Smartphone Maker You Never Heard Of Valued At $45 Billion

If you ask anyone about the leading smartphone makers around the world, the obvious answer that we get is Samsung and Apple but what about the third largest smartphone maker? If you thinking about Sony, Nokia, LG, and Lenovo then you are absolutely wrong.

For those who are not aware, the third largest company is the Chinese company known as Xiaomi. If sources have to be believed, then the company has just raised over $1.1 billion through funding from some of most powerful tech industry's players. Currently the company’s value is around $45 billion, which is more than Motorola, LG, and Sony when combined together. The company at present is most valuable startup in the world, and the worth is even more than Pinterest, Uber, and Airbnb.

Xiaomi: 

The company is one of the fastest growing smartphone makers in the world. The company’s sales rose more than 211% to over 17 million smartphones during the third quarter of 2014. This is 50% of the number of iPhones sold by Apple. While the company was having only 2% of the marketshare in 2013, by end of 2014, the company’s share doubles to 5%.

This Chinese smartphone maker rose to such high prominence rather quickly as they focused on the Chinese market and some of the other nearby high-growth countries. The company is known to be the 2nd smartphone brand sought after Samsung in China. Xiaomi has just started selling out their smartphones in Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, and Russia. The company has taken the entire growth markets storm as they are offering super-low price phones through online-only sales.

The gorgeous Mi4 smartphone, which debuted in August, is known as "iPhone killer” in the country. The developers have built the phone exactly like iPhone. With the added knack of excellent marketing, the company has been able to attract a massive number of people in China. According to Bin Lin, co-founder of Xiaomi, their sole aim is to bring innovation into everyone’s life in 2015.

At present, the biggest question that surrounds the company is whether they will be able to cross and grow beyond the countries they are currently operating in for selling phones. A simple example, the company has the potential to shake the entire US market, which is leading and filled with iPhone and Apple dominance?

Looking at the current trend, the company, and the smartphones have not been able to welcome in the United States of America. Some of the other competitors of the company like Huawei, Yulong and Lenovo, have still not headed towards the American soil. In the past decade, Nokia is known to the worldwide leader in cell phone sales and that too without any significant presence in the United States of America. Even though Sony, LG, and other company’s have been able to get success in international market, but still failed to gain footing here.

At present, the company as no plans or in future to sell their smartphones in the United States of America. But, if they plan to do so, they have to be prepared to face one of the biggest challenge ever.

NASA Plans Airships, Floating City for Manned Venus Mission

NASA To Explore Venus

The team at NASA have always looked forward in expanding their horizons and have now come up with a project to explore the planet Venus. A research project has been unveiled by NASA’s Space Mission Analysis Branch, proposing to send astronauts to Venus speculating that the `lighter than air’ pods would be hovering above the clouds that would be housing the explorers.NASA has revealed that they intend sending astronauts to explore Venus with inflatable air born habitats and a movie together with an image has been published on a NASA website portraying a conceptual design for inflatable silver blimp type air balloons for the purpose of living and working which would be accommodating the two astronauts for a period of one month in the planet Venus atmosphere.

A statement from NASA’s Space Mission Analysis Branch – SMAB, states that “a recent internal NASA study of a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept – HAVOC, has led to the development of an evolutionary program for the exploration of Venus with focus on the mission architecture and vehicle concept for 30 day crewed mission to Venus’s atmosphere. A lighter than air vehicle can carry either a host of instruments and probes or a habitat and ascent vehicle for a crew of two astronauts to explore Venus for up to a month”.

Atmosphere Relatively Benign

Mission to the planet Venus, according to the American space agency would need less amount of time when compared to a similar manned mission to Mars. It is also considered that the mission would be much simpler since the atmosphere of the planet is relatively benign together with similar gravity, pressure and density to Earth. According to SMAB, the atmosphere of planet Venus seems to be an exciting destination for further scientific study as well as future human exploration and the main technical challenges for the mission would include performing the aero capture manoeuvres at Venus as well as Earth, inflating and inserting airship at Venus together with protecting the solar panels and the structure from the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere.

Need Advanced Technology/Further Refinement

NASA has also stated that there would be a need of being advanced in technology as well as further refinement of the proposed venture before its implementation. Presently, there has not been any successful manned mission to any planet though the moon seems to be the only natural satellite that man has ever set his foot on.

NASA had disclosed earlier this year, that it had managed in creating the first 3D printed object in space together with a machine on the International Space Station and is now a 3D printing tools for use on the station. Several designers have created concepts for extra-terrestrial adventures which include a London firm Priestmangoode, who had designed a capsule which would be floating tourists to the edge of space together with ZA Architects, who intend sending robots to Mars to build caves for the purpose of human habitation. Stay tuned for more interesting updating details coming up for future exploration on the planet Venus.

Online Timesheet Management

Technology has been playing a very important role in our daily functions of life, which saves on time and effort and can be performed with ease and comfort. When it comes to obtaining working time records to the last details, the timesheet software is created to take note of employee work hours, performs the task effectively and efficiently maintaining the records for future references. Service providers at timesheetportal, is a UK registered company, catering to this form of service and can be relied on without any doubt with their remarkable services to their clients which include government bodies, consultancies, recruitment agencies, manufacturing and many more.The timesheet portal handles online timesheet management and records the details of the employee with accuracy wherein the viewer on arriving at the Timesheet Submission page has a bullet list of the features that are offered to the user. Moreover the user has the guidance outlining the useful benefits which streamline timesheet platform.

