Oculus Connect conference took place in San Jose, California, on Wednesday. The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s latest VR headset, during the event. The VR headset is called the Oculus Quest. Facebook had already unveiled its prototype two years ago that gave a hint of its being similar to the Gear VR pro or the Rift lite.
Now, when it has been showcased, in the yesterday’s event, we found it most similar to the Rift, but without having a PC base. The new Quest is a wireless, independent VR box that lets you move across 4,000 square feet of space. The Oculus Quest is embedded with the inside-out tracking technology, i.e., the headset has its inbuilt movement detection sensors, rather having it on the external bases.
The Quest supports the 6DOF (Six Degrees of Freedom), i.e., the headset can measure the user’s position in 6 different directions, in the virtual environment, with accuracy. It has a 1600×1440 resolution display that makes the experience more realistic.
Along with the Quest headset, Facebook also unveiled the Touch Controllers, a set of controllers. The controllers are similar to the Rift’s handheld motion Touch Controllers and are made compatible with 50 existing Oculus applications.
Facebook also previewed new and more realistic Avatars for the VR developers. The Avatars will be more expressive with their eye movements and lip sync properties. The Oculus Quest is Facebook’s first all-in-one standalone VR system, that doesn’t need any computer-based setup and gives you the freedom to walk around freely. This amazing product will cost around $399 (Rs. 28000) and will come in the market by the spring of next year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone loves free Wi-Fi. Internet giants like Facebook and Google has been pushing for internet penetration around the world for many years.
Facebook started internet.org in 2013 to get about 4.5 billion unconnected people on internet. Since then, the company is moving straight towards its goal of bringing more population online with services like Free Basics and Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi. These programs are designed to provide fast, reliable and affordable internet to people from developing or underdeveloped nations, thus tempting them to at least try the basic online services including entertainment, study material, online booking, e-commerce etc. When it comes to developing nations, India is always there in top few. But even in India, out of 1.3 billion, only around 400 million people are online; says a report from Telecom Regulatory authority of India (TRAI).
Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi comes as a flexible solution to poor connectivity problem of India by taking help from local entrepreneurs in establishing Wi-fi hotspots in their localities. The program started testing with various ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in India way back in 2015 and after 2 years of development, there are in total 700 Express hotspots at service spread over four states- Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujrat and Meghalaya.
Just Few days back, Facebook signed a huge deal with Airtel to plant additional 20,000 hotspots which is going to spread Express Wi-fi’s umbrella over other states in the country. Although 4G network is growing really fast in India, but it will take years to become a mainstream option. Till then, Express Wi-fi will serve the needs of fast and affordable internet without any need of 4G device. Munish Seth, head of connectivity solutions at Facebook, said about country’s connectivity problem.
One can say Wi-fi is the easiest possible way to access high speed internet. You don’t need a 4G sim card, or a LAN connection. Just you and your device supporting Wi-fi feature will do the job. The initiative will also bring new earning medium for local retailers who can resell internet to get a steady income stream. Moreover, Facebook is providing all the necessary software and data analytics free of cost along with giving full control of data prices to the entrepreneur.
“Anyone can access the Express Wi-fi network by signing up with an Express Wi-fi retailer and purchasing a daily, weekly or monthly data pack at a rate set by the local service provider. They will then be able to connect to the Express Wi-fi hotspot, register/ create an account, login and start browsing or use any app on the internet”. Seth further added explaining the whole process of getting internet over Express Wi-fi.
Free Basics was another such initiative from Facebook which didn’t get a green signal from TRAI for violating net neutrality. Hopefully, Express Wi-fi doesn’t face any issues in future and runs smoothly. As of now, besides India, the service is live in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria And Indonesia.
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.
Success is most often linked to age and a good experience. It is generally assumed that one could achieve success only after reaching a certain age but lately, these assumptions are breaking as today youth are coming forward to take control of entrepreneurial world in their hands. Like Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Palmer Luckey, established a company, Oculus VR at the age of 21. He has established the notion that if you are truly interested and dedicated in something, nothing can take it away from you.
