Meet President Obama’s Look Alike, IIham Anas

IIham Anas is a 40-year old Indonesian photographer who bears a striking resemblance to the US president.

According to reports this has made him a tv star in his country.

Weird similarities between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

Both were shot in the back of the head in the presence of their wives.

Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.

Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy.

Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

Lincoln was shot in the Ford Theatre. Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln, made by Ford.

Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran and hid in a warehouse. Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran And hid in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

Weird twins share everything, even boyfriend

A pair of Perth twins who pride themselves on sharing everything in their lives are now dating the same man.

Lucy and Anna DeCinque share the same bed, job, car and even Facebook account so they said it was only natural to fall for the same man.

The 28-year-olds met their boyfriend Ben on Facebook last year and as he is a twin himself, he understands their need to be together 24 hours a day.

“He knows the closeness, our bond. He understands us and just gets us. We are a threesome now… and we don’t find it weird at all,” the pair told A Current Affair.

“I think any guy would want double the attention. I mean people come up to him and say ‘dude, wow you’re so lucky’.”

The DeCinque twins have even admitted to spending $200,000 on the same plastic surgeries including breast implants, lip fillers and tattooed eyebrows.

“We are never separated. We got to the bathroom together or we watch TV, we are just always together,” they said.

“We like the same food, like everything has to be the same. If we are at a buffet I will come with her and we will get exactly the same.”

The pair, who work in aged care, say they have learnt to block out the critics.

“Some people are just judgemental and what we’ve always said is don’t judge a book by its cover.”

WhatsApp Founders Make Last-Minute Addition to Forbes’ Billionaires List

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the cofounders of WhatsApp, made Forbes’ annual billionaires’ list with few moments to spare after Facebook offered a total of $19 billion to buy the company.

The deal, if completed, will give Koum a fortune of $6.8 billion, according to Forbes. Acton will be worth at least $3 billion. The two were the subject of a very well-timed profile that Forbes had planned to coincide with its billionaires’ issue, which was released on Monday.

After Facebook made its stunning offer on Feb. 19, Forbes posted its exclusive on the founders online.

Koum and Acton are two of 26 newcomers to the list from tech. Others include Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Workday cofounder Aneel Bhusri.

At the top of the list were the usual suspects. Microsoft cofounder and chairman Bill Gates, who once again became the world’s richest man last May, is No. 1 with $76 billion.

Oracle cofounder and CEO Larry Ellison is on the list at No. 5 with $48 billion. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin placed at 17 and 19, respectively, with $32.3 billion and $31.8 billion. The two flanked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose fortune is estimated at $32 billion. Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg came in at No. 21 with $28.5 billion.

Below are the top 10 billionaires on the list:

Bill Gates: $76 billion

Carlos Slim and Helu Family: $72 billion

Amancia Ortega: $64 billion

Warren Buffett: $58.2 billion

Larry Ellison : $48 billion

Charles Koch: $40 billion

David Koch: $40 billion

Sheldon Adelson: $38 billion

Christy Walton and Family: $36.7 billion

Jim Walton: $34.7 billion

Samsung Unveils Mid-Range Galaxy Tabs

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab4 series, its latest mid-range tablets, on Tuesday.

The Galaxy Tab4 is expected to go on sale in the second quarter, and will come in three sizes: 7-inch, 8-inch and 10.1-inch. The Tab4 will be available in black and white, as well as in Wi-Fi and LTE varieties.

In terms of specs, these tablets won’t be able to compete with what Samsung is offering on its Galaxy NotePro and TabPro, but are solidly middle-of-the-road.

The Galaxy Tab4 tablets feature:

• Quad-core 1.2Ghz processor
• WXGA screen (1280×800 resolution)
• Android 4.4 KitKat
• 3 megapixel rear camera and 1.3MP front camera
• 802.11n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 4.0

We’re a little bit confused as to why Samsung is offering both a 7-inch and 8-inch Tab4, given the similarity in specs. The 7-inch model will also be available in 3G, presumably for emerging markets without LTE, but it still seems odd to have two tablets that are virtually the same size and have the same internal hardware.

