The e-wallet infinity war in Malaysia - Everything you need to know about e-wallet starts here...

1. The dawn of the e-wallet infinity war

The Malaysia e-wallet Infinity War has just begun

If you have to name one emerging trend in digital and e-commerce space here in Malaysia, in 2018, what would it be? The talk of the town, the key battlefield is definitely e-wallet (or Dompet Digital in Malay language). This is a key development as we foresee it will fulfill its potential to transform not just how consumers transfer money to each other, it will also change how consumers pay for products and services, both offline or online.

Truth to be told, e-wallet is a game of two-sided markets. In order to be successful, e-wallet provider needs to have payment adoption by consumers, and also payment acceptance by merchants, both at massive scale.

Make no mistake, this is going to be a long-term battle which will take years in an attempt to change Malaysia consumer behavior, as we still predominantly a cash society with 80% of our transactions are still done in cash. As far as "cashless" is concerned, we are quite well served by the cards (Visa and Mastercard) considering we have over 52 million credit and debit cards circulated in the market.

For the e-wallet providers, it will require serious war chest to continuously lure consumers to adopt in mass (at the same time, onboard more merchants) until the habit of using e-wallet takes place and naturally becoming part of the consumers' lifestyle.

Up to date, there are already 37 non-bank e-money licenses being issued by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM). Unofficially, we were told, a total of 40 over licenses are already issued. However, you will only find e-wallets which have already gone live listed on BNM website (under the E-money issuers category).

So, why does it concern you as a merchant? If you are a merchant selling products to consumers, you will need to evaluate the impacts across these few real-life scenarios.

(i) How consumers will pay offline? (Retail + Data) - You might leave your wallet at home, but you are unlikely to forget your mobile phone. High penetration of smart phone in Malaysia made it a fertile soil for fast growth in mobile payment. One thing is certain, with all the cashless policies by BNM, cash usage will reduce over time, and the adoption of mobile payments will only go up.

(ii) How consumers will pay online? (eCommerce + Data) - Online payment gateway providers like iPay88 and aggregators already start to offer e-wallet as one of the payment options. This allows merchants to accept the e-wallet payment with ease. What's next? We will probably expect tight integration of e-wallet payment into mobile commerce. Just imagine Lazada or Shopee supporting checkout with e-wallet with just your thumbprint or face!

Screenshots of e-wallet payment option supported by iPay88 online payment gateway

(iii) How consumers make payment to each other? (P2P Transfer) - Imagine a scenario where restaurant bills are easily split when we go Dutch, and transfer of small changes (say goodbye to coins) with just a few taps on your mobile. The sending or receiving of money via e-wallet app is way easier and faster than online bank transfer.

(iv) How merchants keep the customers coming back? (Big Data + Loyalty & Rewards) - All this while, most retailers do not know any details of their cash-paying customers. This will change,  with the adoption of e-wallet, we foresee more merchants will combine data (a.k.a. the new oil), analytical and loyalty technology to serve their customers better and keep them coming back for more.

2. Does e-wallet provider need a license in Malaysia?

The more accurate question would be, does e-money provider, need a license in Malaysia? This is because what Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) really regulate, is actually e-money, the digital money that gets stored in the e-wallet.

Let's see how BNM defines e-money.

The Financial Services Act 2013 defines e-money as a payment instrument, whether tangible or intangible, that stores funds electronically in exchange of funds paid to the issuer and is able to be used as a means of making payment to any person other than the issuer.

Therefore, e-money is legally recognized as a valid and enforceable legal tender in Malaysia.

In short, any open-loop e-money provider will require an e-money license by BNM. Open-loop means that the e-money issued by the provider can be spent or transferred to third parties apart from the provider itself.

All e-money licensees are governed by Financial Services Act 2013, Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 and all directives, orders or guidelines issued thereunder including any guidelines issued by BNM.

Note: The Financial Services Act (FSA) and the Islamic Financial Services Act (IFSA) came into force on 30 June 2013, replacing the repealed Payment System Act 2003 (PSA).

E-money is categorized as one of the Payment Instruments 

3. What is Bank Negara Malaysia policy on e-wallet?

Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has set its goal to turn Malaysia into a cashless society.

The main benefits for Malaysia? A cashless society may result in savings amounting up to 1% of a country's economy due to lower retail payment cost versus cash transactions.

Thus, BNM has initiated ICTF (Interoperable Credit Transfer Framework) to spur the next wave of e-payment adoption. It has gone into effect since 1st July 2018

With ICTF, BNM wants to encourage innovation and competition by ensuring both banks and non-banks (e.g. Touch 'n Go eWallet, Boost, WeChat Pay etc) to have a fair and open access to a shared payment infrastructure, which will be operated by Paynet (Payments Network Malaysia, jointly owned by BNM and 11 local banks)

In pursuant to the Framework, PayNet is developing a platform called RPP (Real-time Retail Payments Platform) utilizing the technology solution by ACI network. RPP is the critical component of ICTF to enable interoperability of Inter-Bank Credit Transfer and Inter-Scheme (e-money) Credit Transfer. It basically means, bank and non-banks will be connected on a single payment network, and transfer of money among banks and non-banks will be made possible.

RPP will consist of these 2 elements:

1.A National Addressing Database (NAD) - A national level database which will link your bank or e-money account to your mobile phone number, your identification number (IC) or your business registration number. This is to enable anyone to transfer money to other parties by just using these easier-to-remember details compared to the bank account number. You can see the first implementation in DuitNow, which is slated to be rolled out by the end of 2018. Once DuitNow is implemented, customers may make payments by accessing DuitNow under the ‘Funds Transfer’ menu of their respective banks’ Internet banking portal or mobile banking app.


2.An Interoperable QR Scheme and Common QR codes - One of the main challenges now is merchants adopting e-wallet will carry a static, proprietary QR code from respective e-wallet providers. It will become a hassle for merchants to display all the QR codes, and it can be very confusing for the consumers too. To streamline this, banks and qualified e-money issuers are required to a utilize QR code that complies with the interoperable QR code payment scheme set by Paynet. In laymen terms, it means that we can easily transfer money by just using any e-wallet app to scan any 3rd party QR code which is already complied with the Paynet QR standard. The interoperable QR Code scheme will adopt the standard by EMVCo.

What ICTF does for Interoperable QR Payment in the near future?

The benefits are obvious with ICTF, seamless and secure payments between the bank and non-bank (e-money) accounts will become a reality. Furthermore, ICTF policy will also bring down the cost of transaction fee which we are now enjoying. Have you noticed that the fee is already waived for both IBG and Instant Transfer if you transfer RM5000 or less? This will further encourage the usage of e-payment.

In a similar effort to BNM, Singapore government has rolled out SGQR Code. This is slightly different from our BNM approach as MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) enforce only a common QR code (SGQR) to be displayed by the merchant.


