots have been named the “Adora-bots”, which has got “Prime” imprinted over them. The robots will be roaming around the city and deliver the packages to Amazon customers.
The little delivery robots from Amazon are blue and have got six wheels. It uses batteries for power and moves at walking speed. In the past few months, the robots have been trained in a way that they get to know the maps of the city better, and for that, Amazon has used the 3D maps. It includes cameras and the ultrasonic sensors, which makes this robot capable of identifying any sort of obstacles on its way.
Image Source: hindustantimes.com
The company will be
randomly choosing on who gets the delivery by these new robots,
depending on the size and cost of the package as well as the place
where it has to be delivered. The timings for the delivery for these
robots will be only in the day time, and that too, between Monday to
Friday.
Also, the robots
will be under the surveillance of human scouts during the delivery,
which the company has named as the “Amazon Scout Ambassadors”.
They will accompany the robots to get it out of any kind of trouble
and will also be answering the questions of the customers during the
delivery.
The company has been bringing the robotics technology to its almost every operation to automate all the processes and increase the efficiency of its employees. Earlier, Amazon had introduced a collection of sorting robots in its warehouse, and before that, it tested delivering items using drones.
Amazon started the working on the Adora-bots in January 2019, and since then it has tested a bunch of six robots in the Seattle and Washington’s Snohomish County. The company undertook the tests in the daylight and in a different type of weather conditions to check its capabilities. Soon, the company may test the robots in other parts of the country as well.
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.
There were times when production cost to create a TV program was way higher than it would earn at the end. This was because of the high price equipment that the film and TV series maker would pay for buying or renting them. At that time, buying these camera equipment used to cost over a million-dollar and renting them was not less than a thousand dollar per hour. But being an engineer himself, Grant Petty, founder of Blackmagic Design, knew that the cost the vendors are putting on these equipments are way higher than their actual cost. So he concluded that he needs to do something to change the way everything worked in the TV industry.
Early Life
Grant Petty is an
engineer and entrepreneur from Australia, who initially worked in the
TV industry as an engineer. As a kid, he lived in government quarters
with his family. The financial condition of the family was not that
good.
When he was in high school, he started working with a local TV studio, with the help of a grant his school had received from the government. At the studio, he got to operate two PCs at the same time, and hence, he got the opportunity to learn to code. He kept himself busy in learning the basics of programming, and eventually, grew immense interest in coding.
Image Source: buildingaunicorn.com
In late 1991, Petty moved to Singapore to work at VHQ Singapore. It was the biggest firm that provided digital facility products to filmmaker and people from the TV industry. The equipment the company sold used to cost a fortune at times. After working for a while in the TV industry, he found out that technology in the industry was over-priced. The vendors were taking advantage of the fact that the creators are not the coders, and do not know much about the technology.
The Turning Point
In 1992, his roommate, Peter, bought a scanner for his Mac Duo Dock computer. The scanner came with an image editing software application named Adobe Photoshop, and that was a kind of turning point of Petty’s life. He was amazed to see the various useful tools that photoshop provided. The software was able to beat his company’s $70000 PaintBox.
Photoshop was for
the design industry but was able to do much TV-related stuff as well.
This led Petty to explore the software even deeper. He even bought
other design software to learn more about the design industry. He
pitched the idea of using the design software in place of film-making
software. Nobody took an interest in his idea. He realised that there
was no market for such software in Singapore, so he moved to
Melbourne and started working with another company.
Petty decided to establish a new industry that would transfer the control into the hands of the creators. But deciding was not enough. To change the industry, he needed to produce the products himself, so that he could cut the production cost. So he along with his roommate Peter started working on a product. He now wanted to connect design with TV.
Founding Blackmagic Design
In 2001, Petty
founded Blackmagic Designs and launched the first product, a capture
card for macOS, named DeckLink in 2002. The card was first to offer
uncompressed 10-bit video, and for its uniqueness, 163 units were
sold in the very first month. He had started the production with his
own money, so the sale of so many units helped him with further
production. He even had to live on rice for a week as he was out of
money and he had to pay for the supplies.
Soon, the company added support for Windows to the card, and also included colour correction features to it. It also included support for Adobe Premiere Pro and Microsoft DirectShow. This way, the product started becoming more popular.
By 2005, the company
had launched other products as well. The main highlights of the new
product series were the Multibridge family of PCIe bi-directional
converters and the FrameLink family of DPX-based software. The next
year, the company launched the Blackmagic On-Air television
production software, which still is one of the world’s most
advanced live production switcher control software. The ATEM
Television Studio includes the support for both Mac or Windows.