If Samsung can price these tablets firmly under the $350 range, it could offer some competition to Apple, Amazon and Google’s tablet offerings.

Richest man and woman in Africa from Nigeria.

Who says Nigeria isn't rich???

When we have both the richest man and richest woman in Africa both from Nigeria.

We all know the story of Aliko Dangote, let me brief you a little about the richest woman.

While there are many female billionaires on the Forbes ‘richest woman’ list, until 2013, only two of them were black. Angolan Isabel Dos Santos and American Oprah Winfrey were the two holding up the title with $3.5 billion and $2.5 billion respectively, but now they have been joined by a third, and she has theoretically eclipsed them both by quite some margin.

Nigerian fashion and oil tycoon Folorunsho Alakija has just recently made headlines when a relatively small stakeholder of her oil field was looking to sell. Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, holds an 8% stake in Alakija’s oil field in the Niger Delta and they were looking to make around $1 billion from the sale.

This estimate put Alakija’s 60% stake at around $7.3 billion and instantly catapulted her to the top of the list. Of course, as with these types of lists, the value is theoretical, but she could conceivably sell her stake and realise the fortune as a cash balance, something many of the worlds other “paper” billionaires could not necessarily do.

Now you know that Nigeria is really rich.

Facebook in a shopping spree this season

Facebook announced Tuesday that it acquired Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift gaming headset in a cash and stock deal valued at $2 billion.

The terms of the deal include $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock.

The Oculus Rift project gained prominence on Kickstarter, raising over $2 million in the summer of 2012. The company went on to raise more than $91 million in venture funding in 2013. With this exit, the Oculus Rift is easily the most successful Kickstarter project of all time.

“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Although the Oculus team was never committed to bringing a consumer version of its VR headset to the market, more than 75,000 developers had already ordered developer kits for the technology — and the early prototypes we’ve seen look amazing.

Facebook says that Oculus will remain headquartered in Irvine and will continue developing the Oculus Rift platform.

This is Facebook’s second major acquisition in less than two months. Last month, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a staggering $16 billion.

On an investor conference Tuesday evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed why he was so interested in the Oculus team and the Oculus Rift.

For Zuckerberg, it’s all about the future. If mobile is the current computing platform, vision and virtual reality could be platforms of the future. Zuckerberg described buying Oculus as “a longterm bet on the future of computing.”

This is a sentiment echoed by Chris Dixon, an investor at Andresseen Horowitz, the company that led Oculus VR’s $75 million Series B funding round. On his blog, Dixon described his research into virtual reality and Oculus as a company. He writes, “the more we learned, the more we became convinced that virtual reality would become central to the next great wave of computing.”

The idea that Oculus represents the future of computing isn’t relegated to just investors. Shane Hudson, a London-based web developer, says he thinks that Oculus has the ability to offer up a ” fully immersed experience.” Hudson thinks that experience could extend from tasks such as “playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or even chatting your friends ‘face-to-face’ despite being on the other side of the world.”

Hudson works with data visualizations and he sees the Oculus Rift as giving an entire new way of working with that kind of data. “It’s a very interesting technology that could go in any number of directions, much as the web did,” Hudson says.

That’s what Zuckerberg thinks too. He sees Oculus’s current focus around games and entertainment as just the beginning. “Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” “Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” he said. “Imagine not just sharing moments with your friends online but entire experiences.”

Zuckerberg also said that buying Oculus was a way of investing in the best and brightest players in computing. He said Oculus is “years ahead in terms of technology” but that “all the best and brightest in the space already work there.”

Over the last two years, the Oculus team has amassed tons of talent, including many of the best minds in virtual reality and in gaming. John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software — and the lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, joined Oculus in Aug. 2012 as its CTO.