However, unlike SGQR, BNM will not enforce a common QR to be displayed by merchants. Merchants will be allowed to display the static QR code by the e-wallet providers, allowing merchants more flexibility as they see fit. 

Singapore Education Minister Ong Ye Kung, who is also a board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), holding a selfie board with the 27 payment schemes onboard on SGQR (Source: MAS Twitter)

If you wish to learn more about what BNM is doing to drive Malaysia towards a cashless society, listen to Tan Nyat Chuan, Director of Payment Systems Policy, Bank Negara Malaysia.

Some BNM goals and its numbers to put you in perspective:

• BNM intends to increase the number of card terminals from fewer than 300,000 to 800,000 “chip-and-pin” in 2020 and one billion debit transactions by 2020.
• To increase the number of machines from 8 to 25 POS terminals per 1,000 capita by 2020 (to accept debit, credit and prepaid cards)
• Bring down the usage of cheques from 200 million to 100 million.

4. Who are the e-wallet providers in Malaysia?

Let's first investigate how many e-money licenses have BNM granted so far? The answer is 42 e-money licenses at the time of publishing - 5 banks, and 37 non-banks.

We are expecting a few more e-money issuers, notably Telekom Malaysia and MyEG which had announced the intention to join the e-wallet bandwagon.

On another hand, we have witnessed Payfy (by Astro) and Setel (by Petronas Dagangan) launching their own e-wallets app. We think these two are interesting ones to monitor even both remain close-loop for now. Obviously, Payfy is able to tap on Astro's 3.3 million subscribers base, and we foresee it will be tightly integrated to its Astro Go Shop (TV Shopping).

How about Setel? It is the first e-wallet app integrated with (Petronas) fuel pumps in Southeast Asia, allowing you to pay for fuel without even leaving the car. Setel aims to cover all the 1,045+ Petronas stations by the end of 2019. It also supports linking to Petronas Mesra Cards (with more than 7 million circulations in Malaysia) and features like converting the Mesra points to e-money are already in the roadmap.

eCommerce marketplaces have also launched a similar "e-wallet" feature in their app, namely Lazada Wallet and we foresee Shopee will launch its own e-wallet dubbed AirPay in 2019.

5. Which e-wallet providers will stay in the long run?

Who will end up with the last laugh? While it is way too early to tell, however, in our opinion, those with millions of existing user base will have a serious edge in the e-wallet infinity war.

Among the e-money issuers, there are a few 800-pound gorillas in the race, namely Touch 'n Go Digital (a joint venture between Alipay and Touch 'n Go), WeChat Pay (Tencent Group), GrabPay, Boost (Axiata), BigPay (75% owned by AirAsia), and AEON Wallet (AEON Group). All these providers have access to an existing user base in the millions, not to mention the technology and financial muscles they can wield.

Let's summarize below why these gorillas "roar" in the battle against cash:

• AEON Wallet - AEON is one of the largest retail groups in Malaysia with millions of existing AEON members in its RM12-per-year paid loyalty program. The new e-wallet that ties to a Visa Prepaid Card is developed by AEON Credit Service. They are aggressively recruiting users via all the brick-and-mortar outlets. Self-checkout at stores using AEON Wallet could be in the pipeline too. 
• Boost - A homegrown (by Axiata Group) network based e-wallet provider that started from scratch and now boosted with 3.3 million registered users, 50,000 touch points and supported by 10,000 cab drivers. Boost is arguably one of the most aggressive in marketing with users loving its shake rewards for each transaction made. Boost announced a partnership with UnionPay International (UPI) in July 2018 and soon its users will be able to make payment to any merchants accepting UnionPay cards.
• BigPay - BigPay (Rebranded from Tune Card) is the cashless push by AirAsia Bhd, who owns 75% of BigPay. The famous, high-profile AirAsia Group CEO, Tony Fernandez claimed that one day, BigPay will worth more than AirAsia. BigPay partners with Mastercard and it will tap into AirAsia's 63 million customers base to expand its usage.
• GrabPay - Grab needs no introduction, every 1 out of 2 smartphones in Malaysia are installed with Grab. Not content with just ride-hailing, its ambition is to become the WeChat-like super-app of Southeast Asia, and GrabPay e-wallet is an integral part of the strategy. Backed by 120 million downloads across Southeast Asia, it recently also announced a partnership with Mastercard which will link a Mastercard Prepaid Card to GrabPay.
• Touch 'n Go eWallet - All Malaysians know Touch 'n Go - the de-facto cashless payment for our road tolls. The new e-wallet venture is a joint venture between Touch 'n Go and Ant Financial (Alibaba). TNG has recently announced surpassing 1 million users and they have an edge in branding and also accessibility in public transportation use case such as toll, parking, bus payment etc. 
• WeChat Pay - WeChat claimed that there are 20 million WeChat users in Malaysia, and Malaysia is the first country outside of China to have obtained an e-money license. Unlike Alibaba who prefer a strategy to form JV with local players, WeChat Pay directly setup and operate in Malaysia by partnering with a number of merchant acquirers such as Hong Leong Bank, MOL Pay, iPay88 and Revenue Monster. With CNY 2019 around the corner, will WeChat replicate its China "red packet" (a.k.a angpow) strategy in Malaysia to boost its user acquisition?

6. Will Malaysians use e-wallet?

The million dollar question is, "In a 31 million population market which is already very well-served by online banking, debit card, and credit cards, why would we care about e-wallet? "

Cards, are cashless payment too. If we refer to the latest statistic published by BNM, there are currently 10.3 million credit cards and 42.1 million debit cards circulating in Malaysia.

So, will the consumers even care to adopt e-wallet?

Old habits die hard. If you take a look at the United States, e-wallet is not the mainstream, they don’t use it actively for in-store purchase nor person-to-person (P2P) transfer. This is because it is a market already well-served by credit and debit cards, just like Malaysia.

Even for Google Wallet or Apple Pay, both are actually just an e-wallet app that stores your credit or debit card details (as tokens) in the app to use it for payment. Industry call this "Pass-Through", and technically, they are riding on existing card scheme networks, not creating something from scratch like Boost or WeChat Pay.

According to a survey by Statistica, here are the top reasons why US consumers are not adopting e-wallet, will the same thing happen in Malaysia?

7. Understanding e-wallet 1-2-3

What is e-wallet? What is e-money?

People are always confused with these 2 terms, is e-wallet also e-money?

Imagine your own wallet (dompet in Malay) - you keep your Identity Card (IC), debit card, prepaid card, credit card, loyalty card, personal photo, receipts etc in your wallet.

E-wallet is like the digital equivalent of your real-world physical wallet, just that it appears as an app in your smartphone.

In many ways, it mimics your physical wallet, where you store your money, credit card, debit card, or prepaid card details (some use Tokenization technology) inside the digital wallet. On top of that, e-wallets usually offer features built-in like loyalty, bill payment, parking payment, voucher purchase etc to make it useful and convenient for the consumers.

