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Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts Is Shutting Down After Nearly 9 years.

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Google Workspace users were transferred to the more modern “Google Chat” software in February, replacing the outdated “Hangouts” feature. Later this year, the company intends to completely phase out older Hangouts and transition all current users to Google Chat. Google indicated in a recent blog post that users of Hangouts on desktop and mobile devices will be encouraged to move to Google Chat before Hangouts is withdrawn in November 2022. Users will be able to export all of their Hangouts data before the platform is retired, and conversation data from the Hangouts platform will be instantly available on Google Chat. After nine years, Google is ending support for its multi-platform instant messaging service. The internet giant is urging users to transition to Google Chat, which will debut in October 2022. Hangouts Chrome extension users will also be invited to switch to Chat on the web or download the Chat web app. Chat in Gmail will also be available to users of Hangouts on Gmail’s web platform beginning next month.

Hangouts, which debuted in 2013, will be discontinued in November of this year, and Google wants users to download all of their data before that time. Although most users’ discussions will be automatically transferred from Hangouts to Chat, the firm nevertheless urges customers “who prefer to save a copy of their Hangouts data to utilize Google Takeout to retrieve their data when Hangouts is no longer available in November” to use Google Takeout.

“Starting today, people using Hangouts on mobile will see an in-app screen asking them to move to Chat in Gmail or the Chat app. Similarly, people who use the Hangouts Chrome extension will be asked to move to Chat on the web or install the Chat web app. In July, people who use Hangouts in Gmail on the web will be upgraded to Chat in Gmail,” according to a blog post by Google.

Source: techzimo.com

Hangouts users will continue to get in-product notifications for at least one month prior to the termination of Hangouts web. Following that, Google Chat web will begin automatically redirecting visitors from the Hangouts web.

Google Hangouts
Image source: cybernews.com

According to Google, users of Hangouts in Gmail on the web will not be prompted to switch to Chat until July. Google said it will tell customers “At least one month” before moving the Hangouts website to Chat. It will remain available on the desktop site until November. If you still use Hangouts, Google should automatically migrate all of your current conversations to Chat. When Hangouts is formally retired in November, the firm had given the chance to download a copy of your data using its Takeout service.

Compared to Hangouts, Google Chat offers a number of new features, including side-by-side editing of Docs, Slides, and Sheets. Additionally, it has a location designated -for cooperation on specific topics called Spaces. Through chats, teams and groups may collaborate on documents, manage projects and files from a single spot, and share ideas.

Additionally, Google is advising users to download their data via Google Takeout, the company’s data exportation service, before Hangouts is discontinued in November. Google is also providing new features like direct calling, establishing in-line threads in Spaces (formerly known as Rooms), viewing and sharing multiple photos, and more to make things interesting and draw users.

“As we take this final step to bring remaining Hangouts users to Chat, we hope users will appreciate our continued investment in making Chat a powerful place to create and collaborate,” google mentioned in the blog.

Source: indiatoday.in
sharechat

ShareChat Raises a $100 Mn in a Twitter Led Funding Round

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After a long struggle, India has also become home to many creative and useful startups, and even the global tech companies agree with that. Following that very fact, Twitter, one of the biggest technology company, just closed the D series funding as the lead for a four years old Indian company ShareChat.

Where Twitter led the funding, major investment brands including TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital took part in the investments, among which a few are the company’s existing investors. With the latest round of funding, the company was able to raise a $100 million, and with that, the company now values at about $650 million. Till now, the company has raised around $224 million.

ShareChat is an Indian social network that allows people to chat in the regional languages. This is the reason why despite tens of popular chat apps, ShareChat has grown to tens of million users in just four years. Twitter also sees the potential in the startup that is why it took the privilege to lead the funding for the company.

sharechat
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

There has been no statement from Sharechat on the matter. But the managing director of Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari said in a statement, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”

Twitter just appointed Manish Maheshwari in April 2019 for its India office after it started facing a decline in its growth in India. After his appointment in Twitter, Maheshwari has said in a statement, “With premium Indian content on the rise in multiple regions across the country, I believe we are scratching the surface of what’s possible with Twitter in India.”

