India
has a population of 1.3B with 750M unique mobile users. Approx 350M are
feature phone users with another 400M being smartphone users. With the
data growth over the last 18–24 months we’ve seen the data users grow
tremendously to 200M users. However, a massive gap still remains. Why
aren’t all 400M users using data?
We
asked ourselves. Why are the rest of the people not in this 200 million
bracket? There are still many challenges that exist in the country to
bring the remaining 1B online.
On top of that the entire experience of someone coming online is a very tedious 15–20 step process:
It
was clear that to bring the next billion people online we would have to
do something radically new. Could we take this 15–20 step funnel and
collapse it into a few steps?
We think we’ve done it. Today we’re announcing a brand new product called ‘Total, built by hike’.
‘Total,
built by hike’ is a refined version of Android targeted at simplifying
the smartphone and internet experience for the next billion people. ‘Total’
lets users access essential services such as Messaging, News, Recharge
and more even without an active data connection and paves the way for
them to get on Data by providing packs at as low as Re. 1.
It has 4 key elements to it that combined together make the end to end experience extremely seamless:
1. News, Cricket, Recharge, Wallet & More < 1MB
2. Single Login for All Services
3. Works Without Data
4. Total Data Packs Starting at Re 1. Over 50% Cheaper than Market.
Total Data Pack Pricing vs Market
Over
the last 6 months, Hike has worked extremely closely with telecom
partners to enable the USSD Technology & Data Upsell on Total.
Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel & BSNL are the telecom partners which cover
over 42% of the telecom market.
Intex and Karbonn
are the first Smartphone partners that will carry ‘Total, built by
Hike’. Total will be available on 4 models across Intex & Karbonn.
The devices with Total are:
Intex Aqua Lions N1
Intex Aqua Lions T1
Intex Aqua Lions T1-Lite and
Karbonn A40 Indian.
The devices are scheduled to hit the shelves starting 1st March 2018 starting at a price point of Rs 3,000.
Closing Thoughts
We’re excited by the potential of Total, built by hike
to impact millions of people in India as well as other developing
nations. ‘Total, built by hike’ propels digital inclusion and furthers
the national agenda of financial inclusion as well as socio-economic
progress. It works well for service providers as it gives them access to
millions of people who can use their services offline.
To be one of the first to experience Total, built by Hike,
Want
to start 2018 off as a developer? Well check out DevFreeBooks! Here you
will find over 150 books, the best part about it is, the books are
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Feather
is a large collection of open source icons that look stunning! Each
icon is designed on a 24x24 grid with an emphasis on simplicity,
consistency and readability. Great if you need some icons in one of your
projects!
Are
you designing an iOS, Android, or React Native app? If so, check out
Lottie!Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders
After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations
as easily as they use static images.
Were
you ever currious and wanted to know what powers a website? Well
WhatRuns will be useful for you! WhatRuns is a free research and
competitive intelligence tool for developers, designers and salespeople
to know the technologies used on any website.
Kite
is a heads up display (HUD) for programmers that surfaces proven
engineering knowledge in a live internet connected environment helping
developers write better code, faster. Kite is the first tool to offer a
connected way to program; it is integrated with text editors and it uses
type inference to reveal examples as programmers type without having to
leave the screen for a web browser.
Perfect
for developers starting out, Code to go helps developers learning
JavaScript find up to date, accurate and ready to use snippets of
JavaScript code for common use cases.
Over
170 responsive design blocks ready to be used in your web or mobile
apps. All blocks are based on the Bootstrap 4 Library, and they are the
building blocks for beautiful websites.
Happy New Year from the Dvlpr Stash Team ❤
We, at Dvlpr Stash
hope that you find these resources useful, and as a thank you for
everything, we’d like you give you 20% off of everything in our store.
Just use the coupon code ‘DEVELOPER2018’ during checkout. We wish you
guys a very Happy New Year and may 2018 be your best year to date!
