What is Minecraft and why did Microsoft just spend $2.5 billion on it ??????

Adidas Brazuca

The Adidas Brazuca was the official match ball of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which was held in Brazil.It is designed by the company Adidas, a FIFA Partner and FIFA World Cup Official Match Ball supplier since 1970.The ball was manufactured and supplied for the World Cup by Forward Sports of Sialkot, Pakistan.

Naming

The name of the ball was revealed on Sunday 2 September 2012. It was selected by a public vote organised by the Local Organising Committee and Adidas, with over one million Brazilian football fans voting The name Brazuca was chosen with 77.8% of the vote. Two other voting options were given: Bossa Nova (14.6% of the vote) and Carnavalesca (7.6% of the vote).

According to FIFA, “the informal term ‘brazuca’ (our fellow) is used by Brazilians to describe national pride in the Brazilian way of life”, and “mirroring their approach to football, it symbolises emotion, pride and goodwill to all”.The term is also used as slang for “Brazilian” and became well-known abroad due to the Brazilian diaspora.

Design

The ball has a multi-colour design referenced from the traditional wish bracelet to represent Brazil.The colours used in the match balls are blue, green, red, white and black.

Final match – Brazuca Final Rio

The match ball for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final, announced on May 29 2014, featured a variation of the Adidas Brazuca named the Adidas Brazuca Final Rio.Whilst the technical aspects of the ball are the same the design is different from the Brazuca balls used in the group stages and other playoffs, with a green, gold and black colouring.It is the third special ball for FIFA World Cup final matches, after the +Teamgeist Berlin (2006 FIFA World Cup) and the Jabulani (2010 FIFA World Cup).

Production

The Brazuca balls for the World Cup finals are produced in Pakistan,however replica balls will be made in both Chin and Pakistan

Taipei-based Long Way Enterprise were originally asked to manufacture the ball in their subsidiary YaYork Plastic Products in Shenzhen, Guangdong province,China.The company has been associated with production of Adidas balls since 1997.

However Long Way was unable to meet the high demand for the ball.A second supplier, Forward Sports (based in Sialkot, Pakistan), was brought in to help manufacture the ball.Forward Sports, who have been associated with Adidas since 1995 and already supplied footballs for both the Champions Leagueand the German Bundesligawere awarded the contract by Adidas at short notice after the original manufacturer in China failed to meet the demand^{[citation needed]}. Over 42 million Brazuca balls were exported from Sialkot.Each ball is expected to be sold for around US$160.

HTC One M8 : 5 to unleash your device’s true potential !

Though the HTC One (M8) is a very expensive handset, it currently represents the best that Android has to offer right now. Its predecessor was hailed as the best smartphone of 2013 and HTC has not disappointed amidst all the hype. Want to make the most out of your HTC One (M8)? Here are some handy HTC One (M8) tips and tricks on the many cool things you can do with your HTC superphone.

Nexus 5 tips and tricks for Android 5.0 Lollipop

The Nexus 5 is not dead yet. Google’s successor, the Nexus 6, may be upon us but that hasn’t been enough to snuff out the the Nexus 5 flame. At completely different price points, with arguably different goals, the Nexus 5 looks like it will be relevant for quite some time to come, especially thanks to itstasty Android 5.0 Lollipopinjection. Here are some of the best Lollipop Nexus 5 tips you can find.

What to do with an old smartphone ? 9 ways to reuse it

After you receive a new phone for the holiday season, like a shiny new LG G3 or a Nexus 6, you might still have an old phone hanging around. This doesn’t mean you just scored yourself a new paperweight,  door-stopper or something that just lies around collecting dust. There are plenty of uses for an old handset, in addition to the obvious option of selling it, so here are 9 cool things to do with an old phone. The LAST thing you want to do is throw it in the trash!

8 Answers To Things You’ve Always Wondered About……

1. If our blood is red, why are our veins blue?

No matter what people try to tell you, our blood is always red. So why do our veins look blue? It’s because there are different wavelengths with different properties hitting our arm when we look at it. The blue light just happens to be absorbed by the blood and make it back to your eye.

2.Why can’t we decide if tomatoes are fruits or vegetables?

It looks like a vegetable, but it’s classified as a fruit. Or is it the other way around? The tomato is technically a fruit since it protects and contains the seeds of its plant, but according to a Supreme Court ruling, is is classified as a vegetable. Why? The Tariff Act of March 3, 1883 required a tax to be paid on imported vegetables, but not fruit, and they didn’t want any tomato farmers going untaxed.

2.Why do we say “cheese” when we get our pictures taken?

The origin is unknown, but when you say “cheese,” the act of saying the word turns the corners of your mouth lift up, your cheeks lift, and you show off a toothy grin.

4.What is it about showers and creative thoughts?

Our best ideas come to us in the shower because its a mindless task. Since your shower routine doesn’t require much thought, it frees your mind to wander and think of something else.

5.Why is the sky blue?

Much like our veins appear blue, it has everything to do with wavelengths and blue light. Blue light scatters more than the other colors in the spectrum because it travels as shorter, smaller waves.

6.Why do our fingers get wrinkly in the shower?

Scientists have figured out why our fingers and toes get wrinkly during bathtime. It actually has nothing to do with absorbing the water, and everything to do with improving our grip on things underwater. Think of it like the treads in a tire giving a much better grip in slippery conditions. The human body is amazing.

7.How do magnets work?

