Infographic on Code Wars: PHP vs Ruby vs Python - Who Reigns Supreme?

Udemy just released an infographic on the war between the world's most popular programming languages: PHP, Ruby & Python. What’s easier and faster to use is not always the best option. But really, who do you think reigns supreme? You may be surprised.

Source: Udemy Blog

The Most Sought-After Silicon Valley Startups for Engineers

On LinkedIn's blog today is a post about the top 10 most sought-after engineering startups in Silicon Valley. And no, Facebook and Google didn't make the cut because this was a list of companies with fewer than 500 employees. (Pinterest was number 6.) To compile the list, the company looked at nearly a quarter million engineer profiles on its service and tracked where they were searching for jobs.

Four of the top 10 spots go to companies that are heavily involved in Big Data: Cloudera, Palantir Technologies, Hortonworks and Splunk. Two others, Arista Networks and Nicira, are doing new things with networking and virtualization infrastructure. And then there are Box.net, Pinterest andSquare, the mobile payment processor. Most of the companies are clustered in the Santa Clara area, with a few located in San Francisco.

LinkedIn did its analysis by tracking people "visiting profiles of employees looking for common connections, checking out LinkedIn Company Pages, and following companies using the LinkedIn Company Follow button." There aren't many surprises here; these are some of the hottest, best-known new companies in the Valley.

Source: Read Write Web

Samsung Smart App Challenge 2012

The contest offers $4.08 million in cash prizes and mega marketing support for app promotion to the top 80 apps including 60 Samsung Apps Super Apps and 20 Best S Pen Apps featuring the most creative GALAXY Note Stylus Pen (S Pen) functions.

Track	Winners	Judging Criteria	SDK & Tools
Samsung Apps Super Apps GALAXY Tab/Note App	Game 30 Non-Game 30	Highest download counts (Consumer Judging) Highest download counts on Samsung Apps Downloads counts per device group, OS version for Single App will be added up. (Identification criteria : App ID = ‘Package Name’)	Application should be built using Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) or a higher version. No language restriction on application
Best S Pen Apps GALAXY Note App with S Pen functionality	20	Basis of Review(Panel Judging) Entries will be scored on the creativity and originality among the apps featuring S Pen functionality enabled by Samsung S Pen SDK	Application should be built using Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or a higher version. Developers must use the Samsung S Pen SDK library to integrates S Pen functionality. The application language must be English. (Application can support multiple languages including English.)

You can find out more about the challenge here.

Nigerian Dailies now available

Nigerian Dailies has just been published in Ovi/Nokia Store right now. Nigerian Dailies brings fresh news from your favorite Nigerian newspapers to your mobile devices daily. The current release is only for Series 40 Nokia devices. Watch out for a release for other devices in the next few weeks.

Meet Anontune: The New Social Music Platform From Anonymous

In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet.

The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits.




via Wired

Infographic: The Timeline - From Zero to a Billion in 17 months of exposure

Here is an infographic that shows the rise and eventual acquisition of Instagram through photos similar to Instagrams, such that the photos speaks for itself. You like?

Infographic: How the App Stores "Really" Stack Up

The infographic below breaks down the "reality" of the native app stores. But I still wonder why the infographic seems to be selling Blackberry to the viewers.

Bluestacks’ beta lets you run almost any of the over 450,000 Android app on Windows

Bluestack was the recipient of the prestigious Best Software award at CES 2012. BlueStacks allows Android apps and games to be enjoyed full-screen on a desktop PC. The company today has released a free beta version of its software, which now supports most of Android’s 450,000 apps.

The new release is a major upgrade over Bluestacks’ alpha version, which initially launched last October, and was downloaded over a million times was made available for three months last year to early testers and was only able to run nine preselected Android apps. The new beta version, which supports Windows 7, Vista, and XP, gives you access to pretty much any Android app — though not all of them run very well.



The beta version launched today uses the company’s Layercake technology, allowing Android apps to run on x86-based PCs.This is a  big step for the startup, which made waves last year when it first announced its emulation technology. Dubbed Layercake, the software emulates Android apps written for ARM processors on x86 processor-based Windows PCs. Without such emulation technology, software between the two different chip platforms is fundamentally incompatible (without being recompiled). Emulation is nothing new, but Bluestacks is the first company devoted to bringing the rich variety of Android apps to PCs.