I’m
leading a VR development studio, but the truth is I’ve been navigating a
series of epic career learning curves that have taken me far outside of
my comfort zone, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Mainstreet, Mall or Modem
On my quest to
start sharing more about our process and lessons learned on the virtual
frontier, I thought I’d start with a bit of background on how I arrived
here in the first place.
I
studied and practiced architecture, but I’ve been fascinated with
virtual technologies as far back as I can remember. In fact, my
architectural thesis project in grad school (image above) focused on how
VR and digital technologies would someday revolutionize
architecture — specifically retail architecture. This was 17 years ago,
when VR was very expensive, and largely inaccessible, but the brilliant
pioneers at work innovating in this field were demonstrating the massive
potential. It was only a matter of time before VR would find a way to
mainstream.
Like
so many other physical manifestations, from music to books and beyond, I
believe buildings are subject to a similar digital transcendence. It’s
already happening in a pretty big way, and this is just the beginning of
a major architectural transformation that might take another decade or
two to fully surface, but I digress… I’m saving this interest for a
future pivot, and almost certainly another epic learning curve to go
with it.
I tried using Everquest to visualize architecture.
I
had a level 47 Dark Elf Shadow Knight in Everquest, but spent most of
my time wandering around, exploring the environments. What I really
wanted to do was import my own architectural models to explore them
inside the game.
If
they could have such elaborate dungeons and forts to explore in
Everquest, with people from all around the world working together in the
game virtually, why couldn’t the same technology also be used to
visualize a new construction project, with the architect, building
owner, and construction team exploring or collaborating on the design
together?
This
quest to visualize architecture in a real-time world became a ‘first
principle’ in my career path that I’ve been chasing ever since.
I
met my amazing and tremendously patient wife, Kandy, in grad school,
and after studying architecture together in Europe and graduating, we
practiced architecture for some time before starting our own firm, Crescendo Design, focused on eco-friendly, sustainable design principles.
Then
one day in 2006, I read an article in Wired about Second Life — a
massively multi-player world where users could create their own content.
Within an hour, I was creating a virtual replica of a design we had on
the boards at the time. I had to use the in-world ‘prims’ to build it,
but I managed.
I
was working in a public sandbox at the time, and when I had the design
mostly finished, I invited the client in to explore it. They had 2 young
kids, who were getting a huge kick out of this watching over their
parent’s shoulders as they walked through what could soon be their new
home.
The Naked Lady, the Sheriff Bunny, and Epic Learning Curve #1.
We
walked in the front door, when suddenly a naked woman showed up and
started blocking the doorways. I reported her to the ‘Linden’
management, and a little white bunny with a big gold sheriff’s badge
showed up and kicked her out. “Anything else I can help with?” Poof..
the bunny vanished and we continued our tour. That’s when I realized I
needed my own virtual island (and what an odd place Second Life was).
But then something amazing happened that literally changed my career path, again.
I
left one of my houses in that public sandbox overnight. When I woke up
in the morning and logged in, someone had duplicated the house to create
an entire neighborhood — and they were still there working on it.
Architectural Collaboration on Virtual Steroids
I
walked my avatar, Keystone Bouchard, into one of the houses and found a
group of people speaking a foreign language (I think it was Dutch?)
designing the kitchen. They had the entire house decorated beautifully.
One
of the other houses had been modified by a guy from Germany who thought
the house needed a bigger living room. He was still working on it when I
arrived, and while he wasn’t trained in architecture, he talked very
intelligently about his design thinking and how he resolved the new roof
lines.
I
was completely blown away. This was architectural collaboration on
virtual steroids, and opened the door to another of the ‘first
principle’ vision quests I’m still chasing. Multi-player architectural
collaboration in a real-time virtual world is powerful stuff.
Steve Nelson, Jon Brouchoud, and Carl Bass delivering Keynote at Autodesk University 2006
One
day Steve Nelson’s avatar, Kiwini Oe, visited my Architecture Island in
Second Life and offered me a dream job designing virtual content at his
agency, Clear Ink, in Berkeley, California. Kandy and I decided to
relocate there from Wisconsin, where I enjoyed the opportunity to build
virtual projects for Autodesk, the U.S. House of Representatives, Sun
Microsystems and lots of other virtual installations. I consider that
time to be one of the most exciting in my career, and it opened my eyes
to the potential for enterprise applications for virtual worlds.
