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.

Barry Lam : Founder & Chairman of World’s Largest Maker of Laptop Computers

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Success is with those, who work hard towards their goals. The time, the personal computers were just introduced, the Taiwan based visionary entrepreneur, Berry Lam, saw the future scope of the notebook Pcs. He worked hard and used his more than 15 years of experience, in the manufacturing industry, to convert his vision into a successfully running business, and now, he is leading the number one laptop manufacturing company of Taiwan.

Early Life

Barry Lam was born in 1949 in Shanghai, China. His father worked as an accountant for the Hong Kong Club, so he spent his childhood in Hong Kong. He went to Taiwan, to pursue a degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University. He also received the master’s degree in the same field, from the same university.

barry-lam
Image Source: forbes

Career

Soon after Lam completed his master’s degree, along with his former classmates, in 1973, he founded a manufacturing business of the handheld calculators, naming the company Kinpo Electronics. Lam was appointed as the president of the company, and in his leadership, the company emerged as one of the largest contract manufacturers of calculators.

Founding Quanta Computer

In the early 80s, with the increasing popularity of personal computers, Lam founded scope in notebook computer manufacturing and became interested in the same field. In 1988, he left Kinpo to found Quanta Computer, along with one of his colleagues, C. C. Leung, with a capital of less than US$900,000.

In the beginning, it had two production lines that were handled by 60 employees at its office in Shilin Street, Hong Kong. Lam, the visionary entrepreneur wanted to become more than just a supplier. With Quanta, he offered combinations of features for its every product, which the client could choose from. Through Quanta he produced functional and powerful, yet lightweight products.

With the success of the company, Lam established its headquarter in Taiwan and also established the Quanta Research and Development Center there. The Center is focused on creating next-generation innovative products and works in collaboration with institutions such as MIT, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica.

In 2001, Quanta Computer was recognised as the largest notebook manufacturer worldwide and had a 50% increase in the production. In 2002, the company established its plant in China. Under the One Child One Laptop project, in 2007, Quanta took orders for one million laptops and became the original design manufacturer for the OLPC XO-1.

In 2008, Quanta was named as Taiwan’s second largest private manufacturing enterprise, with an annual turnover of NT$777 billion reported in 2007. In the same year, the share of Quanta in the worldwide market was estimated to be 31%. The major clients of Quanta Computer include Apple Inc., Dell, HP, Amazon, Cisco, Lenovo, LG, BlackBerry, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, etc.

Currently, there are 70,000 employees working for Quanta Computer worldwide, and it has expanded its businesses into network systems, mobile communication, automotive electronics, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Barry Lam is serving as the chairman of the company. He was named the Entrepreneur of the Year 2005 by Ernst and Young. In 2006, he was awarded the Second Class Bright Star Medal’ by the Taiwan Government. He was listed as the 296th richest person in the world and 5th richest in Taiwan with a net worth of US$4.2 billion, in 2012. In the same year, he received an Honorary Doctorate, from the National Tsing Hua University.

Microsoft Edge will be Soon Replaced by a Chromium-powered Web Browser

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Microsoft-Edge
Image Source: valuewalk.com

Three years ago, the software giant Microsoft introduced its Edge browser, in order to replace its own old Internet Explorer and also, give a competition to the Chromium Browser from Google. Though the design and appearance of the browser had an impressive impact on its user, its browser engine (EdgeHTML) could not match the level of the Chromium-based browsers.

Now, after three years, Microsoft has given up on the Edge browser, and currently, it is working on a new chromium based browser that is codenamed Anaheim. The Edge browser was developed in 2015, especially for the users of Windows 10, and also, as an alternative to Chrome, Firefox, and other. But now, the new Anaheim browser is going to replace the Edge browser as it has been facing some compatibility issues, and has brought Microsoft under a lot of businesses and consumers pressure for the improvements.

The new browser from Microsoft will use the browser engine Blink from Google, which is used to interpret the website coding to display it on the screen. As soon as the browser is launched successfully, the developers will be more happy, as the testing work will be reduced to an extent. Microsoft had tried hard to encourage Windows users to adopt Edge as their default browser, but failed most of the time, because of the availability of more popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Maybe because of the popularity of Google Chrome, Microsoft has decided to develop its new browser on the same Chromium technology. There have been no official comments on the matter from Microsoft. But considering the reports from the Windows Central, it is estimated that Microsft will announce the browser in the coming week, and it may be out in the early half of next year.