Recording Working Time

Recording working time is essential since it has an important impact on the overall performance of organisations or companies of various forms and sizes and is important for measuring profitability/expenditure of projects, billing on a consultancy basis, obtaining important information in order to make accurate forecast for any future projects as well as monitoring productivity and absenteeism of employee.The portal enables the user to concentrate on business progress instead of spending their time working on timesheets which would involve a lot of time and effort.

Timesheet Software 

Their timesheet software have the capabilities of producing reports which are fully customised, namely enabling different grouping of time together with tracked elements according to the needs of the individual which can be downloaded into Excel with ease. Complexity Simplified Timesheet Portal’s platform enable various options to record employee work time inclusive of shifts, hours or days together with overtime and onsite/offsite rates. This provides the flexibility of being efficiently suitable for all kinds of business as well as those which may have extremely complex working needs.

Convenient Module 

Moreover, online timesheets is also beneficial when it comes to manual labour and human errors which is reduced to a great deal since the natural human errors which may tend to crop up with traditional copying of information is avoided. Besides this, the software also has the potential of a convenient module which enables the user to efficiently produce invoices directly from the timesheets thereby saving on a lot of time which is an important aspect while working.

The Real Cybercrime Geography

According to cyber experts, the recent cyber attack on Sony Pictures was due to digital infiltration of North Korea. In digital world things change very rapidly and due to that spin doctors of North Korea stated in quick response that they didn’t hack the server of Sony Pictures and some of cybercrime experts from U.S. also telling the same that North Korean propagandists can be right. As per the evidence, which represented by FBI, it’s clear that incriminate hackers were working for the government organizations, communist, but still U.S experts stated that these proof are not just enough to blame Pyongyang.


According to Sam Glines, CEO of Norse (a cyber security firm), “According to data collection which was based on forensic evidence, it’s clear that North Korea is not accountable for any type of hacking activity or on initiating the attack on Sony Pictures”. All the hackers must be busy because thousands of information gathered from Sony Picture’s servers, which they released after few hours. All the leaked information was related to cast salaries, film’s budget, taxes of actors and actresses with little known fact that Kevin Federline act for a cameo appearance in $5,000. We all know that country North Korea is still on war with America, but America was never on the radar for computer attacks. So, who was responsible for cyber attack on Sony Picture’s? India? Russia? or Iran and Iraq? In future the answer can be the surprise.

According to Symantec there are 20 countries in world that can responsible for cyber attacks and the list was generated on following factors; malicious code rank, malicious computer activity, phishing, spam zombies rank, attack origin and bot rank. The top five countries according to survey were the U.S.A., China, Germany, Britain and Brazil, whereas; the in the list bottom three are Argentina, Australia and Israel, however; South Korea came in at No. 14, Russia at No. 12, and the fact is that North Korea didn’t make it to enter into top 20.

If you will say just gather 10 American computer experts on coffee table and soon the talk will turn into hacking and cybercrime, but it’s not true, however the Russians have been active in cybercrime and cyber-hacking from past few decades as they are also playing the vital role in cybercriminal world. In present if you own money, and want to hack into PC or mobile, so all you need to place an order or buy a program for a cyberattack to get someone’s personal information or swipe financial or banking information. IN western firms the online banking fraud and credit card information theft is normal, now the main question is “If the Russians are so good, so why they just landed up on rank at No. 12?

Fraud-Proof Credit Cards Through Quantum Physics

Researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Twente have come up with a secure way to authenticate he credit cards, IDs and biometrics with quantum cryptography. It is the method of quantum secure authentication through optical keys, which consist of sending a beam of light at cards with very special paint and later the reflection will use as the authentication mechanism.

It involves the coherent states of light with photon number, which means there are a lot of spaces for the bouncing of photons, as it can be more than one space on same time, so whenever the credit cards reflect the beam with specific paint there will be more dots or points of light will sent back than there are photons and it is well known that attackers won’t have enough amount of data to measure the entire pattern.

Research Details: 

This solution is very easy in implementation with current technology and it doesn’t depend on claim of researcher and stored data. In the process of research experts used the cards coated with millions of nano-particles in the form of white paint, which help to bounce the incoming light particles. In research experts have used the two spatial light modulators, a photon detector and a pinhole. In the process one of SLM have transformed incoming light on to desired challenge wave-front to sent it on the card and the reflected response with challenge were stored in a database.

In process each response of pair will requires 20 KB of memory or for 2,500 pairs it will require 50-MB of database and correct response were sent to a lens behind, which will be behind second SLM that focused them onto a photon detector to authenticate them.

System details: 

High spatial dimension states with photons are the main challenges for system. The created patterns will depend on the challenge as well as the position of the paint particles. In experiment each challenge was described by a 50 x 50 binary matrix, where every element corresponding to a phase was either 0 or Pi. As per the lead researcher, “All we need to make the illumination pattern complex to make sure that number of photons are lower than the number of pixels, which appears in image.

The first SLM will transform the wavefront of an incoming plane into a selected challenge wavefront at random from of database. As the challenge is created dynamically and exists only after the transformation, so it cannot be intercepted. All the response will be recorded in a phase-sensitive manner.

Nothing is impossible: 

When it comes to the failure of experiment, so system can be brake with the help of passive linear optical system, which can automatically transforms the any challenge into the correct response and it is very close to make the physical copy of key. So for full proof security must be done in the patterns of layers as different patterns require different level of security.