Wikitecture
I
started holding architectural collaboration experiments on Architecture
Island. We called it ‘Wikitecture.’ My good friend, Ryan Schultz, from
architecture school suggested we organize the design process into a
branching ‘tree’ to help us collaborate more effectively.
Studio
Wikitecture was born, and we went on to develop the ‘Wiki Tree’ and one
of our projects won the Founder’s Award and third place overall from
over 500 entries worldwide in an international architecture competition
to design a health clinic in Nyany, Nepal.
These
were exciting times, but we were constantly faced with the challenge
that we weren’t Second Life’s target audience. This was a
consumer-oriented platform, and Linden Lab was resolutely and
justifiably focused on growing their virtual land sales and in-world
economy, not building niche-market tools to help architects collaborate.
I don’t blame them — more than 10 years after it launched, it still has
a larger in-world economy of transactions of real money than some small
countries.
We
witnessed something truly extraordinary there — something I haven’t
seen or felt since. Suffice it to say, almost everything I’ve done in
the years since have been toward my ultimate goal of someday, some way,
somehow, instigating the conditions that gave rise to such incredible
possibilities. We were onto something big.
Before I kick-start this article, please allow me to wish
“ A Very Very Very… Happy New Year 2018” To all you lovely readers and my well wishers.
It
has been an amazing journey so far being a part of this mobile app
revolution since 2006, I feel blessed to see both pre & post
smartphone evolution era and having experienced the change myself being
the developer, leader and now a father of my own mobility startup. So
thought to analyze the trend setters which kind of will rule this new
year.
So
here is my Top three technology trends you all should look out for in
your endeavors in this new year 2018, which as always, will offer you
loads of new opportunities to rock this world. Being a part of this
mobile app ecosystem I feel immense pride while writing this piece of
article for all you visionaries and future mobile apprenuer.
1. Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality:
Wiki Defines AR as :
Augmented reality (AR)
is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment
whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated or extracted
real-world sensory input such as sound, video, graphics, haptics or GPS
data.
As per Wiki VR is :
Virtual reality (VR)
is a computer technology that uses virtual reality headsets or
multi-projected environments, sometimes in combination with physical
environments or props, to generate realistic images, sounds and other
sensations that simulate a user’s physical presence in a virtual or
imaginary environment.
Mobile
AR could become the primary driver of a $108 billion VR/AR market by
2021 (underperform $94 billion, outperform $122 billion) with AR taking
the lion’s share of $83 billion and VR $25 billion.
In
2017 a lot has happened in this AR where Google & Apple invested
heavily to harness the true potential of it. Apple has launched ARKit & Google has come up with ARCore, for developer to innovate and create some meaningful mobile solutions for the smartphone users.
As AR
helps in adding a digital layer over virtual information to give a more
realistic and unambiguous outlook. AR intertwined apps will gradually
empower retail, life science, manufacturing, and many other domains
through a wide range AR apps being developed to cater these sectors.
I Feel :
AR
will take a huge leap forward to further revolutionize the ever
progressing gaming industry and will stretch beyond it to empower the
digital marketing world where gamification will be employed to attract
& acquire new consumer for brands . All marketers need to adopt this
tool to target their customers beyond conventional physical marketing.
With most of the marketers seeing augmented reality as a way to provide a
compelling user experience, we will soon be seeing a plethora of
creative AR apps alluring consumers to buy their customized offerings
Virtual
Reality technologies will be more focused on the game and events sphere
as it is already doing so in 2017 and will go beyond to add more
evolved app usage experience to offer an elevated dose of entertainment
for the gaming user.