Original Oculus Rift founder and designer Palmer Luckey was just 19 when he came up with the first prototype for the Oculus Rift. Luckey worked at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies in the Mixed Reality lab, contributing to research and development of virtual reality systems. A head-mounted display aficionado, Luckey’s original Oculus Rift prototype caught the attention of Carmack, who was doing his own research in VR.

The other Oclulus VR co-founders, Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov, previously founded Scaleform, a vector 3D rendering engine acquired by Autodesk in 2011. Iribe, Oculus VR’s CEO, almost passed on Oclus, before seeing the technology.

“I said, ‘Virtual reality never works—I’m not interested,” Iribe told Fast Company. After meeting with Luckey and seeing the demonstration, he had a change of heart. “It was probably one of the most powerful moments of my life. Right away, I knew it was gonna change the world, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

After a successful Kickstarter run and a round of funding, the Oculus team quickly amassed talent from across disciplines. The Oculus team is brimming with experience in the game industry and in virtual reality, ranging from commercial applications to flight simulators for the Navy and NASA.

On the call, Iribe said that he and the Oculus team are thrilled to be “building the future with Facebook.”

Moreover, Iribe says that he’s excited about “bringing even greater resources to our work.” Competition in the VR space is just beginning — with Sony’s Morpheus headset already turning heads (pun intended) and other players expected to enter the space in the next year. With Facebook, Oculus now has a parent company with immense resources and a CEO dedicated to helping accelerate its visions for computing of the future.

Of course, not everyone sees a Facebook-owned Oculus VR as an appealing future. Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft and known online as Notch, is disappointed with the development. Persson shares his thoughts on his blog, revealing that the Facebook deal will put an end to plans for an official Minecraft port for the Oculus VR.

Similar sentiment is cropping up from other game developers. Of course, Facebook has faced this kind of backlash before. After Facebook announced it was going to purchase Instagram, users threatened to leave the service en masse. Not only did users not leave, two years later, Instagram is more popular and more successful than ever before.

Zuckerberg is clearly hoping the same situation will take place with Oculus VR. For him, a little backlash is nothing in exchange for, what he describes in his words, as a “longterm bet that immersive VR is the future.”

Zuckerberg earns $1 a year!

Going by salary at least, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earned just $1 for the year, according to a regulatory filing released on Monday. In Silicon Valley, though, earning a token salary is a sure sign that you’ve made it. Other $1-per-year men have included Apple’s Steve Jobs and the Google guys — Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Like those tech luminaries, Zuckerberg owns a substantial stake in his company, making a salary irrelevant. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has collected a decent salary before — in 2012, he made $503,205.

Overall, Zuckerberg made $653,165 last year versus $1.99 million in 2012. The money went largely to fund private planes and his security program, according to the filing.

The 29 year-old Zuckerberg’s wealth is estimated at $27 billion. He also owns 61.6% of voting power in the company, giving him carte blanche to forge ahead with deals like the $19 billion pending WhatsApp acquisition and last week’s $2 billion proposed takeover of Oculus.

Meanwhile, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made $16.2 million last year compared to $26.2 million in 2012. Facebook CFO David Ebersman earned $10.5 million, VP David Fischer made $8 million and CTO Mike Schroepfer earned $12.6 million.

Twitter Acquires Android Lockscreen App Cover

     

A very interesting acquisition announcement from Twitter : it’s buying Cover, an Android lockscreen app that lets you customise what apps you see and when. For now, Cover will remain live in the Play store.

“If that changes down the road, we’ll provide another update here,” the founders Todd Jackson, Gordon Luk and Edward Ho note in a blog post announcing the deal.

You can read Josh’s review of how Cover works here.

Cover is being somewhat cryptic in discussing what it will be working on at Twitter. “Twitter, like Cover, believes in the incredible potential of Android,” they write. “They share our vision that smartphones can be a lot smarter — more useful and more contextual — and together we’re going to make that happen. We’ll be building upon a lot of what makes Cover great, and we’re thrilled to create something even better at Twitter.”