As for e-money? It is like our money in either coins or notes, just that it appears as digital numbers inside an e-wallet, where the value is stored on the network (cloud).

 There is a difference between e-wallet and e-money. However, since most e-money issuers provide their own version of e-wallet app, all can be categorized as e-wallet providers for the sake of simplicity.

Only e-wallet providers who issue e-money which can be used with multiple merchants (technically known as "open-loop"), will require an e-money license from Bank Negara Malaysia.

How many types of e-wallets are there?

In general, there are 2 types of open-loop e-wallet:

Network-based e-wallet - Network-based e-wallet "stores" digital money on the cloud, for example Boost, WeChat Pay etc. They are not tied to any card network like Visa, Mastercard or UnionPay International.

 Card-based e-wallet - Card-based e-wallet is riding on existing card network, for example BigPay, which ties to Mastercard Prepaid Card, or AEON Wallet, which ties to Visa Prepaid Card.

Many have mistaken Fave and Samsung Pay as e-money issuers. Technically, both of them can only be perceived as mobile payment app that facilitates reward program such as cashback, discount etc.

As you can use Fave or Samsung Pay to pay third-party merchants (open-loop), you cannot top-up balance with cash or cards. However, they allow you to link your existing credit or debit card. When you make payment, it will trigger a charge to your card - a "Pass Through" in industry terms.

What are the must-have features for e-wallet?

Based on the technology availability and trends, a full-fledged, fully functional e-wallet has to fulfill a list of criteria listed below:

• It has to be available as an app for both Android and iOS (Apple).
• It must allow you to top-up the balance, via online banking, debit card, credit card, or cash.
• It must allow you to do a Personal to Personal (P2P) transfer.
• It must allow you to scan a static QR code by the merchant to make payment.
• It must be made available to all the consumers (mass market).
• It must already be accepted by merchants (physical brick & mortar or online).
• It must be an open-loop - support payments to third-party merchants.
• It must obtain the e-Money Issuers License from BNM.

8. Why should retailers or e-tailers care?

It’s still very early in the game, yet, some of the benefits for merchants are quite obvious. The early bird gets the worm, so the early merchant gets the bonuses.

Firstly, e-wallet providers offer a lower transaction cost vs credit card, usually 1.2% or below, with some introducing zero transaction fee to encourage merchant's adoption.

Secondly, the lesser cash transaction, the lesser hassle in handling loose change, especially the coins.

Thirdly, it will be more secured and speedier with less human error when it comes to the account closing at the end of the day.

Fourth, DATA!!! You might not know anything about your cash-paying customers, but you will start to know them via e-wallet starting with their name, and more depends on the e-wallet features.

Last but not the least, early adopters will reap marketing benefits by working hand-in-hand with well-funded e-wallet provider. This will benefit you greatly to acquire new customers or even encourage existing customers to come back and spend more.

9. How to differentiate Static vs Dynamic QR payment?

In fact, there are 3 types of QR payments mode:

(i) Static QR by Merchant - Customers to scan the QR code displayed by merchants, enter the amount to pay, and then authorize the payment. There are a couple of steps for the customers but this is the easiest for the merchants to adopt as it doesn't require any integration with the POS system.

(ii) Dynamic QR by Merchant - The dynamic QR code is generated by merchants, with the amount stated. Customers just need to scan and pay, without the need of entering the amount to pay.

(iii) Dynamic QR by Customer - Customers to authorize the QR code to be shown on the app for merchants to scan. Similar with above, customers don't need to enter the amount to pay.

10. Who will win: network-based or card-based e-wallet?

Who is leading the race right now? From the data announced publicly, Boost has 3.3 million registered users, while Touch 'n Go eWallet just celebrated its first million registered users.

Both above are network-based e-wallet.

But will Malaysia with a society already so familiar with card usage, namely Visa and Mastercard, witness card-based e-wallet (hybrid) dominating the market in the future? Obviously, both the card scheme giants will not want to be left out of the mobile payment scene.

Let's take a look at the companies which have already launched card-based e-wallets in Malaysia.

We have AEON Wallet which is riding on Visa Prepaid Card, the e-wallet (and card) can be used in AEON, AEON BIG, AEON Wellness etc. This hybrid model also adopted by BigPay (Mastercard), Merchantrade Money (Visa), MPay Walet (Mastercard), soon to be followed by GrabPay (Mastercard) and also Boost (UnionPay International, a subsidiary of China Union Pay, CUP).

When card-based e-wallet providers work with Visa, Mastercard or UnionPay International, their payment products are instantly available to all the existing, card-accepting merchants, without the need to go through the time-consuming merchant acquisition and onboarding process. It will also make cross-countries remittance easier, faster as they are powered by the card scheme infrastructure.

However, network-based e-wallets providers would argue, that consumers do not want to carry their physical wallets or cards in the future.

The real enemies for adoption are 2Cs - Cash and Consumer Behaviors.

Of course, it will take a lot more to win the heart of consumers. The fact is, most consumers don't care whether the e-wallet is linked to a card or not! Consumers just want something fast, secure, simple, intuitive, convenient, cheap, and solve their day-to-day problem. One good example is a feature (pioneered by MCash e-wallet) which let us easily pay for DBKL parking via the e-wallet app.

The holy grail for all e-wallets is to become the super-app, the lifestyle app for consumers. Once the mass stick to a particular e-wallet, we will know by then who holds the trump card.
 
Given time, we believe e-wallet will forever transform the retail and e-commerce landscape. Whoever wins, Malaysia in charting a new course to the cashless era.

Bitbucket Deprecating TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 on 1 December 2018

As part to secure repositories, Bitbucket Cloud will be disabling support for TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 effective 1 December 2018.

This will affect all HTTPS traffic to Bitbucket, including:

• Git or Mercurial traffic to bitbucket.org
• The bitbucket.org Web interface
• API calls to api.bitbucket.org
• Hosted sites on bitbucket.io
• Any other HTTPS traffic not listed here

About 85% of HTTPS requests to Bitbucket use the newest version of TLS (v1.2). This includes all recent versions of bitbucket supported browsers, and most recent versions of Git and Mercurial clients. However, that other 15% includes a number of remote CI/CD systems (such as Bamboo or Jenkins), issue trackers (such as Jira Server instances), wikis (such as Confluence Server instances), and older versions of Git/Hg clients; all of those use older versions of Java, OpenSSL, or Python’s ssl module when negotiating the secured connection to Bitbucket, and all of those will be unable to connect to Bitbucket at all once old versions of TLS disable.

Payment processing pages have already moved from TLSv1, to comply with PCI requirements.

How can we know  if we will be affected by this change?