Melanie Perkins : One of The Youngest Female CEOs of Tech World

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“Persistence is what makes an idea to happen,“ the answer given by the CEO and co-founder of Canva when asked about the secret of her success at such a young age. A teenager, who was disturbed with the complexity of the designing software including Photoshop and InDesign, had never thought that she would find a $1b opportunity in this complexity. One of the youngest female CEOs, and that too of two multi-million companies, Melanie Perkins’s hard work and struggle taught her a lot about leadership and running a business.

The Career Timeline & Founding Canva Inc.

Perkins was born and brought up in Perth, Australia and was a student of commerce and communications at the University of Western Australia. At the age of 19, she started teaching graphic designing to University students. With the time, she realised, that it was way too difficult to teach those students how to use those heavy software rather the designing itself. She was frustrated with the fact that it takes almost 22 clicks to export a high-quality PDF.

MelaniePerkins
Image Source: snappystreet.com

Those difficulties, that her students were facing, made her think of developing an easy to use platform for them. She decided to convert her idea into a functional website at a small level to test its potential at a smaller scale. She raised a sum of money, that she borrowed from her relatives, to pay the software designers to build the platform.

In 2007, she along with boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, founded Fusion Books, an online platform on which various schools could design their yearbooks. Only in a few years, Fusion Books became the largest Year Book publisher of Australia. Perkins even had to drop out from the University to completely focus on the website. The website soon became widespread in France and New Zealand, too.

Perkins knew that the scope of designing is unlimited, and it would be better for her if she focuses on using the same idea on a larger scale. In 2010, she decided to raise funding for her next big idea Canva and flew to California to pitch the idea in front of the major investors of Silicon Valley.

The very first investor whom she met was the San Francisco based investor and founder of MaiTai, Bill Tai. Although she wasn’t successful in getting funding from him, her idea was convincing enough to make Mr Tai help her meet other investors. But, it took three years for her to receive the first round of funding of $3 million for Canva and finally, in 2013, she launched it with the help of Cameron Adams, third co-founder of Canva and a hardcore Googler, who now serves as the Chief Product Officer of Canva. Cameron Adams is also among the first investors of Canva along with Lars Rasmussen and Matrix Partners.

The three years of her struggle taught her how to sell, how to recruit, and how to build a business. And her hard work turned out to be most fruitful for her. Just after one year of the launch of Canva, it had 750,000 users, and in April 2014, the company welcomed Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki as its chief evangelist.

In 2015, Canva was launched for the businesses as Canva Work, a professional tool for designing. In 2017, the company reported its revenue to be four times, i.e. $AU 23.5m. Currently, over 200 people are working for Canva, and it has 10 million users across 179 countries. It has its headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and an office in San Francisco. In 2018, the company was valued at $1 billion, and Perkins became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs.

Currently, Perkins serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Canva, Inc.

Google Announced its Best of 2018 List; PUBG Selected the Best Game 2018

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The year is about to end, and Google, following the ritual of selecting best of the year, has published a list of its best apps of 2018, in various categories, including “Most Entertaining” and “Hidden Gems”. There are millions of apps and other content available on the Play Store, and along with apps, the list of bests includes the best movies, TV shows, and books, etc.

Google on the basis of various factors selected the top five among every category and named the best of all. Google, also, first time also added a Fan Favorite category, a user poll, from where the users could support their favourite apps in various categories. On the basis of the voting, Google Pay won the User’s Choice App of 2018 and Google selected Drops as the Best App of 2018.

Google-Play-Best-Of-2018-Awards
Image Source: 9to5google.com

The best app also included other subcategories, and among those categories, Tik Tok became the Most Entertaining App 2018. Unfold won the Hidden Gems of 2018, and Home Workout – No Equipment was named the Best Self-Improvement App 2018. Otter Voice Notes became the Best Daily Helper 2018.

The other main category was the Best Game 2018, and it also had various sub-categories, i.e. Best Game, User’s Choice Game, Best Casual, Most Innovative, Most Competitive and Best Indie. PUBG Mobile won the Best Game 2018 from both User’s Choice and Google. The Best Casual 2018 won by Ludo King, Battlelands Royale named the Most Innovative 2018, Real Cricket 18 won the Most Competitive 2018, and Alto’s Odyssey named the Best Indie 2018.