Early Interest in Electronics and Technology
Getting success in any field is not an overnight thing. One has to start building up for it from a very early age. Passion for technology was deep seated in Luckey right from his childhood. Although he was home schooled by his mother when he was a child, yet the drift towards electronics and technical world was initiated by then. At the age of 14 he founded a forum called ModRetro which concentrates on modifying vintage game consoles. This forum was made for all the electronic enthusiasts. Despite not gaining any formal training in electronics, he kept on experimenting with various complex electronic objects like lasers, coil guns, Tesla coils etc. His passion for electronics grew more with age and this could be marked by his success in stepping into the gaming world when he made a PC gaming ‘rig’. It costed him a lot of money but he took it as a challenge and went ahead to develop the game with a six-monitor setup.
As he began stepping out of teenage, he found himself very passionate about Virtual Reality. Trying new projects is a costly affair and need a good amount of funding. Luckey, being a self-dependent boy didn’t turn to his parents, friends or relatives for financial help. Rather, his own talent got him all the funding for his new experiments and projects. He repaired and resold damaged iPhones from which he received around $36,000. He also worked as groundskeeper, computer repair technician and youth sailing coach in his free time. His dedication and passion for his work made him build a private collection of more than 50 head-mounted displays.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
His Enthusiasm for VR Led Him to Build Oculus VR
He enrolled himself at California State University and joined a degree course in journalism. However, his love for technical filed did not fade even for a moment. As a result of which he had to drop the course and dedicate his whole time to Virtual Reality. His motive behind establishing the company was to develop a unique head-mounted display which would be highly efficient, low cost, light weight and easily portable. The first prototype of his model was designed by him at the age of 17 in his parents’ garage. This gave a 90 degree featured view and also proved to be a push for his company. From then on he developed a series of such prototypes and kept modifying them as per the need. He intended to sell one of his prototypes which he named as ‘Rift’ on Kickstarter crowdfunding website and for the launch of Rift’s Kickstarter campaign he officially started Oculus VR.
With the establishment of his company, more responsibility piled upon him as he was the sole worker and owner of the company. He did all the paperwork, model making, and client dealings all by himself. But not for a single moment he tried to escape from the hard work and stood up all alone to take his company further in the entrepreneurial world. With time his company got more members and soon he was joined by Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov. Luckey’s prototypes greatly interested Iribe and he agreed to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in the Rift Kickstarter Campaign and later joined in as the CEO of Oculus VR. Anatonov left his job in a company named Scaleform and joined in as chief software architect of the company. The Kickstarter Campaign turned out to be a huge success as its value raised to $2.5 million with an additional funding of $16 million.
Oculus VR Acquisition by Facebook
Facebook never fails to get hold of any great product. When the popularity and success of Oculus VR reached Zuckerberg’s ears, his interest grew more in it. In March 2014 Facebook acquired the company for $3 billion. But Luckey still works at Oculus VR on the technology he developed.
In September 2016, Luckey in support for Trump donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a group against the then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. There was a hate post on Reddit from Luckey’s user id in the name of Hillary Clinton. This brought down his image and also posed much loss for Oculus VR as many clients turned down their deals with the company. Palmer Luckey has been named as most richest entrepreneur (22th) under 40 in America. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth around $700 million.
Aanchal is a freelance writer and has been writing since 2013. She is currently pursuing her masters in English Literature from University of Delhi and received her B.A. (hons.) degree in English Literature from University of Delhi.
She has a great passion for writing poetry. She is also a keen reader of inspirational stories of people who have achieved success through hard work.
Social media has expanded its domain at a very rapid pace in last 5 years. The craze of social networking sites and apps for instant messaging, photos and videos sharing has brought about a revolution in the social life of people. In the list of all such sites and apps, the inception of Instagram has set a milestone. Instagram has made a record breaking impression in the lives of millions of users in a very short span. Its unique features like filters, adding special effects before uploads and hashtags have made it one of the most popular apps on net.