At the same time, when you consider the work that Facebook has done in developing its Home service around the Android lockscreen, it’s clear that on some level, if an app is not owning the SIM that controls the entire phone, or the operating system, this is one very obvious way to remain front of mind for a user and incorporate a series of services that become front and center features for a user.

Apps are an overcrowded game. So owning the lockscreen gives you, effectively, a place to be first in the queue. It also gives Twitter some interesting potential routes for how it might longer-term try to deliver its stream of followers’ new and messages outside of its own app. Widgets featuring Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other streams are already quite common; Cover could work on ways to formalise and improve that experience.

It’s an area that others are eyeing up, too: Yahoo earlier this year acquired Aviate, which helps users customise their Android homescreens, for reportedly $80 million.

One question that lingers for me is how, when, and if companies like Twitter (and Facebook) will ever be able to think about these problems in the same way on iOS.

More generally, mobile has become a huge business for Twitter. Apart from the fact that Twitter was created as a mobile-first service, Twitter generates more in advertising from mobile than it does from desktop. Cover, meanwhile, says it has picked up “hundreds of thousands” of users since launching in October 2013.

To date, Cover had raised $1.7 million in funding, a seed round from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal, Max Levchin, Scott Banister, Charlie Cheever, Keith Rabois, Dave Girouard and Alex Franz.

Instagram Launches a faster and better android app.

            Instagram has launched version 5.1 of its app on Google Play today, with a redesign that makes for a much speedier, resource-light experience. Your profile should load in half the time, according to an official blog post announcing the news, and the whole app is half as large after the update.


        The app also has a new look, with “simplified visuals” across the experience that makes it easier for users to engage. Overall it looks like a flattened UI, which is more in keeping with what Android in general is doing, as well as with many of the changes made by OEMs to their own software.

        The redesign isn’t only meant to keep things looking good and running better – it’s also meant to make Instagram accessible and pleasant to use on a wider range of hardware, including low-end smartphones and Android-powered “feature phones,” according to Instagram, as well as on larger-screened devices like the phablets every OEM under the sun seems to be making.

New App Cloaq promises new way to post and share in secret

A team of engineers, who have asked to not be identified by name, are working to develop a new platform for anonymous posting called Cloaq (pronounced “cloak”). This upcoming web and mobile platform, they tell me, will combine the anonymity of apps like Secret and Whisper, with the ease-of-use of more public platforms for sharing, like Twitter, Medium or WordPress.

The team has sent me several lengthy and mysterious emails detailing their project, but I told them that I couldn’t, in good faith, cover them, unless I knew who they were, and why they were qualified to build such a thing.

Though I’ll stick by my agreement to not reveal their names, what I can say is that the team at Cloaq are not seasoned startup veterans hailing from the Valley, but rather a group of engineers whose backgrounds include both senior and consulting roles within larger organizations where they couldn’t have fudged their technical capabilities.

Their decision to hide their names is more of a gimmick, it seems.

Explains one, the team “decided that, in order to stay 100% focused on product, we will take our core theme of anonymity a bit further and remain cloaked ourselves.” In addition, the group “will not be publicly speaking or responding to press inquiries and will basically remain faceless and nameless beyond ‘Team Cloaq.’”

Yep, definitely not seasoned startup guys here.

Unlike other anonymous movements like Anonymous (with the capital “A”), Cloaq is not just the title given to a loosely defined organization that anyone can join. Instead, despite Cloaq’s attempt at (ahem) cloak-and-dagger intrigue, the company sounds like your usual startup. Engineers quit their day jobs to build something they’re passionate about. They even have some initial funding from private investors.

The product the engineers have in mind is interesting, though the actual execution has yet to be revealed, and could easily make or break this thing.


How It Works

Like anonymous “social” apps, Cloaq will allow users to post content, which appears in the timeline of those following you. This isn’t entirely different, on its own, from something like Secret, but there are a number of other features that make Cloaq sound unique.

For starters, the anonymous posts can be of any length, and can be tagged with a category for searching and sorting. Of course, you can be pseudo-anonymous on blogging platforms today, especially on Tumblr, which is already home to a number of “anonymous” personalities, including some of those in the tech industry would know, like Startup L. Jackson or that angry Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley guy (gal?).

