Interesting Tech Facts

• The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.
• Alaska is the only state that can be typed on one row of keys on a “QUERTY” keyboard.
• HP, Google, Microsoft and Apple have one thing in common apart from the obvious that they are IT companies. They were all started in garages.
• Hewlett Packard was started in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939.
• Facebook pays at least $500 if you can find a way to hack the site.
• The Google driverless car has encountered only two accidents. The first it was rear ended at a stop sign, and the second was when a human was behind the wheel.
• The first online advertisement banner was created and used in the year of 1994.
• CD’s, or Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, which is the reverse of how records work.
• The word robot comes from the Czech “robota“. This translates into forced labour, or work.
• Skype is banned from the public in China.
• 86% of people try to plug their USB devices upside down.
• 160 billion emails are sent daily, 97% of which are spam.
• 9 out of every 1,000 computers are infected with spam.
• S. President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in January 1997 was the first to be webcast.
• There are 6.8 billion people on the planet and 4 billion of them use a mobile phone. Only 3.5 billion of them use a toothbrush.
• Two hundred and twenty million tons of old computers and other technology devices are trashed in the United States each year.
• Ninety percent of text messages are read within three minutes of being delivred.
• The average 21 year old has spent 5,000 hours playing video games, sent 250,000 emails, instant messages, and text messages, and has spent 10,000 hours on a mobile phone alone.

 

What’s In a Name?

Creativity is the essence of the tech world and it is evident even with the names of tech companies. There is a story behind the names of most of the companies.

Here’s a look how some of these well-known tech giants got their names:

• Apple – Steve Jobs liked apples a lot. The other reason he named his company ‘Apple’ was that “Apple” was ahead of “Atari” in the phonebook and he used to work at Atari.
• Amazon – Bezos wanted his book retail site to be so quick and easy that it seemed like magic. The site went online in 1995 with the name of Amazon, taken from the Amazon River for being the biggest river. Clearly, Bezos had big ambitions right from the start.
• Google – Google took its name from a deliberate misspelling of Googol, the word that represents 10^100, or a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Why this? Simply because founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to convey the huge amount of data they intended to make available.
• Microsoft – The company was officially established in April 1975, with the name coming from a combination of “microprocessor” and “software” – which is fitting given that they were creating software for the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems’s (MITS) Altair 8800.
• Oracle – This name started as the code for a project that co-founders Larry Ellison and Bob Oats worked on for the CIA. It was a database that was supposed to be able to answer any question about anything.
• Mozilla – In 1994, when a team at Netscape sat around to think of names for a new browser to take on NCSA’s Mosaic browser, what they were looking for was something that would crush the competition. What they looked to was Godzilla. Combining Mosaic with the movie monster brings you to the current day name of Mozilla.
• Asus – The name is derived from the mythological Greek winged horse Pegasus. According to the company’s own explanation it embodies the strength, purity, and adventurous spirit of this fantastic creature, and soars to new heights with each new product it creates.
• Lenovo – The word is a combination of Le and Novo, meaning new in Latin.
• Skype – It’s a combination of “sky” and “peer-to-peer”, shortened to skyper. The name ‘Skyper’ was already in use, so the new name became ‘Skype’.
• Twitter – Founders first thought of ‘twitch’. But ‘twitch’ was not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So, they looked up dictionary and found ‘twitter’. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.
• eBay – The website started out as “AuctionWeb,” a part of the personal website of former Apple software engineer Pierre Omidyar. The website took off, and Mr. Omidyar decided to spin it off into its own entity and name it afterhis consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. When the domain name echobay.com was taken, he switched it to ebay.com.
• Verizon – According to Verizon’s corporate history, the name is a combination of the Latin words “veritas” and “horizon.” Veritas refers to truth and reliability, while horizon signifies forward-looking and visionary.
• Blackberry – This name was coined in 1999 because the keys on the device resembled the drupelets on the fruit.

Fun Facts about Computer Programming

• The C language is written in C.
• The first high-level programming language was FORTRAN invented in 1954 by IBM’s John Backus.
• The first computer virus was created in 1983.
• The first computer programmer was a female, Ada Lovelace.
• The first computer game was “Spacewar” designed in 1961.
• Programming and coding are not the same. Coder is clearly instructed on what should be done. Programmer must be able to imagine a broad set of solutions before writing codes.
• In programming there is a thing called “constant variable”.
• In programming algorithms, root comes at the top.
• Programming language Java was originally designed for interactive TV, but digital cable industry was not ready for the technology.
• Programming language Python came out as a result of boredom of its author Van Rossum during the Christmas week of 1989.
• Python is one of the official languages at Google and NASA.

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Latest Technology Trends

Technology is constantly evolving. Newer technologies such as smart devices, 3D printing are making headway in their mainstream adoption. The possibilities for where these technologies will take us and how they can impact our lives are endless.

Here is the list of top technology trends with potential to have a significant impact on the organizations.