While the Bluestacks software won’t appeal to everyone, it could be useful for those who want to test out Android apps, or users who want access to apps that don’t yet have desktop versions.

Games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds were playable (though the latter had choppy graphics and sound at times), and productivity apps like Evernote worked without much issue. Strangely, the new Angry Birds Space performed almost flawlessly (see the video below). 3D-heavy apps, like Google Earth, didn’t fair as well, and brought Bluestacks to a crawl.



The company is currently working on making the application faster & also working on a Mac version as gleamed from viewing the source of their website.

So far, California-based BlueStacks has raised $10.6 million so far in a single round of funding.

If you bank with Access Bank, formerly Intercontinental Bank, now is the time to take your money and run before it's too late

Nigerian Banks have never been anything to write home about with the exception of banks like GTB who though aren't perfect give you a plethora of options to carry out or manage your accounts/transactions effectively on their platform making life easy for you in the process. The part I hate about GTB is having to go to the bank to carry out any activity as there's always the case of having to wait on endless queues and the customer care people being unhelpful on some occasions.

Ever since Intercontinental Bank's erstwhile MD/CEO, ran the bank to the ground awhile back, I've been cautious of banking with them and have been warned on several occasions by friends and family to stop banking with them and move on but I've been positive about them thinking they'd get their acts together and not fail us, their customers, but that wasn't to be as they were recently bought over by Access Bank. Was initially skeptical at first about Access Bank because I've only heard about Access Bank in the papers; never knew of anyone that banked there before now, and even shortly after they displaced some of their staffs recently, I discovered that most of the faces we've been so used to at Intercontinental for years have been let go and replaced by new unfriendly faces.

Things came to a halt last week when we were sent text messages on the 1st of March, 2012 informing us of the upgrade they were about to carry out on their system from the 2nd to the 5th. The message goes thus:

Dear Customer, As we finalize our IT System integration from Friday March 2 to Monday March 5, service disruptions may occur. We regret all inconveniences.

I wasn't in any way bothered about that as I knew I had nothing to do with them during that period, but their first big mistake happened immediately after their system integration. On the 5th of March, they sent us another message informing of us new set of account numbers after the new ones issued out by the former bank, and the message goes thus:

Dear Customer, Your account number, previously 10xxxxxxxx in IBPlc, has been changed to 00xxxxxxxxxx. Both numbers remain valid. Thank you. For enqr 01-2712005.

After reading the message, I had a feeling that something was wrong somewhere. The previous account number they quoted was totally wrong. Though I hadn't memorized any of my account numbers, I knew the first four numbers at heart and it was completely different from that which I had in the text message they sent to me. I planned to confirm what the exact account number was anytime I went to the bank as I thought the mistake was just with me. The following day, I was meant to fund a friend's account to facilitate flight booking from Abuja to Lagos, but I wasn't cautious enough as the account number which he sent to me to pay into was also wrong courtesy the text message being sent to customers by Access Bank. Eventually, the money could not be used for the purpose for which it was meant, and I was quite lucky enough to still be in Abuja the following day to make my complains and get back my money as the recipient never received the money, neither did Access Bank contact me that the money paid in didn't match the receiver's name.

When I called the account owner to get to the bank to make a complaint and find out what we need to do to rectify the problem, he called me back to tell me he met some serious crowd in the bank with a similar issue and was asked to tell me to go back to the branch where I paid to have it sorted out. On getting to the branch where I lodged in the money, I thought I was the only customer with the problem, but that was not to be after about 10 mins when we increased in number. A lady customer of theirs was screaming and bringing down hell at the bank, having sent her sister money in Lagos since Thursday the 2nd, and yet on the 6th, the money was yet to be delivered to her. The bank wasn't in any way apologetic to us, as the head of security in the bank was even trying to ward people of from seeing the person who was to attend to them as regards the problem. I stopped playing cool when I realized she had been coming to the bank everyday since then, up till the moment at which she was speaking and yet nothing had been done about the issue. I had to let our attendant know that I'd be out of town for awhile and wouldn't be coming there everyday so he should ensure he sorts out the problem right there and then. Probably because the lady spitted more fire than I did, she was being asked to go to the counter where they'd reimburse her, but told me they wouldn't be able to give me cash, and asked me to visit the branch where the account owner was meant to receive the cash to sort out the issue, having written some names & numbers at the back of the teller. The fellow attending to me also wrote his number asking me to tell them to call him in case there were any issues.