The company
announced its first Cinema Camera in 2012. With the passing time, the
company also started to grow. At the time, Petty launched his
company, only one or two high-end production studios were in
Melbourne. With the growth of Blackmagic Design, 80 per cent of the
production houses started using its products.
In 2018, Blackmagic Design joined its hands with Apple and created the Blackmagic eGPU. The next product that the company released with the partnership was the Blackmagic eGPU Pro. In the same year, Blackmagic and Netflix came into partnership.
The Company Today
Today, the company
has established its offices in four different continents and has also
acquired around six other companies, including Da Vinci Systems,
Echolab, Teranex, Cintel, eyeon Software, and Fairlight. The
company’s major products are Broadcast Hardware, Cinema Cameras,
Production Camera and Editing Software, including Fusion, DaVinci
Resolve, etc.
Petty, with his
determination, finally, completed his mission, as he, with Blackmagic
Design, cut down production hardware and software expenses for the TV
industry by 50 per cent. Today, Blackmagic Design values more than
$300 million.
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.
Uber just had its IPO, and it does not seem that the company is earning the expected profits. The company on Thursday revealed its second quarterly earnings after the IPO and has reported a loss of worth $5.2 billion. Though the earned revenue for the second quarter earned is $3.17 billion, it is still less than the expected revenues, i.e. $3.36 billion.
The
price of Uber’s every share had gone down to $42.98 per share from
its IPO price, i.e. $45, and the company closed the quarter at 9%.
The reported net loss is the biggest loss that the company has ever
gone through.
Recently Lyft also came out with its revenue for the Q2 2019 and also reported a loss of $644 million. Being smaller in size, this loss for the company is equally also huge. If we took out the various expenses, like Uber mentioned, “stock-based compensation expenses for employees”, the two are still at loss, as Uber has lost around a $1.3 billion, which is 30% more than last year. And, the total loss for Lyft is around $197 million.
Image Source: pymnts.com
Uber
has just earned a 14% growth up from its last year’s growth,
whereas, Lyft has reported a 72% more growth compared to its last
year’s growth, i.e. an $867 million.
“While
we will continue to invest aggressively in growth, we also want it to
be healthy growth, and this quarter we made good progress in that
direction,” said the Uber chief financial officer Nelson Chai.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also made a similar statement and said, “We’re very confident that this company, at maturity, can be cash-flow positive.” Dara also said while talking to reporters, “We think that 2019 will be our peak investment year and we think that 2020, 2021, you’ll see losses come down. I think our break-even is something that we can push the company to break even if we really wanted to frankly.”
But
is the company really experiencing any growth? In recent years, the
pace of growth for the company has quite slowed down. Also, it had
fired over 400 employees during the IPO as well. There have been more
losses than profits in the entire journey of Uber, and it makes its
position questionable in front of the investors.
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.
Stock exchange and cryptocurrencies, both have proved to be the most beneficial financial industries, where people can invest and earn. But, it has always been tough for people to understand the whole process and make their investment wisely. Using some of the eCommerce platforms costs a big amount, and most of the time does not help the way it should do. This had always been the pain point, and the 2008 financial crisis also became the reasons for the two U.S. based immigrants, Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, to work on a new platform that would allow users to buy and sell shares free of charge. The platform that they created is Robinhood.
Early Life
Vladimir Tenev was
born in Bulgaria, in 1987. At the time, his father was studying at
the University of Delaware, the U.S. After one year, when Tenev was
four, he moved to the U.S. to live with his parents. He spent most of
his childhood in Virginia, and later, moved to the Bay Area. The
family was quite drawn towards studies, and Tenev himself loved to
study maths and science.
In 2004, Tenev joined Stanford University, where he met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt. Both had opted for physics and maths as their degree’s majors. Bhatt is also an immigrant from India. The two shared a common interest, i.e. maths, that helped in building the bond between the two, stronger.
Image Source: glassdoor.co.in
After graduating from the Standford University, Bhatt joined a finance firm as his first job in San Fransisco, whereas Tenev joined UCLA to complete a PhD in Mathematics. While working at the financial firm, Bhatt realized that there was a great business opportunity in hedge funds.
Entering into Entrepreneurship & Founding Robinhood
So the two started
their first venture, Chronos Research, in 2011 and got a small
apartment in San Fransisco, where they started working on their
project. The business they started offered tools for hedge funds and
banks to build automated trading strategies. While working for their
first joint venture, the famous 2008 financial crisis took place. The
Lehman Brothers went under, and the market got collapsed.
