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Oculus Slams Competition

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Oculus Rift VR set

Oculus took the controversial decision to impose exclusivity on its VR games library.

Facebook released a software update for Oculus that prevents apps from their rivals to play Rift-exclusive games. The company wants to protect its game library and offer a competitive edge against other competitors like Vive.

Oculus has recently bought several popular games, such as Killing Floor, Giant Cop or Superhot.

The decision was viewed as anti-competitive and impairing the expansion of VR. However, Oculus founder stated that Sony took the same decision with their PlayStation VR and PS4 set.

While in the past, Oculus has removed the copy protection feature from their game library, it is unclear if this time, the company will go back on its decision to protect their games.

Rift is completely dependent on PCs, which are built by several types of manufacturers. Therefore, it cannot block other companies. It was generally seen that the PC market was the one that imposed conditions on VR makers.

As Oculus cannot create itself a PC, it tries to implement a separate system inside the PC environment. For instance, it initiated a partnership with PC companies to release the Oculus Home ecosystem, which is dedicated to gamers. Facebook receives 30% from the sale.

As a response, HTC partnered with Steam’s creator Valve to develop their own separate headset and a series of exclusive games. Valve is still interested in Rift users, as it wants to enlarge their user palette.

While the general attitude in the VR market is one of competitiveness mixed with collaboration, and everyone relies on the general market powers to attract new users, Oculus takes a decision of separating itself from everyone else.

Oculus is a very popular VR headset, even if its sales will not reach this year’s top of the industry. Experts estimate that Facebook will sell 3.6 million Rifts this year, while Samsung is expected to sell 5 million. The next two companies in top sales would be Vives and PSVR.

The cheapest VR set comes from Samsung, with a price of only $99. In comparison, Facebook’s Rift comes with $600 per each Rift.

However, none of these VR sets are independent. For example, Samsung will plan to launch a new project called Daydream-ready smartphones in collaboration with Alphabet – the company that owns Google.

While these overlapping partnerships may fragment the market, Oculus decision to impose exclusivity on its VR games could have a negative effect on the VR industry that is not mature enough in order to sustain brands.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Facebook Invites Us to Worldwide Live Video Streaming

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"Live Video Streaming"

Facebook Invites Us to Live Video Streaming Around the World

A new feature has been introduced into Facebook’s news feed: the Live Map, which shows in a very simple and intuitive way all live video streaming around the world. The idea pins up on users’ curiosity and on the need to experience life in a world without boundaries.

The most popular broadcasts are shown in a special column, and they are the main news broadcast channels and some public persons. But aside from that, the world full of its particularities and charms will be available for anyone to see and comment in real time.

The feature displays the map of the world with dots showing live broadcasting. Each broadcast is connected by lines to its viewers and pops up the video when hovered over, so you could see what the topic is and also how popular the broadcast really is.

Technically speaking, this is not an invention. Periscope had seized the opportunity long ago, and its app has the same features as Live Video does on Facebook. Users can watch videos and leave comments on the stream – live comments for live streaming.

The Video Map feature is also an improvement for Facebook’s functionality, as the only way to get live streaming that was available until now was through notifications. The new feature is also expected to boost traffic and involve more users on the social network.

And as live streaming attracts more and more people and users are ten times more prone to leave comments on this type of media, Facebook decided to keep up with the trend and play along in hopes of financial gains and new partnerships.

Live Video info has also been pushed up on the Facebook’s news feed in the last couple of weeks, showing that this “new” feature is not viewed as an experiment but as a whole new direction, both entertaining and educational.

As for its content, a few clicks on the new Video Map had shown a live video streaming of a boy staring at his smartphone, a girl getting a tattoo, or shaky images of a motorcycle ride. Still, in time users will know for sure how to get the best out of the new feature.

Image Source: Pixabay

SMS Support and Multiple Accounts On Facebook Messenger? Checked!

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121113053243-text-messaging-tablet-large

Rumor has it Facebook is about to introduce new features to Messenger and we can hardly wait to try them!

Did anyone say they would love to have access to SMS support and multiple accounts on Facebook Messenger? Checked! It seems like Facebook is reading your mind. The giant company is testing, as we speak, both of these features.

SMS support used to be part of Facebook Messenger until the social media site removed it back in November 2013 because not a lot of people were using it. Another reason why SMS text support was dropped from the platform was that, at the time, Facebook wanted its users to fully adopt its messaging platform. Now, it seems that the company has changed its mind about it especially since it has become a standard for other messaging apps like WhatsApp.