Bitbucket team will be contacting some teams and users directly, based on what they find in their logs. If you’d like to be proactive, though, then be sure to check all of the things that you use to connect to Bitbucket, including (but not limited to) your browser, your Git or Mercurial client, your CI/CD system, any API clients, and anything else you may have linked to Bitbucket.

• SSH connections to Bitbucket are unaffected.

• Browser connections to Bitbucket are probably unaffected, unless you use a very old browser. Wikipedia has a chart detailing TLS support in Web browsers; you should be able to check your browser’s version there. Some browsers also make connection details visible in the developer tools, or by clicking the padlock icon in the address bar.

• Bamboo, Jenkins, Jira Server, Confluence Server, or any other Java-based systems that connect to Bitbucket may be affected; you will need to check the underlying version of Java. JDK 8 is unaffected; JDK 7 versions 1.7.0_131-b31 and later are unaffected; JDK 7 versions earlier than 1.7.0_131-b31 are affected; and JDK 6 and older are all affected. (Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud are unaffected.)

• Graphical Git or Mercurial clients, such as Sourcetree, may be affected; please check with vendor. (If you use Sourcetree for Windows 2.5.5 or later, or Sourcetree for Mac 2.7.2 or later, then the embedded Git and Mercurial clients are unaffected. If you use a system Git or Mercurial client with Sourcetree, then you might be affected; please make sure you’re on the latest client version available for platform.)

• The Git command line on UNIX-based systems (including macOS, Linux, and all BSDs) may be affected. You should be able to test your connection from the command line: GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1 git ls-remote https://bitbucket.org/ This will connect to Bitbucket using the Git client and list the connection parameters. If you see a line like “SSL connection using TLSv1.2” in the output, then you are unaffected; if that line mentions a different version of TLS, then you are affected.

• The Mercurial command line on UNIX-based systems may be affected; please check  version of Python (with “python -V”). Versions 2.7.9 and later are unaffected, and most versions earlier than 2.7.9 are affected. Affected systems may also see some text in the command-line output – “warning: connecting to bitbucket.org using legacy security technology (TLS 1.0)” – though this will only show for newer versions of Mercurial. 

• Finally, if you have an API client that queries Bitbucket, then please check the libraries your client uses to connect to api.bitbucket.org.

FlexPai:The world's first foldable phone is finally launch

A small company in California has beaten Samsung and Lenovo to launch the world’s first foldable smartphone, FlexPai. Here’s what the world’s foldable phone has to offer.

The world’s first flexible phone is here. Called FlexPai, the new smartphone has been launched by a small California-based company Royole Corporation. FlexPai foldable phone will be available in China at a starting price of 8,999 Yuan (Rs 95,000 approximately).

FlexPai, when opened up, has a large 7.8-inch display, making it bigger than the likes of Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and Apple iPhone XS Max. After folding it from the centre, the device offers three small screens. The hinge also doubles up as a screen.

“FlexPai’s screen is virtually unbreakable and extremely durable passing tests where the screen has been bent over 200,000 times. Its screen provides fantastic color range, high contrast, wide angle, and high-resolution for outstanding picture quality,” claims the company on its website.

FlexPai has a 7.8-inch AMOLED display with 1920 x 1440 (expanded mode) resolution and 308ppi pixel density. The display supports 4:3, 16:9 and 18:9 aspect ratios. The edge screen shows you alerts and notifications. In terms of dimensions, FlexPai measures 134x 190.35 x 7.6mm and weighs around 326 grams.

The smartphone is powered by “Qualcomm next-gen Snapdragon 8 series SoC” with 8GB of RAM and Adreno 630.It comes with 256GB of built-in storage and supports expandable storage up to 256GB via microSD card.

The smartphone sports 16-megapixel and 20-megapixel cameras with f/1.8 aperture, optical image stablisation and flash. Other key features of the phone include USB Type-C, Bluetooth 5.1 and 3,800mAh battery (with fast charge support). On the software front, it runs on a customised WaterOS 1.0 which is based on Google’s Android 9.0 Pie OS.

Royole Corporation has beaten the likes of Samsung and Lenovo in launching the world’s first commercial flexible smartphone. Samsung has been rumoured for years to be working on a foldable Galaxy X aka Galaxy F smartphone. According to a recent report, Samsung will launch its flexible phone, codenamed “Winner”, as early as next year. The company is said to be contemplating between two variants – one opens horizontally and the other one vertically.

Lenovo is also said to be in race for launching a commercial flexible phone. Last month, a prototype of Lenovo’s flexible phone surfaced online. The company has though already demonstrated flexible displays at several tech shows.

LG hasn’t shown intentions to launch a flexible phone but at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the company showcased 65-inch display that could be rolled like a paper.

Laravel Telescope

Laravel Telescope is an elegant debug assistant for the Laravel framework. Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more. Telescope makes a wonderful companion to your local Laravel development environment.

Installation & Configuration

You may use Composer to install Telescope into your Laravel project:

composer require laravel/telescope --dev

Note: Telescope requires Laravel 5.7.7+

After installing Telescope, publish its assets using the telescope:install Artisan command. After installing Telescope, you should also run the migrate command

php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

After publishing Telescope's assets, its primary configuration file will be located at config/telescope.php. This configuration file allows you to configure your watcher options and each configuration option includes a description of its purpose, so be sure to thoroughly explore this file.

Updating Telescope

When updating Telescope, you should re-publish Telescope's assets:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=telescope-assets --force

Dashboard Authorization

Telescope exposes a dashboard at /telescope. By default, you will only be able to access this dashboard in the local environment. Within your app/Providers/TelescopeServiceProvider.php file, there is a gate method. This authorization gate controls access to Telescope in non-local environments. You are free to modify this gate as needed to restrict access to your Telescope installation:

 /**
 * Register the Telescope gate.
 *
 * This gate determines who can access Telescope in non-local environments.
 *
 * @return void
 */
protected function gate()
{
    Gate::define('viewTelescope', function ($user) {
        return in_array($user->email, [
            'taylor@laravel.com',
        ]);
    });
}

Magento Introduces the Mobile Optimization Initiative for Merchants

Retailers of all sizes continue to have a common problem: converting sales on mobile devices. While smartphones continue to gain share as a primary channel for consumers to shop online, the ratio of mobile views to conversions lags in comparison to desktop. Case in point -- a quarter of all back to school shopping time was spent on a smartphone (according to Adobe Analytics), yet desktop saw a 3.37% conversion rate with an average basket size of $142. Whereas conversion on smartphones was at 1.24% with an average basket size of $111.

Retailers can’t afford to miss out on more effectively monetizing consumers’ time on mobile devices particularly heading into the competitive holiday season. To help retailers tackle the mCommerce gap, the Magento Community, led by technology partners PayPal and HiConversion, today launched the Mobile Optimization Initiative. To date, the participating system integration partners have conducted over 250 experiments resulting in three million data points from merchants worldwide.