I find:
With
iPhone X, Apple is trying to change the face of AR by making it a
common use case for masses. Also A whole bunch of top tech players think
this technology which is also called a mixed reality or immersive
environments — is all set to create a truly digital-physical blended
environment for the people who are majorly consuming digital world
through their mobile power house
With Gartner predicting 26 bn
connected devices by 2020 which ranges from LEDs, Toys, Sports
equipment, medical equipment, to controllable power sockets.We will be
privileged to witness the world where everything will connected with
these small devices thereby bringing information right where you are
standing. Also these information will be tapped right were it is being
generated to empower the data centre using Edge Computing tech.
The
smart objects will be interacting with our smartphone/tablets which
will eventually function like our TV remort displaying and analyzing
data, interfacing with social networks to monitor “things” that can
tweet or post, paying for subscription services, ordering replacement
consumables and updating object firmware.
Big Tech Gaints Are Already Bullish On IoT Connected World:
Microsoft
is powering their popular IIS(Intelligent Systems Service) by
integrating IoT capabilities to their enterprise service offerings.
Some of the known communication technology powering IoT concept is RFID, WIFI, EnOcean, RiotOS etc….
Google
is working on two of its ambitious project called Nest & Brillo
which is circled around usage of IoT to fuel your home automation needs.
Brillo is an IoT OS which enables Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and
other Android stuffs.
Established companies such as Microsoft, with its Intelligent Systems Service,
and enterprise software vendors likes SAP, with its Internet of Things
Solutions, are also adding Internet of Things capabilities to their
offerings.
Amazon
launched ‘Amazon Echo’ a amazing tech which works on your voice command
to answer your queries, play songs and control smart devices within
certain range.
I Feel:
IoT & IoT Based Apps:
Is
here to stay and will be playing a very crucial rule in helping you
navigate this world with more ease & comfort, making your commuting
safe, your communication smart, your shopping productive, your learning
more engaging and much more.. to make your living effective and
efficient. In fact, IoT is slowly becoming part of every aspect of our
lives. Not only will IoT apps augment our comfort, but they will also
extend us more control to simplify routine work life and personal tasks.
Most
of IoT powered devices are already relying on mobile devices to
syndicate data, especially in case of consumer IoT. With the surge in
overall uses of Internet of Things , I feel more mobile apps will be
developed for management of these smart devices.
A
blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all
cryptocurrency transactions. Constantly growing as ‘completed’ blocks
(the most recent transactions) are recorded and added to it in
chronological order, it allows market participants to keep track of
digital currency transactions without central recordkeeping. Each node
(a computer connected to the network) gets a copy of the blockchain,
which is downloaded automatically.
9
in 10 government firms are planning to invest in blockchain for
financial transaction management, asset management, contract management
and regulatory compliance purposes.
Another research by Infosys says:
One-third of banks are expected to adopt commercial blockchain in 2018.
So
it is quite clear that secured transactions based mobility solution
will rule the fin-tech & other industry where security lies at the
core. App developers will have a crucial role to play where they will be
expected to develop more innovative app solutions to cater the need for
secure & connected world. Your mobile phones are generating lots of
confidential informations which needs to be secured from the third
party breaches. So techies gear up and pull up your socks as, I feel
Blockchain-based security mechanism are expected to be developed on
mobile apps in the coming years and will needed in all kinds of
industries ranging from fin-tech, eCommerce, Insurance tech etc….
Blockchain
powered cryptos like bitcoin, ripple, Ethereum is already a rage in the
technology & investment world. It has fascinated the imagination of
many tech innovators leading them to adopt blockchain tech to develop
wallets & currencies and most of them are being developed on mobile
devices & computer systems, thereby offerings lots of opportunities
for techies to adopt it as futuristic career options.
Using
the blockchain tech entrepreneurs will be developing a solutions mostly
over mobile to validate transactions securely, manage contracts
smartly, store digital currencies(like bitcoins ,XRP etc), manage
voting, secure hassle free shopping, powering banking transactions and
many more innovative solutions which will be targeted towards making
consumers life more resourceful and productive eventually.
There are many more trends which will be disrupting the mobility world like
Artificial Intelligence :
Where Machine learning , Deep Learning all will play a crucial role in
fueling intelligence to the machines to help them make smart decisions
without human interventions. Mobile chatbots is one of the prime example
of one such use case of AI. Apps like Siri, Google Now are already
harnessing AI technology and will be inspiring many more voice based and
Images based AI innovations to be made by mobile appreneurs. Mobile
data will be tapped giving it more intelligent forms by app developers
to make our life smarter with time.