According to The Android Police, some users were recently seeing a new SMS Settings pane that allowed them to use Messenger as an SMS client. When texting a friend in Messenger with the option enabled, the prompt in the text input box would read ‘Write an SMS message.’ The messages sent as SMS texts would then appear as purple bubbles, instead of Messenger’s usual blue, the blog also said.

Some users were seeing a new SMS Settings pane.

Some users were seeing a new SMS Settings pane. The message sent as SMS would then appear as purple bubbles.

The company confirmed about the test which is currently available to only a small number of Android users in USA. A Facebook spokesperson declared:

It’s a really simple way to get, see, and respond to all your SMS messages in just one app.

As if this news wouldn’t be enough, SMS support is not the only brand new change coming to Messenger. Facebook has also announced support for multiple accounts in the app for Android users. The new multiple accounts feature is likely targeted at users who share their devices within the family or friends. This addition will mean that multiple people can log in to Messenger from a single device.

On that note, Messenger for Android has added a new section called ‘Accounts,’ which lets you add and remove accounts on the app. These can also be password-protected so only the account holder can read their messages. Others will only see notifications that a message has been received and not it’s content. Unlike the SMS option, this feature is available around the world.

Regarding the second attribute for Android users, Facebook confirmed the rumors, pointing out the fact that millions of people share phones with their family and friends and until now there hasn’t been an easy way for these people to access their individual Messenger accounts from shared devices.

Even though SMS is still one of the default ways people communicate, Facebook’s only option to siphon value from those messages is to try and route users through its own service. From the looks of it, if it makes its way to a wider audience, these features would mark a significant and aggressive push from Facebook to eclipse SMS and long-time US rival iMessage.

Image Sources: turner.com; aolcdn.com.

Google Is Celebrating 1 Billion Users On Gmail

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Gmail is celebrating 1 billions active users.

                               Gmail is celebrating 1 billion active users.

It was announced earlier today that the big company Google is celebrating 1 billion users on Gmail.

The world’s most valuable publicly traded company, Google, stated record earnings for quarter four of 2015.

It seems like it keeps getting better for Google. The new report contains details regarding  how many people are now using Gmail. And the result of this report is that one billion people now use Gmail on a regular basis.

The company’s CEO Sundar Picha added, in her declaration, that these are monthly active users.

For those who aren’t very familiar with Google’s Gmail history, here are a few things. Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well as via POP3 or IMAP4 protocols.

The company launched their email service back in 2004 and the service was originally available in beta. The service came out of beta in 2009, since they have also launched their new Inbox by Gmail app.

In June 2012, it became the most widely-used web-based email provider in the world, with 425 million active users.

In May 2015, the service had over 900 million users and it took only a few months for it to surpass the billion-mark.

Today, Google is celebrating the impressive record of 1 billion by thanking the users with a funny video on Twitter.

 

During the official statement, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai also noted that the growth of users has been fueled by mobile users.

The data shows it is normal, since Android has more than one billion users and users have been spending more and more time on their smartphones. It is, indeed, a lot easier to check the e-mail everywhere, on-the-go, and it significantly increases the frequency on which the clients use the service.

Apart from Gmail, Google also has many other products with one billion users, including its search service, Chrome, Play, YouTube, Android, and Maps.

A lot of tech companies have begun to break out active users among their various products.

Facebook is famous for this and these days it boasted that Whatsapp crossed the 1 billion monthly active user mark and that a number of its other products, including video, search, Instagram and Messenger, were on the same trajectory. Facebook’s platform has 1.59 billion monthly active users as well.

Talking about other services in the email branch, Hotmail, on the other hand, has around 400 million users. Yahoo is far behind with less than 300 million users.

All in all, compared to other email services these days, the true popularity of Gmail is showcasting.

Image Source: twitter.com; jess3.com.

Facebook And Instagram Are Creating Computer Art Using Your Photos

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The two online companies, Facebook and Instagram are using their customer’s photos to create computer art. What does this mean, exactly? The social networks convert every uploaded photo in an html page using ASCII characters.

ASCII (The American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character-encoding scheme.

These codes represent text in computers, communication equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters, according to Wikipedia.

Now, let’s get back to the art part. Imagine having your Facebook or Instagram photo transformed into a piece of ASCII pixel art. Let’s take this photo of The Mona Lisa, for example.

This is how it originally looks like.

And this is how it would look like, using ASCII art-filter.

