Your Tech Story

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.

Ford Goes Electric with its Utility Vehicles; Plans to Bring 40 Electric Vehicles by 2022

News, Product, Tech News / By

At the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference (2019), the American multinational automaker Ford announced that it’s going to electrify its most popular F-Series pickup trucks. The rising fuel price has encouraged the company to enter into the business of electric vehicles, and it has been working towards the plan for past one year.

Ford f-150
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Last year, Ford had announced that it has the plans of producing 40 electrified vehicles, by 2022, with an investment of over $11 billion. According to the company, it will manufacture 16 fully electrified vehicles and 24 hybrid vehicles. It has already launched an all-electric CUV with 300 miles of range, under the same program. The early versions of the F-series pickup trucks, including the latest F-150, are going to be the hybrid ones. Those hybrid vehicles may have their fully-electrified versions launched in the coming years.

Jim Farley, Ford’s president of global markets, said, “We are going to electrifying the F-Series with battery electric and hybrid, and we are doing the same for Transit. We launched a PHEV version of Transit, and that will be on a journey of electrifying Transit globally.”

Last year, the company had sold millions of the F-series trucks, and its popularity made Ford initiate the experiment with the same. Since it won’t be fully-electric, there is the least scope of failure.

Farley added, “We have the F-Series, the world and America’s best-selling truck. More than a million units were sold last year. F-Series core strength at the end of the day is: There’s a truck for every customer, and we know those customers really, really well. From the F-150 all the way to the F-750. They all matter to us.”

Tesla is the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer and has been giving tough competition to other automotive companies. But it is more inclined towards the production of luxury cars. Although Tesla and Rivian have also come up with their electric trucks, Ford being an oldie and an expert in the manufacturing of heavy motor vehicles, like trucks and utility vehicles, knows how to build a product that will appeal to people from every class.

Netflix Rising Prices for its US Subscribers

News, Tech News / By

The popular streaming service Netflix, on Tuesday, announced that it is going to raise the subscription fees for its new users, starting from the 1st February 20019, and will be doing the same for its existing subscribers after three months. The price rise will be between 13 to 18 per cent of the present plans, which is the highest, in more than two decades of its functioning.

netflix
Image Source: worldtvpc.com

Netflix’s cheapest monthly subscription plan is of $7.99, which now will be $8.99, and the most popular plan of Netflix, streaming HD on two different devices, currently costs $10.99 for a month’s subscription, will be raised to $12.99. Also, the four devices plan, the premium plan for 4K streaming, will be raised from $13.99 to $15.99 per month.

The reason Netflix gave for the rise in the prices is that it has been investing a lot in its original series’. The hike in the subscription plans will help it financially to focus more on the original programming.

“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience,” a representative at Netflix, said.

Currently, more than 58 million people are subscribed to Netflix in the US only, and the last hike it had put on the subscription fee was in 2017. But this time the price rise is way higher, that may attract some criticism. Also, the raised cost may affect Netflix’s new subscribers, and it may face a number of cancellation from its existing users.

In 2011, the company had divided its movie rental service, leading to two subsequent services, one had the movie streaming over the internet, and the other was the DVDs in the mail service. This had caused a lot of criticism, and Netflix lost over 80,000 subscribers at once. At the same time, Netflix’s stock price also had dropped 77 per cent in just four months.

“The Black Mirror”, “Orange Is The New Black”, “Stranger Things”, and now “BirdBox”, Netflix has been providing with unique quality content over the years, and for keeping up with the competition, the company is pushing its limits. Raising the prices will certainly work well for Netflix, but are the users ready to pay that much?

Lexar Unveils World’s First 1TB SDXC Card; Available for Purchase

News, Tech News / By

The leading manufacturer of flash memory products SanDisk announced a few years ago that it would be launching a 1TB SD storage card soon. But the announcement never took a real structure. But yes there are many other companies too, that are working towards the same goal and have been trying to build a product.