TACKLING MOBILE CHECKOUT OPTIMIZATION
It’s critical that companies deliver memorable mobile experiences across every facet of consumer engagement. Yet it’s the mobile checkout experience that’s become critical for every brand. A consumer won’t hesitate to abandon their purchase if the payment process is confusing or overly time-consuming.

The Mobile Optimization Initiative offers retailers a complimentary mobile checkout funnel assessment, optimized campaign design and implementation, and professional services during the active program. All participating merchants will benefit from:

• Leveraging HiConversion’s analytics to detect ‘friction points’ in each merchant’s checkout funnel and to formulate data driven test hypothesis;
• A series of A/B experiments that are then run as a single optimization campaign
• Experience optimization using adaptive algorithms; and,
• A final report encompassing results and actionable insights.

The initiative works with 15 system integrators providing professional services, including Web 2 Market, Redstage, Razoyo, Something Digital, Imagination Media, Wagento, ICUBE, JH, Gene, IWD Agency and Lima Consulting Group. Over 60 merchants are already on board and the program continues to expand globally.

The support provided to merchants in the Mobile Optimization Initiative will help them capture some of the billions of dollars that are being lost in revenue for online merchants. To date, participating merchants have seen their average revenue per visit increase by 7.5 percent. An added benefit: the initiative has found that a better mobile buying experience translates to a better desktop buying experience.

NO ONE COMPANY CAN SOLVE THE MCOMMERCE GAP ALONE: IT REQUIRES A COMMUNITY

The Magento Community is a vibrant, collaborative group dedicated to improving the online buying experience for everyone. From developers and system integrators, to designers and merchants, the Community has come together to directly address this challenge.  Leveraging the innovative technology of HiConversion, our system integrator partners have helped merchants all over the world implement and run these experiments to help deliver higher conversion rates and better buying experiences. By aggregating and anonymizing the learnings, then sharing them across the Community, everyone benefits.

As we look ahead to the quickly approaching holiday season, there’s no better time for retailers to optimize the mobile checkout experience. Visit here to learn more about or join the Mobile Optimization Community Initiative. 

How to deal with a workaholic boss

 

The never-ending emails and phone calls. The unrelenting deadlines. The pile-on of projects and deadlines.

Having a workaholic as a boss often means working long hours and sacrificing personal time to meet all the demands. Forget about having any work-life balance — for workaholics, work is life.But working under this kind of pressure can quickly lead to burnout.

"The key for employees is to coexist," said Harris Kern, author of "On Being a Workaholic: Using Balance and Discipline to Live a Better and More Efficient Life."

"You can't change your boss. They thrive on it. They live for the adrenaline rush ... but as an employee, you might have a family and other priorities and can't work 24-7."

Avoid notorious workplaces
Some bosses, companies, or even entire industries have reputations for long work weeks and relentless demands. Try to avoid the problem and do your research before accepting a job offer that will suck you into a work black hole.
"Find an organization that is in line with your views on work-life balance," recommended Dana Brownlee, founder of Professionalism Matters, a professional development training company. "You don't want to find yourself swimming upstream from day one. You probably aren't going to go in there and change the entire organizational structure."

Set your own boundaries...
Don't be afraid to share your work philosophy with your boss to help establish boundaries.
If you just started a job or are feeling overworked at your current position, request a meeting with your manager to talk about your schedule.
Avoid being aggressive — that can create more problems for you, advised Bryan Robinson, author of "#Chill: Turn Off Your Job and Turn on Your Life."
He suggested a sandwich approach to raising the issue: Start the conversation with something positive, then bring up the issue of being overworked with specific recent examples, and then end on another positive note.
"Workaholics don't see the water they are swimming in and don't realize it's taking a toll on people and themselves," he said. "They are totally focused on the task and getting it done."
Bosses can forget how much work they've already assigned, so if you're feeling overburdened, ask your manager to review your to-do list and set priorities.
"It is incumbent on you to point out that you were working on six things, and you can increase it to eight, it might impact the timing of when you can provide some of these deliverables or add a lot of extra hours," said Brownlee.

...and stick to them
There are going to be times when long hours and weekend work are necessary to get a job done. That's expected, and it's important to be flexible.
If you decide to work on the weekend, make sure your boss knows this is an exception, not an expectation.
"Tell your boss that you are fiercely protective of your weekend time, but that this project is important, and you want to make sure it gets out," Brownlee said. "But acknowledge this is an exemption."
If you don't want it to become a habit, stick to your work-life boundaries.
"You can't expect other people to respect your boundaries if you aren't respecting your boundaries," she said.

Acknowledge, then negotiate
If an assignment comes in late Friday afternoon that requires weekend work to hit the Monday morning deadline, acknowledge the request and then work to find a compromise.
Say something like: I understand the importance of the project, but I have other obligations. Can I get it done by end of day Monday?

Find the right balance
If weekend work is unavoidable, make it part of your schedule so it doesn't disrupt your personal and family time too much.
Kern checks his emails on the weekends before his wife wake up. "Work around your family."

Show your sacrifice
If you have to skip out on family or personal time for work, it's okay to let the boss know.
"Say something like, 'You might not be aware, but when you called, I was at my son's game and I want to figure out how I can be productive and meet your expectations but also protect my personal time with my kids and spouse," said Robinson.
A response like this is invitational, showing you want to work with your boss to find a middle ground.
"You are brainstorming together," he said. "You aren't being passive and allowing yourself to be run over, but not aggressive either."

Developers are not good testers. What you say?

This can be a big debate.
Developers testing their own code– what will be the testing output? All happy endings! Yes, the person who develops the code generally sees only happy paths of the product and don’t want to go into many details.
The main concern of developer testing is – misunderstanding of requirements. If requirements are misunderstood by developer then no matter at what depth developer test the application, he will never find the error. The first place where the bug gets introduced will remain till the end, a developer will see it as functionality.
Optimistic developers – Yes, I wrote the code and I am confident it’s working properly. No need to test this path, no need to test that path, as I know it’s working properly. And right here developers skip the bugs.

Developer vs Tester: Developer always wants to see his code working properly. So he will test it to check if it’s working correctly. But you know why tester will test the application? To make it fail in any way, and tester surely will test how an application is not working correctly. This is the main difference in developer testing and tester testing.

Should developers test their own work?

I personally don’t mind developers testing their own code.After all, it’s their baby ;-) They know their code very well. They know what are the traps in their codes. Where it can fail, where to concentrate more, which is the important path of the application.

This is all applicable to a developer who is a good tester!But most of the developers consider testing as a painful job, even they know the system well, due to their negligence they tend to skip many testing paths, as it’s a very painful experience for them. If developers find any errors in their code in unit testing then it’s comparatively easier to fix, as the code is fresh to them, rather than getting the bug from testers after two-three days. But this only possible if the developer is interested in doing that much testing.