On the third day, I was yet to get any message nor call from the bank informing me that the money I paid in was not delivered. I went to the bank with the account owner to go get my money and be done with once and for all, only to meet the kind of traffic usually prevalent at GTB at Access Bank. People rarely queued up outside the security door of Access bank, Ring Road like they almost always do at GTB Ring Road, but on this day, we all came with similar problems. When it was my turn to be attended to, the bank was non-apologetic about the problem, never accepted it as their problem and feigned ignorance as if the messages sent themselves to us, and to even make it worse, the people attending to me instructed me to call the numbers written on the teller myself to talk to them since I was the one who brought it to them. I was about lambasting them when some customers came to my defense saying that was silly of them and rarely happened in other banks, so they eventually made the call to confirm my claim and know how to proceed. The only thing I had them repeatedly say was that their link has been down for some days and they have been having issues. They never accepted the fault as theirs nor did they address the issue of misinforming customers on their new account numbers. I wasn't eventually sorted out that day as they took my number and promise to give me a call but they haven't yet called me and I'm waiting for the new week to begin before I unleash my fury on them.

At the close of day on the 9th, four days after their mistake, they deemed it fit to message us to apologize, after four full days:

Dear Customer, Pls ignore the acct number sent to you between March 4 & 5. You will be advised of your new acct number soon. We regret any inconvenience - 012712005.

In closing, for a bank that is insensitive, irresponsible, unfriendly and inefficient, would you rather bank with them? So if you are like me, and you've been getting advice from friends and family to move ship and sever your relationship with Intercontinental/Access Bank, now is the time to do so before it becomes a nigbati issue. I was being told to report them to CPC, but mehn, this is naija, it's not about CPC joor, but it's about you reading this who banks with Access Bank/Intercontinental to give it a thought and decide if it's worth taking the risk with your money.

Top Smartphone Facts and Figures in 2011

VisionMobile just released an infographic on the top smartphone facts and figures of 2011.

Android is the undisputed king of smartphone platforms, at least in terms of shipments. While this was true even at the end of 2010, Android grew even further in 2011, grabbing a highly impressive 49% share in the smartphone market – this can easily be translated as follows: 1 in 2 smartphones sold in 2011 was an Android device.

Moreover, Android’s share keeps growing, rising from 42% share in the first half of 2011 to a crushing 54% share in H2 2011. This level of pervasiveness has not been seen since Symbian’s heyday, but let’s not forget that Symbian didn’t have to face such stifling competition back then.

Samsung unveils Galaxy Note 10.1 with Android 4.0, dual-core chipset and S Pen

Samsung on Monday took the wraps off another new addition to its Android tablet lineup, the Galaxy Note 10.1. Like the supersized “phablet” it joins in the Galaxy Note family, the Note 10.1 includes Samsung’s S Pen stylus for drawing, note-taking, highlighting and much more. Sadly, this still isn’t the high-definition slate we’ve been waiting for so it looks like Samsung is shooting to launch its Retina-like tablet later this year. The 10-inch Galaxy Note runs Samsung’s TouchWiz UI atop Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and includes a 1.4GHz dual-core processor along with the same cameras found in the original Galaxy Tab 10.1. In fact, the Note 10.1 essentially seems like a redesigned Galaxy Tab 10.1 with an S Pen and a new processor, which is peculiar since the Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1) is pretty much a Galaxy Tab 10.1 as well. Announced alongside the Galaxy Note 10.1 is the Galaxy S WiFi 4.2, a Wi-Fi-only device aimed at gaming.

Huawei unveils world’s fastest quad-core smartphone

Huawei on Sunday announced the new Ascend D quad smartphone at Mobile World Congress. The company bills the handset as “the world’s fastest quad-core smartphone,” with its 4.5-inch 720p HD display and Huawei’s own K3V2 quad-core 1.5GHz processor. The smartphone features an 8-megapixel rear-camera, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Huawei also introduced the Ascend D quad XL and the Ascend D1 smartphones. The Ascend D quad XL boasts a massive 2,500 mAh battery, but otherwise it’s the sames exact smartphone as the Ascend D quad. The Ascend D1 runs a 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU and has a 1,670 mAh battery. The Ascend D quad series will be available in China, Australia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, North and South America, and the Middle East in the second quarter of 2012, with the Ascend D1 to be made available in April.

Pricing and more specific information surrounding launches aren’t yet available.