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HTC Might Exit the Chinese Smartphone Market Soon; Pulls Smartphones from Major Chinese Market

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The Taiwanese handset maker, HTC, had recently revealed that it would stop selling its handsets at the two of China’s largest eCommerce portals, JD.com and Tmall, temporarily. And, finally, it has pulled off its smartphone chain from the two stores. This step taken by the company has compelled everyone to think that the company might be planning to take an exit from the Chinese smartphone industry.

htc china exit
Image Source: consumercomplaintsnumbers.co

In the recent times, the rumours were making rounds that Google was planning to acquire the company, but later, Google was only able to acquire the HTC’s Pixel team in a $1.1 billion deal. After Google’s acquisition, over 2,000 HTC engineers moved to work for Google. After the deal, HTC took to exit from India last July. So, from the decision of not selling its smartphones for a temporary period, it is pretty easy to predict that HTC might also be thinking of exiting China in the same way.

For now, the company has drawn off all its smartphones from the two eCommerce giant websites as well as their flagship stores. The company has also ceased the selling of its products from the other physical retail stores in China. But the company is still selling its smartphones, except some of its flagship smartphones including U11 or U11+, at its own official store as well as the VIVE flagship physical store in Shenzhen.

The company confirmed the news through a blog post, stating, “Due to the consideration of HTC China’s long-term business strategy, we will temporarily close the HTC mobile phone Jingdong flagship store and Tmall flagship store. HTC smartphones and accessories can still be purchased through HTC Official Mall and HTC VIVE Flagship Store. We will continue to provide quality pre-sales and after-sales service as always.”

The company has been seeing great competition due to the rise of the other rival companies, including Oppo, Vivo and Xiomi, that has dropped down its smartphone sales to a greater extent. Despite pulling off its flagship smartphones from the major retail stores in China, the company is still trying to get its hold in its other business arms.

The company has emphasised its focus on the HTC 5G Hub project that according to it will be bringing 5G to every home. HTC has also moved its focus towards its VR efforts. The company has also confirmed that it will be bringing the Android 9 update to its U11, U11 Plus as well as U12 smartphones by the end of May and starting of June.

Deepfake Salvador Dali is Back to Life as Fakedeep; Takes Selfies with Museum Visitors

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Artificial Intelligence has always amazed people with its surprising experiments. One of its wing Fakedeep is also one really amazing technique that even can bring back the deads. Yes! This has happened in the past. In the month of February, Burger King featured producer-director Andy Warhol in one of its ad eating a Whopper. There has been a question on the appearance of Warhol as he has been dead for nearly 32 years.

Video Source: The Dali Museum (YouTube.com)

And now, with the help of same technology, Dali Lives, has brought the surrealist painter Salvador Dali back to life, who had died 30 years ago, in 1989. Dali Lives is an exhibition unit that hosts exhibitions in the Dalí Museum in Florida for Dali’s paintings. The museum has partnered with ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) to create a look-alike virtual being of Dali, who can interact with the museum visitors and even can take selfies with them.

The company has used the machine learning powered video editing technique to re-create the virtual Dali. They made the use of various pictures of Dali, and the video interviews, to mimic his voice and gestures. The company re-created his face by pulling over 6,000 frames through his images and interviews. It took 1000 hours for the AI algorithm to learn all of Dali’s facial expressions. An actor with the same general physical characteristics of Dali’s body did his body double, and the facial expression of Dali was imposed on the actor’s face. A voice-over artist learned his speech and mimicked his voice following Dali’s past interviews.

The video of virtual Dali is displayed in a kiosk. To watch the video, the visitors have to press a button on it. Dali will appear on the screen, and then have a conversation with the visitors. For this, the engineers made sure to include some of his quotes and the famous statements in the conversation. Every visitor will have a different experience with Dali, as every time he will be talking about different things. And after a 45-minute conversation, he will ask the visitors to take a selfie with them. Here too, the visitors won’t be ones to click the selfie, in fact, Dali will click the picture, and even, will text it to those visitors.