ShareChat supports almost every regional language except English, which has been the unique feature to attract its 60 million users to the platform. And, the company has no plans to change that in the coming future. So investing in ShareChat can be a step forward for the company to expand its limits to different regions, regional languages and people from different background.

discord

Jason Citron : A Video Game Lover and the Founder of the Digital Distribution Platform Discord

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The video game industry is vast and is growing even more through online gaming and live game streaming. Over a decade ago, people could only play games on the desktops or gaming consoles. But now, they can play games online with other gamers as well. While playing, they can even talk to each other in real-time. This is called the real evolution of technology. Earlier, the gamers made the use of other expensive chat apps, like TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Ventrilo to communicate through chat at the time, they played games. But soon, they got their hands on more convenient and a lighter platform, i.e. Discord.

Discord is a VoIP application that Jason Citron, an American developer and entrepreneur, developed for the video gaming community. With Discord, the gamers are capable of sending and receiving texts, images, videos and communicate, while playing a game using the internet in real-time.

Early Life

Jason Citron, the founder and CEO of Discord, had always been a video game lover. His father, and his grandfather, both were businessmen. His first encounter with video games was through one of his childhood friends, who introduced him to NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). Later, when in middle school, in Florida, he opted for computers as one of his subjects in school. One of his friends at school was good at fundamentals of QBASIC and taught him the basics of programming.

Jason Citron
Image Source: vox.com

Inspired by his father, he also aspired to be an entrepreneur. By the time he was 13, he had learned a lot about computers and started teaching the basics of computers to people older than him and charged them a small amount of fee. When he was sixteen, he started part-time freelancing and wrote codes for different companies.

Since, he had always been into gaming and coding, after completing his graduation from the Full Sail University in Florida, he started working for a game company, where he worked on a gaming console in San Rafael. Meanwhile, he moved to a new apartment where he lived with the students of the University of California, Berkeley, where he got to meet Rohan Relan. Rohan’s uncle, Peter, was the owner of an incubator called YouWeb that supported mobile and gaming-focused businesses.

Building Aurora Feint; The First Startup

As Citron was into starting his own business, he met Peter and joined his company as one of the developers. At the incubator, he started working on a new iPhone game and built a company named Aurora Feint along with a fellow developer Danielle Cassley.

With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Jason Citron got the opportunity to build new games that would work with the small screens. He focussed on creating games based on RPG and puzzles. The company launched the first version of Aurora Feint for free to use for iOS during the Christmas in 2008. The game was a success but was not making any revenues. Citron was looking for a better business model but had no clue how to work with newly built iPhones.

After just a few months the game reached one million people, but still, there was nothing that would pay back Citron and his company.

Founding OpenFeint

One day, while discussing with the YouWeb Owner Peter, Citron realised that the iPhone did not have Xbox live in it, but their Aurora Feint 2 did have a similar feature. It was the kind of first asynchronous MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). So they decided to build a separate SDK that other platform could integrate and use.

In February 2009, Citron launched the beta version of the software at TechCrunch, where he got to showcase it in front of hundreds of developers. This way, the software also got hundreds of signups, and thus, he was able to raise the money to produce the next version of the product. The software was free, but the company monetize the sale through revenue sharing, mobile storefronts, and game features.

The company carried out its first round of funding at the end of 2009, which was led by DeNA in Japan and raised $6 million. In the second round of funding, the company raised $5 million. By 2010, the company had more than 10 million users registered on the network. In October 2010, Intel Capital also invested a $3 million in the company. The next year, Japanese company GREE, Inc. acquired OpenFeint for a whopping amount of US$104 million.

The Journey from Hammer and Chisel to Discord

After selling the company, Jason Citron started another startup named Hammer and Chisel, a game development company, that launched its first game named Fates Forever, in 2014. Citron tried to launch the game as the Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), but due to the lack of good communication methods, it could not be commercially successful. This led Cistron to develop a new chat service, that would help people to chat in real-time while playing video games online.

Citron was able to get a sufficient amount of funding from YouWeb, Benchmark capital and Tencent for the development. Finally, he launched the first version of the product in May 2015, with the name Discord. Soon, the platform was famous and was used by the esports, LAN tournament gamers, and by the Twitch.tv streamers. In January 2016, the company received an investment of worth $20 million. In the same year, the growth rate for the software had reached a million users per month. By the end of the year, the software had registered 25 million users worldwide, and in December 2017, it recognised a total 90 million users, subscribed to the platform and raised $50 million by December.

By the end of 2018, the company valued at $2 billion and raised an additional $150 million, in a round of funding, led by Greenoaks Capital. In May 2019, the company announced that it has more than 250 million users across the world, who use the software.

The reason behind the success of Discord has been the consistent hard work of Jason Citron, and the skills, as an entrepreneur he possessed in his genes.