It’s testers responsibility to make sure each and every path is tested or not. Testers should ideally give importance to all small possible details to verify the application is not breaking anywhere.

Developers, please don’t review your own code. Generally, you will overlook the issues in your code. So give it to others for review.

Everyone is having specialization in particular subject. Developers generally think how to develop the application on the other hand testers think how the end user is going to use the application.

Conclusion

So, in short, there is no problem if developers are doing the basic unit testing and basic verification testing.Developers can test few exceptional conditions they know are critical and should not be missed. But there are some great testers out there. Through the build to test team. Don’t waste your time as well. For the success of any project, there should be independent testing team validating your applications. After all, it’s our (testers) responsibility to make the ‘baby’ smarter!!

Hundreds of Looted, Ancient Tablets Are Returned to Iraq

Hundreds of ancient stolen tablets, seized from the company Hobby Lobby and returned to Iraq, provide clues about what a lost 4,000-year-old city called Irisagrig was like.
Billionaire and Hobby Lobby owner Steve Green started collecting artifacts in 2009 and soon amassed a collection 40,000 strong, which he used to fill the newly created Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. However, some of those artifacts had been smuggled illegally into the US, and last summer, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized thousands of looted items from his collection. Those artifacts were recently returned to Iraq. They include about 450 tablets holding cuneiform text, many of which describe Irisagrig.

"The new texts from Irisagrig cast some fascinating light on what is, indeed, quite literally a 'lost city,'" said Eckart Frahm, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University. ICE asked Frahm to assess the content and origins of the seized tablets in the fall of 2016. [In Photos: Ancient City Discovered in Iraq]

"I had only about two and a half days to study them in the warehouse where they were temporarily stored, in fairly poor lighting conditions," Frahm told Live Science in an email. "Each individual tablet was wrapped, and it took a considerable amount of time to unwrap and number them, and then rewrap them again."

Many of the tablets are fragile, "with salt incrustations covering large parts of their surfaces," Frahm said. "It seems likely that these tablets all come from the same archive, which must have fallen prey to destruction at some point in time, with the tablets falling on the ground with one side exposed [possibly] to water and the other protected."

In the end, Frahm was able to review about 250 of the cuneiform tablets. And he did find that many came from the lost city.

"Among the most exciting tablets from the lot inspected by me is a large document that records allocations of sustenance plots to royal dependents, and another that records food distributed to the 'dogs of the palace,' who were apparently well fed," Frahm said.

Some of the tablets "record food allocations for royal envoys and other officials, and specify their missions, which include inspecting work on a canal, improving the 'royal road,'" Frahm added.

The lost city

The tablets seized from Hobby Lobby are far from the only tablets from Irisagrig that have appeared on the antiquities market in the past two decades. Live Science combed through the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative's (CDLI) database, the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts and numerous journal articles, and found tablets from Irisagrig that are now in collections in Texas, California, Illinois, New York, Australia, Japan, Canada, Israel, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and France, among other places.

"In my view, it is certain that all tablets identified by scholars as coming from ancient Irisagrig have been looted," said Manuel Molina, a research professor with the Spanish National Research Council who has conducted research into Irisagrig. "The reason is simply because the only ones who know the location of Irisagrig are the looters of the site, who found it around 2003."

A few of those tablets provide geographical information that helps narrow down the location of Irisagrig, Molina wrote in a paper published in the book From the 21st Century BC to the 21st Century AD: Proceedings of the International Conference on Neo-Sumerian Studies Held in Madrid 22-24 July 2010 (Eisenbrauns, 2013).

Molina has narrowed down the likely location to an area in southern Iraq near the modern-day town of Afak. One of the most promising candidates within this area is a "tell" (a mound formed by the debris left by its ancient inhabitants) called "site 1056" that has never been excavated by archaeologists, Molina wrote in the book. Satellite images show that the tell was heavily looted between 2003 and 2009, Molina wrote. [25 Strangest Sights on Google Earth]

New imagery of the site provided by DigitalGlobe suggests the looting has decreased since 2009, according to Molina, who compared the new images with his images from earlier.

But even with the new imagery, archaeologists can't be sure site 1056 is Irisagrig, said Molina, who noted that there are other possible candidates for the lost city. On-the-ground archaeological work is needed to come to any conclusions, he said.

Provenance hunt

Live Science contacted several of the identified owners (some remain anonymous) of the tablets mentioned in the databases in hopes of tracking down the looters to discover the location of the city and the motivations behind the looting. Ultimately, attempts to find the looters were unsuccessful.

Only a few of the owners responded. For instance, Jim Falk, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, pointed to his website that indicates he got his tablet from Artemis Gallery in September 2015. Before that, it was held by Harlan J. Berk Ltd., which did not respond to requests for comment.

Bron Lipkin, a retired doctor and collector who owns the company Collector Antiquities, hasn't ever owned an Irisagrig tablet. But some of the owners contacted him to ask for help in deciphering the texts.

"After all this time, I don't have any easy way of working out which collector had which tablet," Lipkin said, adding that he recalls some individuals had bought the tablets on eBay and that three tablets came from an Australian dealer.

Documents from the US Department of Justice said the artifacts returned to Iraq were sold to Hobby Lobby from three unnamed Israeli antiquities dealers. Live Science also found that one of the largest known private collections of tablets from Irisagrig (containing more than 100 tablets) belongs to Jawad Adra, a businessman in Lebanon. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Return controversy

There's been a debate about whether the cuneiform tablets should be returned to Iraq before they have been studied and described in scientific journals. David Owen, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University who has published descriptions of hundreds of tablets from Irisagrig, has called for them to remain in the United States for study.

"Once they enter the bowels of the Iraq Museum, it is unlikely scholars will ever have access to them, nor are there any Iraqi scholars capable of publishing them given the many thousands of unpublished texts already in storage in the museum for generations and mostly inaccessible to scholars," Owen told Live Science.

Frahm said that, while "it would have been helpful if the tablets could have been more properly documented before being sent on another trans-Atlantic journey," and that conservation work is urgently needed on the tablets, he thinks Iraqi scholars will be able to get the job done.

"I have faith in my Iraqi colleagues, who are aware of their responsibility not only to safeguard, but also to publish, the archaeological and epigraphic heritage of their country, and who have shown in recent years a laudable willingness to collaborate with scholars from other countries in an effort to do so in the best possible way," Frahm said.

Owen, on the other hand, is not at all confident that these tablets will be published after they return to Iraq. "Who knows what new data the tablets sent to Iraq contain," he told Live Science. "But we'll never see this new evidence now thanks to the stupidity of our government."

Google Just Turned a Huge Corner in the Smart Speaker Game

When Amazon launched the Echo back in late 2014, it kicked off one of the biggest trends in tech. Almost overnight, it seemed like every company wanted to get in on that sweet smart speaker action. However, largely because Amazon was first to market, the Echo has consistently been the top-selling smart speaker for the last three and a half years.