Though people have been concerned about the usage of Fakedeep technique, as people can also misuse it to defame other people, Dali Museum has no such intentions, but it created the virtual Dali to acknowledge his 30th death anniversary.

CollegeDekho Raises $8M in the Series B funding, Plans to Add More Educational Institutions to the Platform

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CollegeDekho, the Indian ed tech platform, went through its round of Series B funding, where it has raised $8 million. The company’s existing investors, including GirnarSoft Education and Man Capital, including the other investors, raised the funding, who also raised a $2 million in the Series A round for the company in 2018.

collegedekho
Image Sourec: whizsky.com

GirnarSoft Education is the parent company of CollegeDekho, a startup based in Gurugram India, that helps the students to connect with different colleges so that they can choose the right college for their higher studies. A chatbot has been set on the app to respond to the basic queries from the students. The students can also refer to the website or the app for information to know more about various colleges in which they are interested, like their location, courses they offer, and the fee structure, etc. They can also track their exams, and the other activities going on in the colleges, through the CollegeDekho app.

The company has even hired over 3000 customer care executives to ensure that the users get access to all the information they want. Those executives also help the students with the recommendations for colleges according to their interest and knowledge.

The stats given by the company claims that it entertains more than five million sessions from students on the platform every month, and over 8000 students took the help of CollegeDekho for their college admissions last year.

With a seed funding of $1 million from GirnarSoft Education, Ruchir Arora founded the company in 2015, and since then, the company has raised $13 million. The company plans to use the capital to enhance the boundaries for the platform so that it can serve the users by connecting with more colleges and educational institutions in India as well as abroad.

The company aims to help those students who after completing high school, due to lack of knowledge, are not able to find the best suitable college for them. In fact, due to less literacy rate, the parents of those students suffer from the dilemma of opting for the right choice for their children.

CollegeDekho makes its profits by charging a minimal fee from the students. Last year, the calculated revenue for the company was $3.2 million, which is pretty impressive. The company has listed over 36,000 certified educational institutes on the CollegeDekho app.

After JetBlue, Delta Air Lines to Provide Free WiFi to its Passengers

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delta air lines
Image Source: fortune.com

The internet has become quite essential for every human being, and when they have to fly, the extra cost they have to pay for the WiFi becomes out of their interest. Though if required, many do not mind spending the money. But what if one gets it for free? Pretty cool. Right?

On Thursday, Delta Air Lines announced that starting from 13th May, the company will start testing free WiFi on its aircraft for a period of two weeks. There will be 55 of the Delta domestic aircraft which will get to test the free WiFi, and the crew will notify the passengers onboard if their flight is also a part of the test.

The company has said that the test includes getting the feedback from the passengers, see how the free WiFi works, and to test the strain on the system. Providing free WiFi on the flight can be a bit of a difficult task, as the number of the users will automatically increase and handling such a big number of passengers in the air will be a challenge. It may also stress the plane’s bandwidth.

According to the Wallstreet Journal, the Delta passengers will be able to read articles and open their emails through the free WiFi, but not stream online videos. Delta is already providing free movies and video streaming on the plane partnering with the other media companies.

Gogo is the WiFi network provider for Delta Air Lines, and according to Gogo, currently, only 12 per cent of the passengers use the paid WiFi. Gogo has also expressed the concern that if WiFi is offered free for the passengers, there can be issues with the bandwidth of the plane itself.

The test will require Gogo to increase the bandwidth of the network it provides, and this will lead to more expenditure on the WiFi from Delta. Though it is beneficial for Gogo only, it depends on the company if it is ready to provide such large bandwidth to the airline or not. If not, Delta is free to move on to other options. Currently, JetBlue is the only airlines in the U.S. offering free WiFi to its passengers. Now we need to see how the tests turn out to be after two weeks for Delta Air Lines.