The financial crisis
inspired the two to move to New York City and find a better solution
for share market trading. Their joint venture was the first step for
their new startup Robinhood. Thus, they brought their existing
technology to the retail brokerage market and started Robinhood in
2013.
Being the Millenials, they knew that smartphones will play the prime role for their new ventures, so they worked on different layouts of a mobile app for the platform, and sent it for the regulatory approvals. Before the app, they launched their website, that would do the same work as the app. They wrote “commission-free trading, stop paying up to $10 per trade” on the front page of the app, and worked on a waitlist, that would show people their position among other traders.
The Biggest Turning Point
The waitlist got Robinhood a mention in the Hacker News, that too at third after news on China moon mission and Google in a single day. The specifying in Hacker News got the company its first maximum traffic. After one day, Robinhood had its press lunch, following which, the platform got 10,000 signups, and in the next week, the signup reached 50,000. The company offered free membership to the users for their sign-ups. It only charged the users with a monthly fee instead of charging a particular fee on every single transaction.
The next task was to get the investors on board. The company raised $3 million in its seed round, led by Index, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, after pitching their startup in front of about 75 investors. Even before the company launched an official app, it had gained over 1 million signups, in the first year of its launch. After a year and a half, the company launched its app in March 2015. The Robinhood app offered the easiest interface for the users, such that it got most of the users under the age of 35.
The app has helped
people to recover 90 per cent of their investment in the trade
market, which is impossible with the traditional method. By the
beginning of 2017, the platform had carried out the transactions of
over $30 billion. In April the same year, the company raised another
$110 million through a funding round led by DST Globa that made the
company value at $1.3 billion.
The next year, on January 25th the company started to trade in cryptocurrency and announced a commission-free waitlist for the users from California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. By the end of the day, the waitlist had over 1,250,000 names registered. In May 2018, Robinhood raised $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global and valued at $5.6 billion.
The Company Today
The company
partnered with the Ohio-based Sutton Bank, such that to provide its
users with checking and savings accounts as well as debit cards. The
company raised an additional $200 million in a round of funding in
2019, that has led the company to value between in the $7 billion to
$10 billion.
The company is
registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and
headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Before 2019, the company’s
primary source of revenue was from payment for order flow, but now,
the source of revenue has been changed. The company earns its revenue
from the interest earned on customers’ cash balances and margin
lending.
Currently, the two co-founders are serving the company as the co-CEOs. Tenev was named among ‘30 Under 30’ in 2016, by Forbes. Robinhood became the first financial app to receive an Apple Design Award and was also listed among the top US FinTech startups of 2015 and various other rankings.
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.
Microsoft is one of
the biggest tech company in the world, but it could not make a mark
in the smartphone industry with its Windows phones. But now, the
company has taken a step forward and has partnered with the biggest
Android smartphone manufacturer company, Samsung.
Samsung just hosted its Unpacked event in the New York City, where it launched its Galaxy Note 10, Note 10 Plus, Note 10 5G, Galaxy Book S, and a few other Samsung devices. The Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also attended the event and went on stage to announce the new partnership between the two companies.
The partnership will help Microsoft bundle a few of its apps to the Samsung Note 10 series smartphones. Through one of the features that the companies are combinedly getting to the phone is the mirroring of Androids apps to the Windows 10 systems using Microsoft’s Your Phone app. The users will be able to see their text messages, notifications, and even, the whole screen on their desktop or laptops’ screen by simply connecting the smartphone with a USB-C or USB-A cable. The users then can run all the apps of the phone on the PCs as well as make calls using the Your Phone app.
Image Source: eftm.com
Other than the Your
Phone app, the new Samsung Note 10 series smartphones will also
render support for Microsoft’s OneDrive, Outlook, Microsoft Office,
etc. With OneDrive the users will have an option other than Google
Drive to store their data on the cloud. Also, the support for Outlook
and Microsoft office will provide the users with a better way to
process their documents over their smartphones.
“From calls and
text messages to emails and photos, we’re making these everyday
experiences great and the interactions between all the devices
seamless,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said while on stage, “the
combination of Microsoft intelligent experiences and Samsung’s
powerful, innovative new devices, like the Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy
Book S, make this possible.”
Most likely, the new partnership is entirely targetting on the rival company Apple, that already has got awesome built-in products on its iPhones. The main reason why iPhone users have always been afraid of switching to an Android phone. iPhone has already provided its users with the ability to send and receive text messages and e-mails through their Mac devices, and its productivity suite, iWork, is everything, a corporate user would want for all of their document related works.