Mobile computing/Cloud computing :Based
mobility solutions will be in high demand specially for big enterprises
where business decisions are made based on intelligent data analytics .
All these will be stored over the cloud and mobile will play a major
role in harnessing the power of those data to serve consumer in real
time.
Some of My Other Relevant Tech Article Which Can be Useful:
Having
seen the world of mobility, changing from feature phone to a smartphone
era I feel amazed how it has transformed the life of humans. Now we can
communicate in split seconds, transact in no time, buy what we need
with one touch, get entertained when & where we want, shower our
love to our closed ones without being physically present and do many
more things which one can imagine just over this tiny powerful device.
So
as a developer and as a tech visionary you have, the greater
responsibility to make sure that you are creating tools which
complements user needs and impacts them deeply. It’s your duty to
entertain them, educate them, and to make them feel safe & secure on
the go.
Ending
by, extending my sincere gratitude to all you awesome readers for
showering all your love & constantly inspiring me to write more
& learn more eventually.
I
don’t really understand most of the proposals to “regulate” Facebook.
There are some concrete proposals on the table regarding political ads and updating antitrust for the data age,
but other punditry is largely consumer advocacy kabuki. For example,
blunting the data Facebook can use to target ads or tune newsfeed hurts
the user experience, and there’s really no stable way to draw a line
around what’s appropriate versus not. These experiences are too fluid.
But while I want keep the government out of the product design business,
there’s an alternate path which has merit: establish a baseline for the
control a person has over their data on these systems.
Today
the platforms give their users a single choice: keep your account
active or delete your account. Sure, some expose small amounts of ad
targeting data and let you manipulate that, but on the whole they
provide limited or no control over your ability to “start over.” Want to
delete all your tweets? You have to use a third party app. Want to
delete all your Facebook posts? Good luck with that. Nope, once you’re
in the mousetrap, there’s no way out except account suicide.
BUT
is that really fair? Over multiple years, we all change. Things we said
in 2011 may or may not represent us today. And these services
evolve — did we think we’d be using Facebook as a primary source of news
consumption and private messaging back when you were posting baby
photos? Did you think they’d also own Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and so
on when you created accounts on those services? We’re the frogs, slow
boiling in the pot of water.
What
if every major platform was required to have something between Create
Account and Delete Account? One which allows you to keep your user name
but selectively delete the data associated with the account? For
Facebook, you could have a set of individual toggles to Delete All
Friend Connections, Delete All Posts, Delete All Targeting Data. Each of
these could be used individually or together to give you a fresh start.
Maybe you want to preserve your social graph but wipe your feed? Maybe
you want to keep your feed but rebuild your graph.
Or for Twitter: Delete All Likes, Delete All Tweets, Delete All Follows, Delete All Targeting Data.
Or for YouTube: Delete All Uploads, Delete All Subscriptions, Delete All Likes, Delete All Targeting Data.
The
technical requirements to develop these features are only complicated
in the sense of making sure you’re deleting the data everywhere it’s
stored, otherwise every product already support “null” state — it looks
very much like a new account. This leads me to believe that the only
reason these features don’t exist today are (a) it would be bad for
business and (b) actual or perceived lack of consumer demand.
Anecdotally, it feels like (b) is changing — more and more people I know
wipe their tweets, talk about deleting their histories, and so on.
Imagine the ability to stage a “DataBoycott” by clearing your history if
you think Facebook is taking liberties with your privacy and such. This
is what keeps power in check.
As we’re getting ready to ship your Axum earbuds next month,
we still get lots of questions from customers about the sound quality.
How’s the highs? what made your bass so good?
So I’ll try to explain in 2–3 minutes how implementing Qualcomm’s technology helped us achieve CD-Quality sound.
For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, Qualcomm is the world leader in mobile technologies.
