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Buy Bitcoin for $1 in the Walmart Stores

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According to a post, by TheKayleMain, in The CryptoCurrency subreddit, Walmart is planning to sell a set of six BitCoins for just $1 USD. The post was released on Monday, and included a picture, that displayed packages consisting of BitCoins that were bannered under the name of “Everyday Low Price”.

The BitCoin is a decentralised cryptocurrency that is created and held electronically. According to the Reddit readers, these BitCoins are a bit different in its manufacturing, as these are covered with chocolate. Pennsylvania based chocolate manufacturing company, the Frankford Candy & Chocolate Company, will cover the BitCoins with milk chocolate weighing about 1.48 Oz and will be wrapped with golden tinfoil.

According to the crypto forum, for now, these chocolate BitCoins will only be available in America. The launch of such BitCoin chocolates can make many other prospective investors to approach Wallmart as the intermediate for their market-to-market purchase of BitCoins.

Bitcoin’s price has already seen a slump from $20000 to $6000, this year, but, $1 exchange price for six bitcoins is quite inexpensive. Until now, Wallmart has not confirmed the news, but, Frankford gave a hint by tweeting on Friday, “Lots of Milk Chocolate + Bitcoins = Pure happiness.” With the tweet, it also posted a picture of chocolates covered with the gold foil having a Bitcoin sign on it.

Daniel Zhang to Replace Jack Ma as the Chairman of Alibaba Next Year

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On last Friday, the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma announced his retirement from the position of the chairman of Alibaba. He is going to serve as the chairman of the company till 10 September 2019 and will stay a member of the board until 2020. Jack Ma is only 53 and wants to devote his time to Philanthropy. At the age of 53, he is the only Chinese billionaire who has taken such a decision.

Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999, as a business-to-business marketplace. Soon, he expanded the business, to obtain a $420 billion profit, within a few years, making Alibaba as a consumer based platform. He also tried his hands in cloud computing, digital media, and other industries, including the payment gateway AliPay. His success story inspires everyone and he is referred to as ‘Teacher Ma’, in China. His decision has shaken the whole world, but he has got a plan for himself. Jack Ma is going to stay as a lifetime partner of the Alibaba Partnership and will continue working with his philanthropic organisation, the Jack Ma Foundation.

Jack Ma had already decided to retire from his post, a long time ago. Almost a decade ago, he had asked his team about what they will do without him. Now when he is stepping down from his position, the current CEO of the company Daniel Zhang is going to replace Jack Ma, to hold the position of the chairman of the company.

Daniel Zhang joined as the CEO of Alibaba, in 2015, and since then, Alibaba has seen consistent and sustainable growth, for 13 consecutive quarters. On this Jack Ma said, “This transition demonstrates that Alibaba has stepped up to the next level of corporate governance from a company that relies on individuals, to one built on systems of organizational excellence and a culture of talent development”.

Apple Announces an Online Portal to Cooperate with the Law Officials

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Since our lives have been so attached to our smartphones and we have stored almost every personal data in our phones, the data security has become the main concern. Over the past few years, the cyber-crime has also made the law enforcement officials to request the user’s private data from the top tech companies. The tech companies also respond to those queries with a sense of responsibility.

On September 4, Apple wrote a letter to Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democrat from Rhode Island, regarding a web portal that will help the police to request the user data stored in the iCloud. Apple is going to launch the web portal by the end of the year. It will constitute a team of trainers that will train the police about which data to be obtained and how it can be obtained.

Apple said in the letter that last year it answered to 14000 law enforcement requests. Among which 231 requests were regarding the domestic emergency and were addressed within 20 minutes. Until now, the law enforcement officials requested the data through emails to an Apple law enforcement email account.

The online portal will be a more convenient and a centralized hub. It will help the police officials to make and track requests, easily. Apple has created a set of strict guidelines on how and which data can be obtained. Apple has already trained over 1000 law enforcement officials that were trained in its training institutes. Now for further training, Apple is going to develop an online training program. The trainers from Apple will help the officials in the training and the training portals will be available globally.

Twitter is Preparing to Roll Out New Features Presence & Threading

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Facebook, Instagram and many other social media platforms have included the status feature to their inbox that shows if the user is currently active or not. Facebook also allows the user to choose between showing its status to its followers or not.