That is, until Q1 2018, when Google knocked Amazon out of the top spot for the first time by increasing sales of Google Homes a staggering 483 percent year-over-year to 3.2 million units versus 2.5 million Echo devices for Amazon, according to tech research firm Canalys.

This is an important moment for the still-growing smart speaker market. It suggests that Amazon’s first-mover advantage may be finally coming to end after originally holding a two-year lead over Google, which launched the original Google Home in late 2016.

At the same time, this could also be considered a huge victory for Google. Its Google Assistant is widely regarded as the “smartest” disembodied AI, but for a long time, it was stuck trying to catch up to the Echo’s more mature ecosystem and larger user base.

However, the smart speaker war is far from over. Amazon still holds a significant lead in total devices sold, with an overall market share of 69 percent versus just 25 percent for Google, as of January, according to Edison Research. As far as the rest of the Q1 2018 sales go, Alibaba and Xiaomi finished in third and fourth, with smart speaker shipments accounting for 11.8 percent and 7 percent of total sales, respectively.

All told, those top four companies accounted for nearly 83 percent of all smart speaker sales, leaving companies like Microsoft, which launched its own Cortana-powered speaker in partnership with Harman Kardon last year, and Samsung, which rumors say will launch its own Bixby-powered speaker sometime this year, scrambling for the remaining 17.3 percent of the market.

And then, of course, there’s Apple, whose Siri-powered HomePod launched just three months ago to a rather tepid response because, while it has been praised for having great audio quality, its high price and limited digital assistant features have prevented Apple’s normally ravenous fan base from getting into the smart speaker game.

Jesus Was A Buddhist Monk Named Issa

Jesus Was A Buddhist Monk Named Issa Who Spent 16+ Years In India & Tibet

The most famous person in human history was Jesus. His life, teachings, crucifixion and resurrection form the very basis of Christianity, yet scholars and historians have consistently called into doubt much of that basis.

A BBC documentary called Did Jesus Die? addresses many unanswered questions that arises from the biblical version of historical events in the time Jesus lived. The documentary explores the possibility that Jesus didn’t die, that he was not resurrected, but resuscitated and that he left Israel, travelling either with Mary Magdalene to the South of France or back to India.

Did Jesus really die on the cross?

Would a man die after only six hours on the cross? Was Jesus drugged? What really happened in the tomb? These are the questions that have occupied many scholars over the centuries.
That Jesus might not have died on the cross is a very explosive idea for Christians, but according to scholars, it’s hard to find solid historical evidence and the four gospels all tell different stories. In the earliest versions of the earliest gospel Mark, there are no resurrection appearances at all; the gospel simply end with the discovery of an empty tomb; the last verses that do contain a resurrection story were added 200 years later.Mathew and Luke do have resurrection appearances but they don’t agree on the details.

What the yearly voluntary crucifixions teach us

We can learn from current re-enactments of the crucifixion that takes place every year in the Philippines that people don’t die within six hours of being crucified. What actually happens is that the person dies of suffocation, because it’s hard to breathe without supporting your weight with your legs. Yet, the Gospels all agree that Jesus died after only four to six hours.

Why did he die so quickly and why were so many herbs taken into the tomb? The herbs were aloes, which have healing properties, so did they help to revive Jesus?

If Jesus survived the crucifixion, he would still have been a condemned man. The gospels do tell of his being taken up into heaven, but again this version of events doesn’t appear in the original form of the gospel of Mark and was also added 200 years later.

South of France?

One theory is that he may have followed or traveled with Mary Magdalene to the south of France, but France would have been an unlikely choice, as France was a Roman colony and a condemned man’s first priority would have been to escape from the Romans.

He would have to leave the territory and where would he go? Traveling east would have made sense. It would have been in the opposite direction of the Roman Empire and it would have been easy to leave Israel by sea or land on the silk route or the spice route.

Did he perhaps return to where some speculates he came from – to India?

The three wise men from the East

The documentary posits the possibility that the three wise men were Buddhist monks who had traveled to Israel in search of the next Lama, which they believed to be the baby born as Jesus.

In Buddhist tradition, when a Lama dies, wise men consult the stars and set off on a long journey to find the infant who is the incarnation of the Lama.

The possibility that Jesus could have been taken to India as a child and taught as a Buddhist is borne out by the discovery made by explorer Nicolas Notovitch who traveled extensively throughout India, Tibet, and Afghanistan in 1887.

Monks at the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of Hemis in the city of Leh showed Notovitch two large yellowed volumes of a document written in Tibetan, entitled The Life of Saint Issa. The document tells the story of a child named Jesus (i.e. Issa = “son of God”) born in the first century to a poor family in Israel.

Jesus was referred to as “the son of God” by the Vedic scholars who tutored him in the sacred Buddhist texts from the age of 13 to 29, exactly the time that we have no Biblical, Western, or Middle Eastern record of Jesus in Palestine. This time is known as “The Lost Years”.

Life in Kashmir?

There is a tribe in Kashmir who claim to be descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and they claim that Jesus returned to them in his thirties and lived among them till his eighties. According to this tribe, he was known as Yuzasaf, which translates to ‘leader of the healed’, and ‘the shepherd’.

The path jesus took to came in Tibet

Watch the documentary about Jesus

Krem Puri in Meghalaya, longest sandstone cave in India explored

Cave research, encompassing the study of speleology and biospeleology, is still in its infancy in India. Although there are thousands of caves in India, research expeditions occur in few states. The Siju Cave of state Meghalaya is the first limelighted natural cave from India.

The Caves of Meghalaya comprise a large number of caves in the Jaintia, Khasi Hills and Garo Hills districts in the Indian state of Meghalaya, and are amongst the longest caves in the world.

Meghalaya Adventurers` Association (MAA) led 27 international cavers upon a 26 – day exploration of Krem Chympe in the village of Sielkan in East Jaintia Hills and new exploration in the Mawsynram and Mawlongbna area as part of the Caving in the Abode of the Clouds expedition 2016. The expedition team was accompanied by two associated scientists from India who conducted ongoing bio-speleological studies of the areas.

While interacting with newsmen, MAA general secretary Brian D.Kharpran Daly said, “Krem Puri is the great find of the expedition. It has been partially explored and surveyed for 8,269 m making it India`s longest sandstone cave delegating Krem Mawtynhiang (3.14km) to second spot.”

“The complexity of the cave is uncharacteristic to the great majority of the Meghalayan caves. Even as the cave is still open for future exploration it would already be considered to be one of the top sandstone caves in the world,” added Brian D.Kharpran Daly

Meanwhile, Krem Lumshken, located close to the Expedition Camp in the Mawlongbna Tourism Guest House, proved to be the second longest cave to be explored this year yielding 3,424 m of cave passage.