However, what Cloaq says would be different on its platform is that it won’t even collect users’ email addresses or phone numbers at signup, like Secret or Tumblr or Twitter or anyone else these days, would do.

“So, even if there is a hack… there is no personal information to retrieve,” explains a Cloaq co-founder. “That’s my only beef with Secret. It’s really fun to use and consume micro-content on, but I still wont post anything that I wouldn’t want coming back to me, because they have my personal information.”

Instead, with Cloaq, you simply enter a password and get assigned an @id number, which serves as your handle of sorts. And if you want to publish something that’s totally cloaked, you can choose to not even have your @id number associated with it. It will still show up in the streams of those who follow you, though.

These numbers will start at @alpha1 and go through @alpha9999 before moving on to @beta1 through @beta9999, and so on. The co-founder adds that while Cloaq can handle password resets via security questions, those who forget their Cloaq ID could be out of luck, which is why they’ve tried to simplify them.

Like blog posts, Cloaq posts can have a title, photo and content, though the title and photo are optional, which lets Cloaq work for long-form and short-form content alike. There will also be standard features, like a Popular section, favoriting and flagging functions, and comments among other things. To cut down on abuse, Cloaq will have a no-tolerance policy for racism, prejudice hate speech, and threats. Users’ accounts making those sorts of posts will be immediately frozen.
Timing May Be Right, But Cloaq Has A Lot To Prove

“We designed this platform to give intelligent people a way to speak their minds freely,” explains a co-creator. “We want to give people a way to really be their true selves, and express their true beliefs, ideas, opinions and suggestions without the natural reservation that comes with living in the public social media age, and worrying about what their friends, family or followers will think of them, or how they will be judged,” he adds.

In theory, it sounds like the time could be right for a service like Cloaq, as the shift to mobile continues amid the fallout from exposure caused by putting our personal info in the hands of social networks, which were later mined and archived by governments, it was revealed.

But simply building an “anti” public social network is not enough, as a number of services in the past, including the Diaspora project, or alt Twitters like Identi.ca and the earlier version of App.net, have previously shown. Cloaq, however it turns out, will still have a lot to prove. Especially since they’re playing the tease.

Cloudshot Inc.: FRIEND-ZONE

Cloudshot Inc.: FRIEND-ZONE: In popular culture, friend-zone refers to a platonic relationship wherein one person wishes to enter into a romantic or sexual relationshi...

FRIEND-ZONE

In popular culture, friend-zone refers to a platonic relationship wherein one person wishes to enter into a romantic or sexual relationship while the other does not, and it is generally considered to be an undesirable situation by the lovelorn person.

The term “friend-zone” was popularized by a 1994 episode of the American sitcom “Friends” entitled “The one with the blackout”, where the character Rose Geller, who was lovesick for Rachel Green, was described by character Joey Tribbianii  as being the “MAJOR OF THE FRIEND ZONE”.

Most people are of the belief that the friend-zone might result from misinterpreted signals or from a fear that a deeper relationship might jeopardize the friendship, and a very funny thing is that most people don’t even know whether or not they are in the friend-zone L L

I'm sure one question running through your mind as you read this is; “AM I IN THE FRIEND-ZONE?!!!”

If you’re a guy, below are a few signs that you are in the Zone:

·      *  She calls you BROTHER

·      *  She talks about other guys with you and she is not doing it to make you jealous

·        *She tells you everything on her mind

·       * You’re always the first to know when a guy asks her out, hits on her, or she even starts to date someone else

·      *  She doesn't flirt with you

·       * She never dresses up for you

·      *  She never believes you when you compliment her.

I’ll stop here for now, and in subsequent weeks I’ll write on more signs for guys, and the ladies too are not left out. I’ll also give you tips on how to free yourself from the dreadful zone.

Please feel free to drop your comments below, they would be highly appreciated...