Wednesday 27 April 2016

Pivotal: Asynchronous Pair Programming at Scale (Teaser)

Sunday 24 April 2016

Why your wallet is becoming the next platform

The “wallet” in the modern sense of “flat case for holding paper currency” dates back almost 200 years. The word itself goes back 700 years, and the concept (minus paper currency) for millennia.

Leather wallets were not “smart,” of course; they were atom agnostic, payment type agnostic, even, as credit cards and the like started proliferating in the mid 20th century. But today the payment type is almost a pointer — in computer science vernacular — to a source of money. And the wallet itself is the master pointer, used for opening and closing a transaction, and choosing which sub-pointer to assign.

Because intercepting the payment leads to a whole downstream treasure of goodies, the wallet — once tanned animal hide — is going to be the ultimate financial platform. As digital wallets increasingly become the origination point for consumer spending, they will become THE platform for downstream financial services — creating an opportunity for startups and a problem for established players.

The problem, of course, is that a payment type can become a wallet, and a wallet can become a payment type. So which is which? If a ridesharing company has 100 million credentials, they’ve solved half of the network effect problem of being a payment company — so you could imagine using that app as your wallet at, say, Walmart. Or Starbucks, which is one of the biggest wallets, has a pointer within its wallet to Visa Checkout, another wallet, pointing to a card type (a Visa card, or even a MasterCard/Amex/Discover card), pointing to a “loan” (the “credit” part of a credit card), ultimately pointing to a bank account.

As a stack, we have hardware — your mobile phone — at the top and bank accounts holding the actual treasure at the very bottom. But it’s better to think of this “stack” as really a system of pointers, in this case downwards. And the goal for businesses is finding and occupying a defensible position in this stack that allows them to intercept payments, capturing and controlling value to become that ultimate financial platform.

Thursday 21 April 2016

Facebook Will Soon Let You Earn Money From Your Posts

Learners Bytes: Mark Zuckerberg has realised Facebook’s power to experiment with new ideas to generate content and revenue. According to a news report, Facebook is testing new ways to allow the individual users to earn money from their posts. It indicates how aggressively Facebook is moving ahead to become a more dominant force in real-time sharing.

Facebook is now looking for new ways to make monetization of different aspects of Facebook a priority and become the biggest force in the tech world. Recently, the company allowed all publishers to use the Instant Articles platform and show ads to the readers.

As a similar policy change, a new survey was recently spotted by The Verge that hints at the future prospects of Facebook allowing its users to make some profit from their posts on the social network.

The user survey indicates that Facebook users could make money or promote a cause with the help of different options. Users can include a tip jar, share branded content, and take a portion of the ad revenue Facebook earns from their posts.

It was also reported that Facebook could also ask the users to use a ‘call to action’ button to direct the visitors to donations, some sponsored marketplace, or other monetization schemes.

Image : The Verge

At the moment, Facebook doesn’t allow the individual users to earn money by posting any content on Facebook. It has allowed the news publishers to make money using its platform by rolling out more tools and ad formats.

In past couple of years, Facebook has emerged as an advertising giant and the business of online news has never been forgiving. According to a recent survey, in the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising goes to Facebook or Google.

Facebook has the power to experiment with new ideas to generate content and revenue. It has realised its potential as a game changer and is busy twisting and making the new rules of internet marketing.

Why to choose the best web development company?

The Internet has become an effective tool of sales. As the web advance, people are spending most of their time accessing their favorite sites on the internet.

Many of the organizations are designing a professional website to boost their brand image and growth as well. Through this, a company can show its strength and a distinct identity to the web users.

A professional and attractive website help you to extend your business and market your wide range of products and services in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Therefore from small to large scale companies, are hiring a reputed web development company that can build an aesthetic website (online presence) for them.

Saturday 16 April 2016

Join the Deep Learning Revolution: Program the Google’s Revolutionary Artificial Brain and Develop Intelligent Android, iPhone, Web and IoT Apps

Zia Khan

Do you want to Learn to Program the Google’s Revolutionary Artificial Brain?
We are planning to start a new course in "Deep Learning" in September in major Universities of Pakistan that is going to bring the latest state of the art technology to Pakistan. It will will allow developers to build intelligent Android, iPhone, Web and IoT Apps. Right now we are preparing the material for the course, therefore need your feedback? Please review the document:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l8g6kkid3ae…/deep%20learning.docx…
Please give us your feedback, tell us what needs to be added or removed from this program? Most importantly tell us if you are interested in taking this course? because right now we plan to offer only one class with 100 handpicked students.

Wednesday 13 April 2016

I'm proud to join Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking for a new space initiative to go beyond our nearby planets to explore other stars for the first time in human history.

Our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years or about 25 trillion miles away. Even with today's fastest spacecraft, it would take 30,000 years to get there. That's too long.

The new idea here is that instead of using large spacecraft burning fuel like people have in all traditional space travel, we're going to create a fleet of tiny spacecraft -- or nanocraft -- that we can accelerate to 20% of the speed of light using an array of laser beams from our planet's surface. At that speed of 100 million miles per hour, it will only take 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri. This is a completely new way to think about space travel and exploration.

The reason this project is important is recent research has found many stars have planets within a distance where they could have water to sustain life. That is, they're close enough to their star that any water isn't frozen but not so close that it has all evaporated. But just because a planet is in this habitable zone doesn't mean it has water and is a place we can actually live. For example, Mars has no water, so it would be difficult to ever live there. It's quite possible the closest planet that humans could actually live on is orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the only way to know that for sure is to visit close enough to photograph the planet, which is what this project will do.

Over the years, Yuri and I have worked on a number of science initiatives together, including creating the Breakthrough Prize. I'm excited to support this latest initiative with Stephen Hawking, and to help bring human space exploration to the stars

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Facebook's 10 year roadmap

At our F8 conference this morning I laid out Facebook's 10 year roadmap and everything we're building to make the world more open and connected.

We announced new technology like Messenger bots that use artificial intelligence to make it easier to communicate with businesses. Now you'll be able to send messages to a business like you do with a friend -- and get a quick reply without taking your full attention or requiring you to install a new app.

We also opened up the Live API. This means that you can stream live video from any device directly to Facebook.

Over the long run, we're building planes and satellites to connect everyone to the internet; artificial intelligence to help us interact with services more easily; and virtual reality to help us experience the world in a totally new way.

I've always believed that giving more people a voice makes the world a better place, and I'm excited about the future we're all building together.

From now on we will using this Application Architecture for developing products in Panacloud, Zavia, and other companies we are going to form in the future. We will will also use this to teach how to build serverless web and mobile apps in our classes in Sir Syed University, Saylani, and All Pakistan Memon Federation.
Serverless computing is definitely a game changer. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions provide event-driven computing services that have gotten many developers excited, one that makes it easy to set up rules associated with their applications and then let the computers take action on their own. Developers don’t need to worry about scaling out these programs across many virtual machines, and only pay for the time it takes for their functions to be executed. This opens to the developer’s endless possibilities offered by the event-driven approach combined with the rich Cloud ecosystem offered by the main Cloud vendors, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
We will focus on developing these serverless cloud services using TypeScript.
I have also updated the syllabus:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89695208/Books/Web/Text%20Books/syllabus.docx