Now, this is exactly how Facebook or Instagram photos are transformed.

The good news is that you can test this for yourself, following some easy steps.

On Facebook, you can simply right click on their chosen photo, paste the URL link on the address bar, and add “.html” at the end to receive a colored ASCII copy. Another step or so-called ‘trick’ involves adding “.txt” to the end of the URL, to create a black and white version of a photo.

On Instagram, the process might be more complicated, but bears a definite result.  You have to right click on the image for “view page source”. You could easily look for the URL there if you search (Shortcut: CTRL + F) by keyword “jpg”. If you copy paste the URL and add “.html” should be enough.

And there it is! The simple recipe for anyone who wants to see what their snapshots would have looked like on a 1980s Mac or MS-DOS PC.

It’s good to know that the revelatory discovery came from Mathias Bynens, a web standards enthusiast, who posted about it on his Twitter account. Bynens is the one that also points out the difference of results, depending on the adding of “.html” or “.txt” to the image URL.

Of course that there are some mysteries regarding this new discovery: Why would anyone follow the process, just to see the result of their photo transformed in bits and pieces? Why would Facebook keep this feature hidden to the public as if it’s part of something big?

The answer remains to be find out in the future. However, the artsy ASCII doesn’t look that bad and it can be a way of having fun, when one gets too bored and wants to see how their photos would look like with a touch of this magic.

Image Sources: dizayntablo.com/; mkweb.bcgsc.ca; petapixel.com.

Zuckerberg Is Back and Sales Are Up

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"Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg speaking at a conference"

                        Mark Zuckerberg is now the sixth richest person in the world.

After a paternity leave that lasted only two months, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is back and sales are up and running. According to the latest numbers, Facebook hit in December 2015 935 million users. The social media platform hit 18 billion dollars in sales in the previous year, as opposed to 12 billion dollars in 2014.

Zuckerberg’s company managed to shatter the estimates that Wall Street gave at the beginning of the year by surpassing them with no more than 3.6 billion dollars. This rise is due to the growth of users and the advertising that Facebook promotes on tablet and smartphone screens.

The social media platform now has approximately 935 million users on mobile devices, as of last December. This adds up to the fact that now almost 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from the advertising that Facebook promotes on tablet and smartphone screens. It seems that mobile advertising wasn’t the flaw that everybody thought it is a couple of years ago.

Facebook’s success comes as a hard hit for social media rival Twitter. Even though Mark Zuckerberg did not use the competition’s name when making the sales comparison, which was an act of fair-play on his part, it is pretty obvious that Twitter was the platform in question.

The blow is even harder for the character-limited social media platform since it has been shaken up in the past few weeks by executive turmoil, mass resignation, a stock that is declining rapid and a stagnation in the numbers of the users.

One of the department heads from Twitter actually left the company to work for Facebook’s branch, Instagram. Zuckerberg’s company is really decimating its rivals. And what it doesn’t destroy, it buys, see Instagram for an example.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is back and sales are up, making him the sixth richest person in the world. And he took some time after discussing the company’s roaring numbers to talk about the reason he was absent for two months with the company.

Recently the Zuckerberg family added a new member, Max, his little daughter. Apparently Facebook’s creator and one of the richest people in the world was so impressed by the little bundle that he began thinking about the legacy the world is leaving to its children. He stated that he wants to create a better future for the next generations and he will give away impressive amounts of his fortune for this purpose.

Image source: www.flickr.com

Sleep Is Affected By Social Media

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"woman in bed checking her social media accounts on her smartphone"

The light emitted by our devices can increase brain activity preventing us from falling asleep.

A recent survey that involved 1,700 participants concluded that sleep is affected by social media. It seems that young people are caught in a vicious cycle in which they cannot sleep, therefore, decide to check their social media accounts which leads to insomnia to kick in.

The book on the nightstand was replaced a couple of years ago with a tablet or a smartphone. People, especially the targeted audience of the study which were male and female individuals between the ages of 17 and 32, seem to think that checking their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tinder before going to bed is a good way of relaxing and getting ready to catch up on some missing Zs.

But the latest study shows that sleep is affected by social media and this habit is exactly what’s keeping a lot of people from resting up and look fresh in their morning selfies.

The study in question was conducted via a nationwide survey. The list of queries was comprised out of 11 questions developed by the researchers in order to discover if sleep is affected by social media. The questions were focused on the frequency with which the volunteer participants used social platforms like Facebook, Tumblr or SnapChat before going to sleep and the frequency of sleepless nights.