On 1 September 2018, Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter also talked about some new features like Presence, to be added to Twitter, through one of his tweets. He wrote, “Playing with some new Twitter features: presence (who else is on Twitter right now?) and threading (easier to read convos)”.

As he has talked about Presence and Threading, it clearly shows that those two features are somewhat similar to the Facebook’s Messenger’s features. With Presence, you will be able to see all the online users and you can easily engage with them. Also, Threading will help you follow or stick to a particular thread of conversation, in an easier way as compared to the current embed and click-through method.

Most of the Twitter users have given positive feedback to the threading feature as they mentioned that with the present thread it is difficult to go through all the tweets using the @reply and is a bit annoying. But, most of the users disliked the Presence feature as showing the other users the online status can be disturbing. Upon which the Twitter’s head of product Sara Haider replied, “would definitely want you to have full control over sharing your presence.”

It means that the user will be able to update its status according to one’s will. According to Dorsey’s tweet, Twitter is only performing the test right now and he has not mentioned the particular date when the new features will roll out on Twitter.

Microsoft Ends its Surface Pro Financing Program

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Image Source: azureedge.net

Approximately, a year ago, Microsoft launched a financial program with a payment plan called Klarna Financing, for selling its expensive and pretty Surface Pro Laptops. The program targetted mainly the students and the educators, who wanted to buy an expensive laptop but could not afford it.

The scheme included a 24 months payment program. The buyer could get the laptop on a no interest lease, for that he/she had to pay a particular amount every month till next 24 months. After a successful completion of 24 months, the buyer would own the laptop. Also, the program had offered the buyer to upgrade the laptop with a newer version after 18 months or more, only if the buyer had kept the laptop in good condition. But in case of a failed payment, the buyer had to pay 20% extra.

Now this year, Microsoft has quietly shut down the program and will no longer accept any enrollments for the program. It stated in the FAQ of the company that Microsoft decided to end the program after “much thought and consideration.” It has not given much information about why it is shutting the program down.

The customers who are already registered with the program will continue getting the benefits and will be able to upgrade their laptops to the newer version. Also, for more information, the customers will have to contact the company directly about the Klarna program as Microsoft is also going to shut down the Surface Plus Portal on September 30th of this year.

Lenovo Premium Yoga Laptops & X1 Extreme ThinkPad Unveiled at IFA 2018

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Image Source: pcmag.com

Many of the tech giants have gathered at the IFA in Berlin and are ready with their new products to be showcased in the event. On Thursday, another tech giant Lenovo unveiled its new X1 Extreme ThinkPad with two other premium Yoga Laptops, C930 and S730.

The latest Lenovo X1 Extreme is embedded with the NVIDIA’s GeForce 1050Ti graphics and will be the first ThinkPad laptop to own it. It has a 15.6 inches 4K high-resolution touch screen with the Dolby Vision support. The laptop is built upon the Intel Core i9 variants with the 8th generation chipsets. The lightweight laptop supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage. Also, the laptops claim to have 15 hours of battery life after 100% of charging and the laptop gets charged up to 80% within an hour, thanks to the Rapid Charge technology. For secure login, it has also got the touch and face recognition features. The appearance of the laptop is similar to the older ThinkPad laptops and the chassis is built using carbon fibre, that is capable of absorbing shocks.

Lenovo also announced two more laptops in its Yoga laptops series, the Yoga C930 and S730. The C930 laptop uses the 8th generation Intel Core i5 processor. It holds up to 4 GB of RAM, and 258 GB of SSD storage. The laptop has a foldable 13.3 inches 4K IPS-technology touch screen. It also has a privacy shutter on the webcam and is integrated with a rotating soundbar.

Even being a part of the Yoga series laptop, the S730 is not 360-degree foldable and also does not support a touch feature. The laptop is like a notebook having a slim body with 13.3 inches screen that makes it the look-alike of the Mac AirBook. The laptops support the 8th Generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 variants, with Intel HD 620 graphics. The laptop holds up to 16GB DDR4 RAM and up to 1 TB PCIe SSD storage.

The laptops will be available in the market during the last 3 months of the year. The price of the X1 Extreme laptop ranges from $1859 ( around Rs. 1,31,900). The Yoga C930 is going to cost $1,399 (around 99,280) and S730 will be available in approximately $999.99 (around Rs. 70,900).