Black Panther was selected as the Best Movie of 2018 on Play Store, and the top five list includes the following:

  • Black Panther
  • Avengers: Infinity War
  • Thor: Ragnarok
  • Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
  • Deadpool 2

Google’s top five TV shows of 2018 are:

  • The Walking Dead
  • Riverdale
  • The Big Bang Theory
  • The Flash
  • PAW Patrol

The top five eBooks of 2018 selected by Google:

  • Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff
  • The Outsider by Stephen King
  • Fear by Bob Woodward
  • 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
  • Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis

In the category of best Audiobooks of 2018, the following win the race of top 5:

  • 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
  • Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis
  • Fear by Bob Woodward
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • The Outsider by Stephen King

Martin Dougiamas : The Man Behind the Open-source LMS Moodle

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Martin Dougiamas is the Australia based educator and computer scientist, who founded one of the world’s biggest learning management system. Dougiamas has always been a keen learner, and despite lack of facilities, he was able to fulfil his desire for learning. A voracious reader and a lover of speculative fiction, he is a believer of sharing knowledge. Brent Simpson described him as “one of the rare instances in Open Source software development, where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.”

Early Life

Dougiamas was born on 20 August 1969, in Perth, Australia. He spent most of his childhood in a deserted area in Western Australia, where, there was no facility for even basic education. He received his primary education at his home and studied from the material dropped from the aeroplane. He then joined the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, under distance education. As it was a distance learning school, he visited the school only a few times; sometimes for the school projects and a few times for the exams. He always missed being in a classroom with his classmates. At the age of ten, he became interested in wireless and internet technologies and studied books based on them.

Martin Dougiamas
Image Source: Flickr

After a few years, his family moved back to Perth, where Dougiamas joined West Balcatta Primary School and Balcatta Senior High School. He received a master’s degree and PhD from the Curtin University, Australia.

Career

At the age of 17, Dougiamas started working at Curtin University, where he taught the staff about the usage of various web applications. The internet and computers were the latest technologies that were emerging at that time, and he realized that it is not an easy task to teach people about those technologies and utilize them for teaching and learning.

The university installed the newly built learning management WebCT, one of the first learning management systems of that time, at its campus. Dougiamas was asked to improve its functionalities. But, his experience with the software was not a pleasant one, due to the restriction and software’s intellectual property rights.

Founding Moodle

Soon, Dougiamas joined the university as a student and started working on the development of a set of online tools for distance education, as the part of his PhD thesis, “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”. The tools he was developing for online education were soon adopted at a bigger level, and he had to eliminate them from his PhD thesis.

The first site developed on Moodle was of Peter Taylor from Curtin University, in 2001. By the end of the year, Moodle was available for downloads on CVS. In 2003, Moodle became a community-based software, with its first contributed module released on Moodle.org, a community arm for Moodle.com. People, across the world, were translating it in different languages and were developing themes for it.

In 2015, Moodle became the most used learning management system in the world, with 70,136 registered sites, in 222 territories worldwide, and in 2017, it had over 100 million registered users. Moodle Pty Ltd. HQ has over 45 employees, and it has its branches located in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the UK. The company is financed by a partners network that consists of over 80 certified companies around the world.

Personal Life

Currently, Dougiamas serves as the CEO of Moodle, Pty Ltd. He is the winner of Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category (2008) and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic – the Central University of Catalonia “for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform”, in 2016. He also received another honorary doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in 2018.

YouTube Stories Feature Now Available for the Creators with Subscribers More than 10K

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Stories have been famous for not only Snapchat (that originated it first), but also for other social media platforms like Instagram, Whats app, Facebook and even LinkedIn. Now YouTube has also adopted the same feature for its user to make it more interactive and help them with promotions.

YouTube
Image Source: YouTube

The feature is a similar version of the Stories feature of other social media apps, but with a few changes. This feature is available only for the creators having at least 10000 subscribers. Also, the stories on YouTube last for a week i.e. seven days, unlike for Instagram, What’s App and Facebook, on which the story lasts only for 24 hours. Even the stories posted on YouTube can be seen by the people who haven’t subscribed the particular YouTube channel.

YouTube is one of the biggest platforms for marketing and content sharing and has become the widest stage for the influencers to connect with people, globally. The stories feature is going to help creators, influencers and brands, with sizable followers, for better exposure of their content on the platform.

The stories are located on the right sidebar, with the “Up Next” tab, on the right side for the desktop users and below the video, for the mobile users. The video length for the YouTube Stories is set to be 30 seconds, at max, and can be assembled into a playlist. People can also comment on those stories and interact with the creator. The main goal of those stories is channel promotion and day-to-day community engagement.

The feature was rebranded as the “YouTube Stories” at the Vidcon, last year, and was available only for some selected YouTubers. YouTube had been testing the feature for the other users, for past one year, and had announced that it would become available for them by the end of 2018. The stories feature has been the biggest influencing vigour for mainly Instagram and Facebook, and now it will also help the marketers to endorse their services directly on YouTube at a bigger level.