A researcher with a post-doctorate degree, Jessica C. Levinson, who is also the author of the study in question, says this is the first time when somebody researches the link between a poor sleep quality and social platforms. And the results state clearly that sleep is affected by social media.

It seems that a good night’s rest doesn’t depend only on how often or for how long you check your Facebook before going to sleep, but also, the amount of physical exercise you do during the day. According to Levinson, the people who spent more time outdoors and engaged in a physical activity like sports or exercise, and who kept their mobile devices on silent more, slept much better than those who kept in touch with the virtual world.

Levinson says that out of all the volunteer participants in the study, 30% were dealing with some sort of sleep issues. These individuals were also likely to spend an average of 61 minutes a day on social media, which leads to a total of 30 visits on the platforms in a week.

The participants who spent more time on the platforms had up to 50% chances of falling asleep after a longer period of time or even falling asleep at all. This is due to the display units of our devices which stimulate our brain.

Levinson published the study in which she concluded that sleep is affected by social media in the online magazine Preventive Medicine.

If your sleep is affected by social media, experts recommend reading a book or meditating before sleep. The white pages of the book or the calming effects of meditation will help you fall asleep instantly.

Image source: www.envato.com

Tagging Someone on Facebook Can Land You in Jail

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"Facebook status update"

The accused woman tagged her sister-in-law in a status update.

Apparently tagging someone on Facebook can land you in jail, or, at least, this is what happened to an American woman that tagged her sister-in-law in a post in which she was insulting the woman. Because of an existing restraining order, the woman is now facing criminal charges.

Maria Gonzales decided to release her wrath on Facebook and publish a status update in which she was saying that she is over the mess endured with Maribel Calderon, her sister-in-law and her family. She also called them a “sad family” in the same update. Intentionally, or not, the woman tagged her ex-family member in the status leading Calderon to receive a notification.

Laws are starting to focus more and more on the virtual means of communication so Calderon presented the Facebook information in front of the court and Susan Capeci, the judge that presided the case sentenced Gonzales to a year in prison.

The judge motivated her sentence with the fact that the restraining order that Calderon had on Gonzales restricted any communication between the two parties, including electronic means. The fact that Maria Gonzales tagged the woman in the status update lead to a notification that appeared on Calderon’s private account and this is considered an attempt at communication.

The appeal that was filed was denied because the order clearly forbade any attempt of any nature at reaching the person who requested the restraining order, which includes Facebook posts, as well.

Gonzales is now facing criminal charges and a year in prison because of a Facebook status update. It seems that tagging someone on Facebook can land you in jail and make you famous at the same time.

Because of the continuous development of technology and the increased popularity of social media platforms, judges and jurors in America have begun to take very seriously any proof that originates from the virtual environments. This means that writing a hateful status update can bring you more than just some “unfriends” or rude commentaries, it could bring you in front of a judge.

The case of Gonzales will now be a point of reference for all future digressions that take place on a social media platform. A mean tweet will be considered valid proof, so will a personal message sent via Facebook Messenger that contains any violent or threatening language.

If tagging someone on Facebook can land you in jail, then all the billion users of social media sites all around the world will begin to think twice before poking a person, or commenting a photo or a status update.

Image source: www.witty-ways.com

Instagram Rolls Out New Filters To Give An Amazing Look To Your Pictures

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new features of Instagram

Instagram rolled out five new image filters, real-time commenting and slow-motion video uploading. The new tools are available for iOS version 6.4 and Android version 6.12.

Now users can do a lot more than sharing their pictures on Instagram. The new features will allow them to make use of frames and filters for the images they captured from their smartphones. Users can also utilize these filters to take images from the app.

Instagram also upgraded the old filters available in the app. However, the new filters are located at the front side of filter tray of users.  These five filters are named as Aden, Prepetua, Ludwig, Crema and Slumber.  They delicately alter the colors to give a new look to the picture. Sometimes it dulls or sharpens a color in order to provide numerous look of the picture.

Additionally, Instagram released a new layout as well through which users can hide the filters which they use rarely.

Instagram releases these new features to compete with the rivals like Twitter. The company is presently working on its new business model which would probably finish in 2015.

Two years ago, Facebook purchased Instagram at a large amount of money $715 million.  The social networking firm really wants to generate great revenue with Instagram.

Currently, Instagram has around 300 million monthly active users. The figures are more than the active users of Twitter and Facebook. The firm has incredibly increased its audience in the past nine months.

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