1. Device Mesh – The device mesh moves beyond the traditional desktop computer and mobile devices (tablets and smartphones). As the device mesh evolves, we will see greater interaction between these devices.
2. Ambient user experience – The experience blends physical, virtual and electronic environments, and uses real-time contextual information as the ambient environment changes or as the user moves from one place to another.
3. 3D printing materials – Advances in 3D printing have already enabled 3D printing to use a wide range of materials, including advanced nickel alloys, carbon fiber, glass, conductive ink, electronics, pharmaceuticals and biological materials. These innovations are driving user demand, as the practical applications for 3D printers expand to more sectors, including aerospace, medical, automotive, energy and the military. 3D printing will see a steady expansion over next 20 years.
4. Information of everything – The now a days information goes beyond textual, audio and video information to include sensory and contextual information. Information of everything addresses technologies to link data from all these different data sources. Information has always existed everywhere but has often been isolated, incomplete, unavailable or unintelligible. Advances in semantic tools such as graph databases as well as other emerging data classification and information analysis techniques will bring meaning to the often chaotic form of information.
5. Advanced machine learning – Advanced machine learning is what makes smart machines appear “intelligent” by enabling them to both understand concepts in the environment, and also to learn. This area is evolving quickly, and organizations must assess how they can apply these technologies to gain competitive advantage.
6. Autonomous agents and things – Advanced machine learning gives rise to smart machine implementations including robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and smart advisors that act in an autonomous manner. Instead of interacting with menus, forms and buttons on a smartphone, the user speaks to an app, which is really an intelligent agent.
7. Adaptive security architecture – The complexities of digital business, combined with an emerging “hacker industry,” significantly increase the threat surface for an organization. IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks.
8. Advanced system architecture – The mesh app and service architecture are what enable delivery of apps and services to the flexible and dynamic environment of the digital mesh. This architecture will serve users’ requirements as they vary over time.
9. Internet of Things Architecture and Platforms – IoT platforms exist behind the mesh app and service architecture. The technologies and standards in the IoT platform form a base set of capabilities for communicating, controlling, managing and securing endpoints in the IoT.

Amazing Facts About Apple Inc

Apple is the world’s largest IT company by revenue and total assets, and the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer. Here are few interesting facts about Apple:

• The bite in Apple’s logo was added so it wouldn’t be confused with a cherry. The original logo included Isaac Newton perching under an apple tree. That was eventually switched to the one we know today, a simple apple.
• A rare Apple-1 computer built in Steve Job’s garage in 1976 was sold at an auction in 2014 for US$905,000.
• Apple’s cofounder had sold all his shares for $800. Today they would have been worth US$35 billion.
• Apple has more operating cash than US treasury.
• Its brand worth US$118.9 billion. It is the world’s most valuable brand.
• Every Apple iPhone ad displays the time as 9:41 AM, the time Steve Jobs unveiled it in 2007.
• Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones in 2015. That’s worth about US$40 million.
• Apple could buy Disney or Coca-Cola and pay in cash.

Interesting Facts About Microsoft

It is hard to imagine our lives without having products/services rendered by tech giant – Microsoft. Did you know – Microsoft  has as much interesting facts as its products?

Here are a few of them:

• Microsoft was originally called “Micro-Soft”. Windows was originally called “Interface Manager”.
• Microsoft has split its stock nine times since it went public back in March 1986. Put very, very simply, a company will generally split its stock when its share price becomes too high.
• The name of its search engine “˜Bing’ has its origins in Bingo. Just like the game, it was meant to suggest that something looked for has been found or realized. “˜Bang’ was also proposed because it was memorable, short, and easy to spell. Finally, Bing was chosen for the same reasons.
• Microsoft is one of the largest corporate collectors of artworks with over 5,000 contemporary pieces including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, ceramics, studio glass, and multimedia works. Microsoft gathers arts from local artists, up-and-coming artists and big names.
• Microsoft has a reputation in the industry for asking off-beat, off-the-wall questions during its job interview. The most oft-quoted question is: “Why is a manhole cover round?” Whether this particular example is genuine, or an urban legend, it’s certainly true that Microsoft employs a very unusual, and forward-thinking interview process.

Fun Facts About Google

• The simple design caused people to just sit there looking at the screen during initial tests. Test users were actually waiting for the “rest of the page to load”. To solve that particular problem, the Google Copyright message was added as a line as an end of page marker.
• “To google” became a verb in 2006 when both Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary recognized it. It of course means – to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.
• Google’s core search engine ranking system is called PageRank. Each page is assigned a rank that determines its ranking in the search engine results. But the term is not taken from its function; it’s actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
• Google has photographed more than five million miles of road for its Street View maps.
• Google has been acquiring, on average, more than one company per week since 2010.
• Google HQ rents goats from California Grazing to mow their lawns and fields. The employees think that it’s a lot cuter to watch goats do the mowing than lawn mowers.
• Google has a pet T-rex, named Stan, which lives at their California headquarters. Founders bought it to remind the employees to not let Google go extinct.
• Google is a wedding planner. Plan your special day with Google Wedding.