Lexar
Image Source: digitalcameraworld.com

On the same league, a company named Lexar has already achieved the task and has launched the world’s first 1TB SD storage card. Noticeably, the company has been in the field of digital media production for more than twenty years, and in 2017, it had announced that it’d be ceasing retail operations that year. But last year in the month of August, it made its come back with many new products.

Now this time, it has brought the product that everyone was eagerly waiting for the 1-terabyte SD card. Lexar has introduced the 1TB 633x SDXC UHS-I, that has a read speed of up to 95MB/s as well as the write speeds of 70MB/s, and records a video at Class 10/V30 speed. The size of the storage the card is providing may seem to be too large, but people who are shooting the 4K and the 8K videos maybe thanking Lexar for this new storage card as those videos eat up space quite quickly.

“Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card,” said Joey Lopez, the company’s senior marketing manager. “Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor.”

Amazingly, the card has just been launched and already has been made available for the purchase. The cost of the SD card is set to be at $500 (Rs. 35,297). The SD card comes with a lifetime warranty, which is quite unimaginable. The company quotes that they have done various tests on the card and it is compatible with 1100 different devices.

Scott Heiferman : Founder of Meetup, A Platform Connecting People in the Real World

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Losing your mother at a young age might be a difficult situation, but when you have five elder siblings to hold on to, you can stay strong when the phase passes. Scott Heiferman considers his five siblings as his five parents other than his father, who guided him well when it came to his life as well as career choices. Even when he decided to work at a McDonald’s restaurant, there was no pressure on him. But the wake of September 11, attracted his attention to a crucial topic, which made him found Meetup.com.

Early Life

Heiferman is the youngest of his four siblings, born in Homewood, Illinois, in 1972. He was still a child when he grew an interest in technology and business. He started his first business when he was just 9, the “Scott’s Slave Service”, which of course was for his family members only, in return he received food and shelter for him. He went to the Flossmoor High School in Homewood and started learning programming languages on his Apple II. He even created a Commodore VIC-20 graphics program. In his teens, he started another business and sold coupon books to earn extra money. The money he earned from his coupon books business, was sufficient to pay for the fees for the first year of his college.

Scott Heiferman
Image Source: medium.com

He joined the University of Iowa, where he first took engineering as majors. But later, he changed his mind and took business studies. During college, he worked as the host of a weekly radio show named Advertorial Infotainment, at the college radio. The show became the first radio program on the internet. Being brought up among people from different fields helped him experimenting with his career choices.

Career

After graduating from college, Heiferman started working at Sony, as Interactive Marketing Frontiersman. After working for one year from 1994 to 1995, he flew to New York. In New York, he started an online ad-agency, named as i-traffic. Soon the company earned lots of profits and grew to 100 employees. The success of the company attracted the interest of Agency.com in it, that, in 1999, acquired i-traffic for $15 million. Heiferman continued working for Agency.com but left just in a year.

He was tired of meeting people from the corporate world, so to take a break from the same and to get in touch with the real world again, he started working at one of the McDonald’s restaurants.

Founding Meetup

At the time he worked in McDonald’s, Heiferman lived near the Twin Towers in New York. The attack of 9/11 made him connect with his neighbours for the very first time. A few days after the attacks, he started reading ‘Bowling Alone’, a book based on interacting with strangers and building trust.

At the same time, being a music lover, he used to go to different music concerts. He even attended the Luna concerts, 20 times, as it was his favourite band. In the beginning, his friends went with him, but later, he started going alone to the concerts. At the concerts, he started noticing people who were coming to the same concerts with him. The meetups with his neighbours and the meeting with the strangers at the concerts led him to think of creating a platform upon which people could meete other people who shared the same interest as them.

Soon in 2002, Heiferman founded Meetup along with five other co-founders. He started the company with a total of 10 employees. At the same time, he also founded another startup named Fotolog. Only in two years, Meetup reached one million users. In 2003, Barak Obama, who was a candidate for the U.S. Senate at that time, had promised to attend any meetup having a hundred supporters. For that Democrat, Howard Dean organised a campaign over Meetup.com and for his surprise more than hundred people had gathered through the website.