“Magnets: how do they work?” Actually, The Insane Clown Posse asked a good question. According to Northeastern University, a magnet is simply any object that produces its own magnetic field and interacts with other magnetic field. Magnets have two poles (north and south) and the magnetic field starts and the north pole and ends at the south pole.

8.Why do we have eyebrows?

You have to pluck them and prune them, so why do they even exist? Aside from being a very distinct feature on your face that helps you communicate, there’s actually a very good reason eyebrows exist. If you’ve ever run longer than to catch a bus, you know just how sweaty your forehead can get – sweat can even drip down into your eyes and cause temporary blindness. And that’s why your eyebrows exist. Consider them a built-in headband!

Mark Zuckerberg

Synopsis

Born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room. He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user base of which has grown to more than 250 million people, making Zuckerberg a billionaire. The birth of Facebook was recently portrayed in the film The Social Network.

Early Life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family, and raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family’s home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple’s four children—Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named “Zucknet.” His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. “I had a bunch of friends who were artists,” he said. “They’d come over, draw stuff, and I’d build a game out of it.”

To keep up with Mark’s burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school’s team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics. Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.

Time at Harvard

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By his sophomore year at the ivy league institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard’s student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.

Zuckerberg and his friends created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site—first called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

The Rise of Facebook

In 2005, Zuckerberg’s enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to ivy league students. Zuckerberg’s company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site’s membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site then began attracting the interest of other companies, who wanted to advertize with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up, however in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle. The creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses. Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks but, after lawyers searched Zuckerberg’s records, incriminating Instant Messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users’ private information to his friends.

Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?” he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I think I’ve grown and learned a lot.”

Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.

Zuckerberg faced yet another personal challenge when the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, by writer Ben Mezrich, hit stores. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg’s story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters. Regardless of how true-to-life the story was, Mezrich managed to sell the rights of the tale to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and the critically acclaimed film The Social Network received eight Academy Award nominations.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film’s narrative, and later told a reporter atThe New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg has been dating longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2003. He also said he never had interest in joining any of the final clubs. “It’s interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own,” Zuckerberg told a reporter at a start-up conference in 2010. “So there’s all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right.”

Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism.Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fairplaced him at the top of their New Establishment list. Forbes also ranked Zuckerberg at No. 35—beating out Apple CEO Steve Jobs—on its “400” list, estimating his net worth to be $6.9 billion.

SUCCESS STORY OF “BILL GATES”

   Bill Gates – A Success Story

              Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle in a family having rich business, political and community service background. His great-grandfather was a state legislator and a mayor, his grandfather was vice president of national bank and his father was a lawyer.

             Bill believed in achieving his goals through hard work. He also believes that if you are intelligent and know how to use your intelligence, you can reach your goals and targets. From his early days Bill was ambitious, competitive and intelligent. These qualities helped him to attain great position in the profession he chose also Bill was deemed by his peers and his teachers as the smartest kid on campus; Bill’s parents came to know their son’s intelligence and decided to enroll him in a private school, known for its intense academic environment. That was the most important decision in Bill Gate’s life where he was first introduced to computers. Bill Gates and his friends were very much interested in computer and formed “Programmers Group” in late 1968. Being in this group, they found a new way to apply their computer skill in university of Washington. In the next year, they got their first opportunity in Information Sciences Inc. in which they were selected as programmers. ISI (Information Sciences Inc.) agreed to give them royalties, whenever it made money from any of the group’s program. As a result of the business deal signed with Information Sciences Inc., the group also became a legal business.

 Bill Gates and his close friend Allen formed a new company of their own, Traf-O-Data. They developed a small computer to measure traffic flow. From this project they earned around $20,000. The era of Traf-O-Data came to an end when Gates left the college. Upon graduating from Lakeside Bill enrolled in Harvard University in 1973, one of the best universities in the country, He didn’t know what to do, so he enrolled his name for pre-law. He took the standard freshman courses with the exception of signing up for one of Harvard’s toughest mathematics courses. He did well over there, but he couldn’t find it interesting too. He spent many long nights in front of the school’s computer and the next day asleep in class. After leaving school, he almost lost himself from the world of computers. Gates and his friend Paul Allen remained in close contact even though they were away from school. They would often discuss new ideas for future projects and the possibility of starting a business one fine day. At the end of Bill’s first year, Allen came close to him so that they could follow some of their ideas. That summer they got job in Honeywell. Allen kept on pushing Bill for opening a new software company.

 Within a year, Bill Gates dropped out from Harvard. Then he formed Microsoft. Microsoft’s vision is “A computer on every desk and Microsoft software on every computer”. Bill is a visionary person and works very hard to achieve his vision. His belief in high intelligence and hard work has put him where he is today. He does not believe in mere luck or God’s grace, but just hard work and competitiveness. Bill’s Microsoft is good competition for other software companies and he will continue to stomp out (challenge) the competition until he dies. He likes to play the game of Risk and the game of world domination. His beliefs are so powerful, which have helped him increase his wealth and his monopoly in the industry.

Bill Gates is not a greedy person. In fact, he is quite giving person when it comes to computers, internet and any kind of funding. Some years back, he visited Chicago’s Einstein Elementary School and announced grants benefiting Chicago’s schools and museums where he donated a total of $110,000, a bunch of computers, and provided internet connectivity to number of schools. Secondly, Bill Gates donated 38 million dollars for the building of a computer institute at Stanford University.