The pre – expedition of Krem Chympe during the first week of February, 2016 on the other hand resulted in the mapping of an additional 743 metres of the cave which is India`s sixth longest.

During the expedition this year, three existing and partially explored caves and 33 new caves besides 18.9 kms of new cave passages were explored and mapped.

INDIA ISRO's communication satellite lifts off.

The GSLV-F08 rocket saddled with the passenger satellite in its payload fairing blasted off from the second launch pad at 4.56 pm. Leaving behind plumes of smoke, the 49.1 metre tall GSLV soared majestically into clear skies, carrying the 2,140 kg GSAT-6A satellite to be injected into a geostationary orbit at a height of about 36,000 km.

The satellite was launched from the space port of Sriharikota, about 110 kms from Chennai.The Launch of GSLV-F08 marks the 12th flight of  Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle GSLV-F08 and sixth flight with indigenous Cryogenic upper stage.

GSAT-6A, is similar to GSAT-6, a high power S-band communication satellite built on I-2K satellite bus with a mission life of about ten years, it said.A key feature of the satellite is providing mobile communication to India through multi beam coverage facility.

The satellite will also provide a platform for developing technologies such as demonstration of 6 m S-Band Unfurlable Antenna, handheld ground terminals and network management techniques that could be useful in satellite based mobile communication applications.

Celebrate Pi Day 2018 with NASA's Tasty 'Pi in the Sky' Math Challenge

NASA is inviting the public to celebrate Pi Day (March 14) by sharing a series of cosmic calculations for kids and adults to solve.

The "Pi in the Sky" challenge was created by the Education Office of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and is now in its fifth year. The challenge will feature math problems to calculate for Martian earthquakes, helium rain on Jupiter and the rotation rate of the first interstellar visitor ever discovered, asteroid 'Oumuamua. The topics of last year's Pi Day challenge included craters with butterfly-shaped ejecta, or tossed material, and the total solar eclipse.

Pi is a number whose digits go on forever, but it's most popularly known by the first three: 3.14 (hence March 14). It is a mathematical constant often denoted by the symbol π. Pi comes in handy when determining the circumference or the surface area of a round celestial body. It also helps engineers and scientists program the precise orbits of satellites and spacecraft. such as the impressive pirouettes the Cassini spacecraft performed before its "death dive."


Ota Lutz, a senior education specialist at JPL, believes everyone should attempt the Pi Day Challenge, even if they aren't familiar with these math tools. Students in grades 5 through 12 are especially invited to participate, and JPL offers resources for educators who want to use the math problems in their classrooms.

"All of the problems in the 'Pi in the Sky' challenge are real problems that JPL scientists and engineers solve using pi," Lutz said in a statement.

Solutions to the illustrated questions will be posted on March 15, according to NASA. Pi Daychallenge problems from previous years can be found on the website(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/nasapidaychallenge/), too.

World’s first rotating skyscraper in Dubai

First announced back in 2008 before being put on hold, Dynamic Architecture’s rotating skyscraperproject has been rekindled.

The apartments would be able to rotate individually. Courtesy Dynamic Architecture

 

 

 

 

Dubai is full of jaw-dropping views from its myriad of skyscrapers, but for those who demand a fresh panorama without moving to a new home there could be a solution.

First announced back in 2008 before being put on hold, Dynamic Architecture’s rotating skyscraper project has been rekindled.

The idea is that the building, known as the Dynamic Tower, will be built in four dimensions and will constantly change shape.

“It will never look the same,” said Israeli-Italian architect David Fisher, speaking recently on Your Discover Science channel on YouTube.

“The floor is rotating very smoothly. You don’t hear anything,” he said.

How would this work? According to Mr Fisher, each apartment would be able to independently rotate 360 degrees, with the speed adjustable.

A stationary core would be built containing the elevator, with the apartments connected onto the centrepiece.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, the project is planned to have no electricity costs as wind turbines would be placed between the floor of each storey.


“It is a green power station. It will power the entire building,” said Mr Fisher.

It is also planned to be the world’s first pre-fabricated skyscraper, whereby individual units are built off site, including plumbing and electrical connections, before being hung from the central core.

Customising your own view is envisioned to come at a heavy financial cost, however, with as much as US$30 million quoted in the programme.

Details of when the project could begin and where it may be located have not yet been given.

The UAE is home to a number of rotating restaurants, and there were separate plans for a rotating residence in Dubai.

In 2015 it was confirmed that High Rise Properties’ Dh250m Rotating Residence had been cancelled.

The 16-storey freehold rotating tower consisting of four town houses and retail areas in Jumeirah Village South was due for completion in 2008.

Moon to get its own mobile phone network next year

The mobile phone network will enable high-definition streaming from the lunar surface back to earth.(NASA)

Vodafone Germany, Nokia and Audi are working on this project together.

The moon will get its first mobile phone network next year, enabling high-definition streaming from the lunar landscape back to earth, part of a project to back the first privately funded moon mission.

Vodafone Germany, network equipment maker Nokia and carmaker Audi said on Tuesday they were working together to support the mission, 50 years after the first NASA astronauts walked on the moon.

Vodafone said it had appointed Nokia as its technology partner to develop a space-grade network which would be a small piece of hardware weighing less than a bag of sugar.

The companies are working with Berlin-based company PTScientists on the project, with a launch scheduled in 2019 from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Vodafone said.


“This project involves a radically innovative approach to the development of mobile network infrastructure,” Vodafone Germany Chief Executive Hannes Ametsreiter said.

One executive involved said the decision to build a 4G network rather a state-of-the-art 5G network was taken because the next generation networks remain in the testing and trial stage and are not stable enough to ensure they would work from the lunar surface.

Apple may offer rebate to users who bought full-price batteries

After a US senator asked Apple questions about its controversial decision to quietly slow the performance of older iPhones, the Cupertino-headquartered company replied that it may offer rebates to users who paid full price for a battery replacement.

"Apple told a US senator it is 'exploring' whether to offer a rebate to customers who paid full-price for a battery replacement," CNET reported late on Tuesday.

Senator John Thune, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, had sent a letter to Apple with several follow-up questions, including whether customers who purchased batteries at full-price might be compensated.

"The company has also promised the committee some follow-up information, including an answer about additional steps it may take to address customers who purchased a new battery at full price," Thune was quoted as saying by CNET.

Apple faced a backlash after it admitted last month that it used software updates to limit the performance of older iPhone models, including the iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone SE and iPhone 7.

The tech giant used software updates to slow down the performance of some iPhones, a decision the company defended by saying it prevented devices from erratically shutting down.

The goal, according to the company, was to "smooth out" peak power demands and prevent older iPhones from sudden shutdowns as their lithium-ion batteries degrade. But it resulted in a disappointing performance for users, according to CNN.