In 2005, Heiferman started imposing a fee for running Meetup groups. It was 2009, when the company made its first huge profit, having 32 million members in 182 countries. In 2017, Meetup was acquired by WeWork, Scott Heiferman remaining the CEO of the company, till in 2018, when he stepped down from the post to retain the office of Chairman of the company.

Personal Life

On 13 September 2008, Heiferman got married to Emily Krasnor an officer of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. The couple has two children together.

In 2013, Heiferman was named “Innovator of the Year Under 35” by MIT Technology Review. The book ‘Bowling Alone’ was the game changer for him, and still, the copy of the book is presented to every employee at their joining in the company.

North Launches the New $1,000 Focals Smart Glasses

News, Tech News / By

It was 2013 when Google launched its first pair of smart glasses. The company brought the glasses too soon, as it lacked in the technical factors and was the biggest failure in terms of privacy, battery, looks as well as the functionalities. The company had to discontinue the product and recycle the ones it had already produced. After Google’s smart glasses, many other companies also tried their hands in the same but was not much successful.

focals
Image Source: techspot.com

This time a company named North has put its all efforts to create a similar product, i.e. Focals Smart Glasses, that it introduced at the CES 2019. The smart glasses look just like the normal spectacles, which consists of a touchpad, camera and a hidden projector placed behind the right lens of the glasses.

The UI for the glasses is a circular piece of polygraphic film which projects like a head-up display of a car dashboard. Using the glasses, the user can search, use the navigation, and also book an uber. The glasses also have got the support for voice text and have the inbuilt Alexa. It allows the user to check time and date as well as the weather.

The Focals comes with a Loop, a ring worn on the finger with a tiny four-direction joystick through which the user can control its menu. Also, it can be connected to the Smartphone through the Bluetooth so that the user can check the messages, notification, etc.

Just like the smartwatches, the vocals of the smart glasses are also there to alert the user about the important notifications. The Alexa in the smartphone can communicate with the smart home device and control them. The glasses can be customized according to one’s fit by taking proper measurements. A single pair of glasses will cost a $1000.

Although Google has already failed in the same technology, with the improved battery life, processor and optics, we can expect that North’s Focals may have some good scope in future. Also, Apple has been planning to launch its smart glasses in a few years. So, there may be a good hope for the glasses as to become a regular, but important gadget like any other, in the coming future.

Google Assistant’s Expansion to Reach 1B Devices By the End of January

Google, News, Product, Tech News / By

The CES 2019 is already started, and even before Google’s real product launch in the conference, the company has made news with its announcement about the rolling out of Google Assistant, in more than a billion devices, by the end of January.

Google assistant

The google assistant is an AI assistant that runs on various Android and iOS devices, including the smart speaker, home hub, headphones, TV, smartwatches, etc. As of October 2018, the company introduced the same for the home gadgets and the home appliances such as dishwashers, oven, bulb, etc. According to the reports Google Assistant was already running on more than 500 million devices from 1000 different brands in May last year. And, for the last month, Google reported having over 900 million devices enabled with the Google Assistant.

It has been two years since Google Assistant was launched, in 2016, and following then Google is trying really hard to beat its rivals. In a revelation, Amazon has also reported that it sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices last year, making the competition further tougher for Google.

Google has also made some updates to the Google Assistant, along with the support for 22 new languages. From now on, it will also be available for 66 countries. It means, Google Assistant will be supporting 30 languages in total and will be actively working in 80 different countries.

There has been a significant change in the number of Google Assistant enabled devices since last January when the total number of users was over 400 million. The main reason behind the rising number of Google Assistant users may be the Android smartphones that also run the Google Assistant on them.

Manuel Bronstein, the Vice President of Google Assistant, said, “The biggest footprint right now is on the phones. On Android devices, we have a very, very big footprint.” Google Assistant has played a vital role in the growth of the company. Although the smartphone users may not be using the assistant actively, the home devices from Google are becoming really popular, and adopting the AI for its devices is really paying it off well.