Talking about the success of this app, the heavy toil and dedication of the person behind bringing out such a great idea cannot be overlooked. The journey of Kevin Systrom in building up this app worth $1 billion had been short but endowed with several twists and turns. The interest for computer programming in Systrom had developed right from the days when he attended Middlesex School in Concord and it intensified as he grew up. He graduated from Stanford University in 2006 acquiring a bachelor’s degree in management science and engineering, after which he joined Google as an associate product marketing manager. Dedicating his service to Google for two years, Systrom turned to join a travel recommendation startup named Nextstop.
Image Source: Wikipedia
Dedication to learn
Kevin Systrom was not completely satisfied with his job at Nextstop, as he had a bigger plan in his mind. But he knew it was difficult to proceed further without a training and in-depth knowledge of computer science, thus he gave up his comfort to learn coding. He accomplished the assigned tasks of Nextstop in the office hours while learned to code at nights and on weekends. Indeed it was not easy to manage it altogether yet his inexorable efforts showed ardent result and he came out with an HTML5 prototype which he named as Burbn. The app dealt with the on-going trend of photo sharing and checking-in. Now the only thing dwelling in his mind was to take his idea further and it didn’t take much time as well. It was in March 2010 when Systrom met Baseline Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz at a party and approached them with his prototype. The party came out to be a remarkable event in his life as the two venture capitalists liked his idea and agreed to invest in it. He then quit his job to dedicate all his time and skills to Burbn and within just two weeks he raised $500,000 as seed funding from the two venture capital firms.
Steps towards success with Mike Krieger
The reassessing of Burbn began after Mike Krieger, an acquaintance from Stanford University joined in with Systrom. Now it was the time to give the app, a unique feature so as to make the experience of users different from the other popular apps. The main focus of Systrom right from the beginning was on mobile photos. The duo wanted to make the app very handy, free from the complications of too many features at a time and therefore they took few steps back and stuck to photo sharing. And then they decided to rename the app from Burbn to Instagram. Their incessant efforts and hard work were all directed to make it better by improving the photo-sharing experience of users, fixing the bugs and by passing it through several other tests.
And finally the big day came, eight weeks later Instagram was launched on 6th October, 2010. No wonder, the minds of two gems made this app with such intent care that there were hardly any complaints or issues after the launch. And by the end of the first week it had been downloaded over 100,000 times and reached to one million users by the mid of December.
Acquisition by Facebook
In not more than 4 months after its launch, Instagram with its remarkable features began attracting investors and as a result of which the company value reached around $25 million in February 2011. Seeing its increasing popularity, Jack Dorsey the executive chairman of Twitter approached Kevin Systrom offering an amount of $500 million to acquire the company. But till then Systrom had no intention of giving his dream in other hands and thus he declined the offer.
Insagram made constant progress adding up more polished features and in April 2012 it was released with a new version compatible to the android phones. With this step the app established new records as it was downloaded by more than a million of android users in less than 24 hours. Acknowledging the company’s progress even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder could not resist himself and showed his desire to purchase Instagram. He was aware that Systrom would never agree to leave his hands completely off from the app so, he offered a tempting amount of $1 billion in cash and stock emphasizing on the provision that the company would be free to be independently managed and to this Systrom could not deny.
Hit by criticism
No successful story could be completed without the involvement of scandals and criticism. In December 2012, there were some changes made in its terms and services policy which included the clause of owner’s rights to sell users’ photos to third party without any notification and compensation. As a result of this Instagram was hard hit by criticism and there was a notable drop recorded in the number of users. But the mistake was soon rectified with an apology by Kevin Systrom himself.
Aanchal is a freelance writer and has been writing since 2013. She is currently pursuing her masters in English Literature from University of Delhi and received her B.A. (hons.) degree in English Literature from University of Delhi.
She has a great passion for writing poetry. She is also a keen reader of inspirational stories of people who have achieved success through hard work.
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