But as Samsung has
just joined its hands with Microsoft, to bring similar flexible
features to its series of smartphones, it may be able to encourage
the iPhone users to get Android smartphones.
Though the
partnership between the two companies was big news, the event was
solely to boast about the new Galaxy Note 10 series. The company
talked about all the features that the new smartphones will possess.
The company also revealed the price of the devices and when these
will be available in the market.
The cost of the Galaxy Note 10 in India starts at Rs 69,999, while the starting price for Note 10+ will be Rs 79,999. The smartphones have already made available for pre-orders in the U.S. on selected online retail outlets, including Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, Tata Cliq and Samsung’s online store. The pre-orders in India will start on August 23. The company has also imposed offers like cash backs on the pre-orders.
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.
Age is just a number. It has been proved a lot of times before, and the duo who co-founded Mixer is the most appropriate example of that. Matthew a.k.a. Matt Salsamendi and James Boehm became entrepreneurs at the age of 13 and 15, respectively. Built out of curiosity, the two ended up founding Mixer as Beam in 2016, and again as a teenager, i.e. at the age of 17 and 19. Mixer is a video game live streaming platform that enables people to watch their favourite gamers play and get in whenever the gamers need help to defeat their enemies. Today, Mixer is the part of Microsoft, and Matt and James are the lead member of the Xbox team.
Early Life & Career
Matt is a native of
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he lived with his family. Being a
curious kid, he always played with computers, broke them and
assembled them. In fact, he had build a few computers that resided in
his room. When he was thirteen, he thought of converting those
computers into the server and started providing hosting to gamers on
Minecraft.
James lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and got to meet Matt online at Minecraft through an advertisement he had posted for his hosting service on the platform. James was 15 at that time. The ad made him interested in a new startup, and he contacted Matt. Soon, the two were good friends and talked about a server hosting business. James was ready to help him with marketing and other business stuff, whereas Matt had to do all the hosting related tasks.
Image Source: zimbio.com
Soon, the business
started growing, and they had to move out of Matt’s house to a new
place, a datacenter. As they had already moved out to a new office,
they became the owner of an unnamed company, which they then named as
MCProHosting. The demand was increasing, so was the business. Within
the span of three years, the company valued at $5 million. The
company also became the world’s largest game server provider, hosting
over 600,000 game servers.
In 2014, Matt was in his freshman year at school, and at the same time, was handling a multi-million company. The burden was increasing rapidly, and he was becoming incapable of keeping the balance between his studies and the business. Finally, after discussing with his parents, he decided to drop out of school.
Founding Mixer
Matt and James have been a video lover, ever since they got to know about it. At the time, the online live game streaming field was getting hot. YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch were providing live streaming to the gamers, but there were a few flaws in both platforms.
YouTube did not
offer live chat, and on Twitch, the latency rate for the chat was
quite high. Even though people could watch their favourite gamers
play, despite a chat system, they could not suggest new moves to them
in real-time. This clicked an idea for Matt and James, and they
decided to shift their business from the server hosting to live game
streaming service, with better features.
The two got their
hands on building a website that would allow gamers to live stream,
chat with their viewers in real-time with lowest latency rate, take
their help, and discover other streamers. They started with the alpha
version of the platform and focused on connecting the gamers with
other game communities.
They had started working on the website in 2014 and launched it as Beam on January 5, 2016. Soon, there were over 1,00,000 users on the platform. The co-founders took Beam to the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in May 2016, to participate in the Startup Battlefield competition. Eventually, they won the competition and earned $50,000 in equity-free funding for their startup.
The Big Breakthrough
The winning of the competition could be a kickstart for the company, but only after two months of winning, Microsoft acquired Beam for an undisclosed amount in august 2016. Matt announced the news through a blog post, thanking all the community members that had supported Beam. Matt and James remained the lead of the Beam team and moved to Redmond to work with Microsoft.
The company integrated the platform with Xbox, and then later, with Windows 10. In the next year, the company integrated it into Xbox One along with the 2017 software update. In May, the same year, Beam was rebranded as Mixer. The new software update came with new features as well as a new mobile app.
Matt and James are
consistently working on Mixer, and as of now, there are not as many
users as its rivals like Twitch have. It does not bother the two
co-founders as they believe in steady growth. They know that their
platform is providing better services to the users, so eventually,
those users would end up with Mixer. In fact, Ninja, a famous video
game streamer, announced on 1st August 2019 that he would move from
Twitch to Mixer on the 2nd August. Within four days of the
announcement, Ninja got a million subscribers on Mixer.
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.