Several years ago they’ve acquired a company from the UK that changed the game in wireless audio.
What’s so special about them?
Well, let’s just say they took the CD-Quality sound and were able to reproduce it over wireless connectivity-
Yes, I know it sounds simple but it’s quite a big problem.
As we said in the past, we’re using it in Axum and that’s 1 of our secrets.
Now
for those of you who want to get technical and learn more (I’ll be
honest with you, once the engineer told me about it I spent the night
digging into it) I’ll explain how it works:
When sending music over wireless connectivity,
it breaks as the bandwidth isn’t big enough.
So what they did?
They split those files into smaller ones,
this way you can stream it over wireless connectivity.
But the best part?
You’ll get the same wired sound quality!
As for the bass, what made it so good is:
Our custom made driver, that we’ve been testing over and over for the last 14 months
Maybe
you saw those $1 speakers that you place on your table and suddenly the
entire table starts shaking from the bass (I’ll ignore their
joy-risking horrible sound quality)? as it turns into the kind of bass
box for the speaker. Great, so one major factor with sound is the
acoustics and shape of the earbuds and that’s why we had to do so many
tests with the plastics and internal design. We knew that every 1mm
change (especially with such a small product) will have a huge impact on
the sound.
In production, like in life, there are no shortcuts.
You want to achieve the best?
You want to make an awesome product?
You want to beat the competition?
Well, in such case you’ll have to outwork your competition!
We knew the ONLY way to achieve success was to push our limits
and make another test, another prototype, another upgrade,
and when we thought “that’s it, Axum is ready…” to try another change,
another solution to make it even better.
And trust me, we wish we could make it on the first try and ship it.
But that’s the beautiful world we’re living it,
full of surprises and great rewards for those who go all-in with their goals.
These kind of things (and hundred more) is what turns Axum,
Redesigns its App for easy discoverability of transactional services
Cab booking, bus, train, movie tickets, bill payments and more will soon be possible on Hike
21 December:
Hike Messenger, India’s first homegrown messaging app today announced
that it has crossed 10 million transactions per month on its Wallet,
growing 100% month-over-month. Hike is the first messaging app to
integrate payments in India and Hike Wallet has seen exponential growth
over the last two months. Of the 10M transactions, 70% were on recharge
and the remaining 30% on P2P.
The
app also has been redesigned to provide easy access to transactional
services on the new homescreen. Users will no longer need to scroll
through the chat thread or look for the services they want to go to. One
can view the entire portfolio of services and just tap to access these
and pay seamlessly through the Hike Wallet.
Seeing
this phenomenal response, with just a simple set of services like
Recharge & P2P, Hike is planning to add more services like cab
bookings, bus, train, movie tickets and pay bills in Q1 2018.
According to Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger, “The
growth on the Wallet has been tremendous and honestly we’re just
getting started. On the back of this growth, we’ve launched an updated
design to make it easier to discover and transact with services on Hike.
It’s also become quite clear to us that our users want more services.
So we’re heads down working hard to bring things like booking taxis,
movietickets and more to the platform. Expect these to start rolling out
as early as next quarter.’
About Hike Messenger
Hike
is the first messaging and social technology company made with love in
India. It simplifies how people connect with others and changes the way
they interact with content and services on mobile. It is the only
successful Indian messaging platform with scale.
Hike
was launched on 12/12/12 and acquired a user base of over 100 million
in January 2016. In August 2016, Hike raised its fourth round of funding
of USD 175 million led by Tencent and Foxconn at a valuation of USD 1.4
billion, making it the fastest company in the India to attain a
valuation of USD 1 billion, having reached the milestone in just 3.7
years. Investors in Hike include Tencent, Foxconn, Tiger Global,
Softbank and Bharti. Apart from these, some of the top tech veterans
from the Silicon Valley have also invested in the company and are
advisors.
Today, Hike has over 350 employees spread across 2 offices in Delhi and Bangalo
Hardik Gandhi is Master of Computer science,blogger,developer,SEO provider,Motivator and writes a Gujarati and Programming books and Advicer of career and all type of guidance.