Nike Makes Use of Augmented Reality and AI to Build a New Shoe Measuring Feature

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According to the researches, 60% of the people worldwide wear the wrong shoe size, and even it has been almost a hundred years since the shoe size measuring tool, ‘Brannock Device’, was invented, many of the people have not used it to measure their real shoe size.

nike shoe measuring feature
Image Source: theverge.com

To fight with the struggle people go through while trying out their shoes and finding the right shoe size for them, the biggest sport shoe manufacturers, Nike, has developed a new AI-powered feature to measure the shoe size. The company had been working towards mixing technology with its products and has been exploring the augmented reality for quite some time now. And, finally, it has brought a shoe size measuring feature, ‘Nike Fit’, to its official app, with the help of AI.

The company was secretly testing the feature, at three of its U.S. stores, in Pasadena, Seattle, and Dallas. The company founded out that all the different shoes from the Nike fit the customers differently, as make and the material of those shoes are different.

The company has announced that all its stores will now have this new feature on the Nike app, which will help the customers to scan their foot and choose the right size shoes of every type, whether it is an Air Max, Jordans, Air Force Ones, or even a soccer cleat.

Use of this new feature in the stores will reduce a lot of extra work that the salesperson has to do in order to find the correct shoe size for the customers. In the retails, the customers will have to stand on a mat, and the salesperson will scan the foot size with the help of an iTouch device. After measuring the foot size, the app will provide all the options of shoes for the customer to choose from.

People can also use the feature on the app at their home. The process of measuring the foot is quite simple. After opening the mobile app, along with the select size option under a product, you will see a new option, for measuring the shoe size. As soon as you click on the option, the camera of the phone will open, and you will be asked to stand alongside a wall and scan your foot from the top. You will now have to click the button in between, and the right shoe size will render on your screen.

The new feature will make use of AI and the scientific data, to measure the shoe size of a customer. Using at least 13 data points out of 32 data points, the app is capable of efficiently measuring the correct shoe size for the customers. The launch of such technology has ignited the scope for measuring apps for other things, too. Like, while ordering online, people are often confused over their shoe or clothes’ size. But if this type of technology will be available on every online website, it will be easier for people to buy things without thinking much.

Play Store will Now Prefer the Recent Reviews to Rate the Apps

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Till now, Google has revealed many new launches and numerous changes to its services at its annual I/O conference going on in California, U.S., including new features added to the Google Assistant, the launch of new Assistant-powered home hub under the Nest brand, the launch of Pixel 3a and 3a XL, etc. And along with bringing new APIs and a refreshed Google Play Console data to the Play Store, the company has now introduced how the Play Store ratings will work.

play store
Image Source: theleaker.com

About two years ago, Apple made a change to the App Store on how the ratings would work for the apps. The company allowed the app developers to decide whether or not their ratings will reset to with every new update. In a similar way, Google has also revealed that from now, the apps won’t get rated on the basis of their previous performances, but after updates, those will be rated on their latest reviews and other factors.

Reviews and ratings have been crucial to the promotion of a product, and in fact, to the promotion of apps on the app stores, as people read the reviews before they install one on to their devices. In recent years, due to the old bad app reviews, the average rating of certain apps was degrading them. Despite new updates, the old reviews were also part of the average rating. But now the new average rating calculations will consider the latest reviews and updates to rate the app, as to give more preference to the latest reviews.

“You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree,” said Milena Nikolic, the engineering director leading Google Play Console.

Google is also working on a new reply feature, that will be in response to the user reviews. The developer will get to choose among three options to reply to a review. These options will include an auto-generated response, which the user can directly select and send, customise it and send or write a response and send. For now, those responses will be in English, but Google will soon add some other languages to the system.

The company has revealed that the average rating calculations will be updated for all the android apps. The developers can preview the new ratings on their Play Store Console from today onwards, while the end users will be able to see it only after August this year.