Friday, February 7, 2025
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Centenary Bank will pay you for taking a Selfie!

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Centenary Bank Uganda is running one of the best promotions for Youth and campusers. All you have to do is take a Selfie with your newly acquire CenteVolution ATM card, tag Centenary bank’s Facebook page and tag as many of your Facebook friends. The Photo with the most likes, comments and shares in a day will win 50,000 Uganda shillings. Centenary Bank will then reward its winners on through their CenteVolution accounts.

Your selfie should come with your Facebook names  and their real names together with your Phone number. You are required to be #CenteVolution account holders and you should hold a piece of paper with writings in bold stating you are a proud owner  a #CenteVolution account.

Remember that opening this account is free, so don’t wait, get up and open your #CenteVolution account.

 

Intel Ideation Camp Day 2: What you missed!

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Nothing beats arising to a morning filled with great and free knowledge. Well that’s what Intel shared with us on the second day of this Intel Ideation camp.

Today Mark from iHub its led today’s sessions that rotated around creation of ideas. He asked teams not to criticize ideas but rather come up with lots of ideas including ridiculous ones that the intelligent might call “bad ideas” based on ‘Creative Ideas’ theme.
We had to sort the ideas according to their value and uniqueness on a fun to use scale.

We then had to make a business model canvas for each group, a Business model canvas is built on 9 building blocks which you use to map out an entire business plan on one page.

Business Model Canvas
Mark shared that every canvas has to clearly define customer segments, value propositions, channels of delivery, revenue streams, key resources, key partners and cost structure. I believe this is the major reason startups are successful because it helps startups define a clear path to follow when promoting their apps and ideas.

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Pitching
Then we came to the moment everyone was waiting for, time for pitching came. We were lucky enough to have some tips from Abigael which included elevator pitching and a strong opening statement. Teams had an intense time preparing for the pitching session and pitching wasn’t as easy as it has always looked. I was totally impressed with what the randomly choosen team (in day one)came up with an hour.

Team Nutrita pitched a web based app to solve nutrition problems that young parents face. Team Smile Karamoja pitched an idea about taking an international school to rural karamoja.
Team. Team Hakuna queue pitched a health wearable which would reduce congestion at health centres. Team Nakawele pitched a wearable that detects whether mothers have malaria. Team Mospital created a solution for patients through a mobile application to find health services. Tusome pitched about an online lab simulation for schools.

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The judges announce Team Hakuna Queue as the winner and in 2nd place came Nakawele and Mospital came 3rd. All winners went home with envelope with some party money.

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The today event ended on a very good note as participants seemed quite excited. It’s such events that mentor developers and start ups to create awesome stuff. Kudos to Intel and outbox for organizing a brilliant event.

The Intel Ideation Camp Day 1 comes to a glorious end

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Outbox Hub hosted the Garage48 Intel Ideation camp, an event that aimed at preparing Techies and startups for the upcoming Garage 48 hackathon. Abigael Wangui and Mark from iHub Kenya who were sent by Intel took attendees through the various sessions.

Abigal started with a session that explained innovation, inventions and how to successfully implement new ideas. She tackled the million dollar “What is innovation?” question. She was clear enough to tackle the basics on Initiative and entrepreneurship, through a six step stages.

[quote_right]”Ideas are cheap, execution is everything”[/quote_right]

She shared about the Intel Youth Enterprise Program which provides trains startups how to pitch and implement ideas, because startups might think they have the best ideas but sharing them in front of a panel becomes a problem.

[quote_box_center]The world is made by people who were no smarter than you! Don’t be afraid to change – Steve Jobs [/quote_box_center]

The event required us to form teams that comprise of a Hacker, Artist and a Hustler. Hustlers in the business sense, artists in reference to designers and hackers are techies. The groups were chosen in a close to random manner which seen died that every team had at least 2 hackers, hustlers, and artists.
This kind of arrangement promoted teamwork and sharing ideas and followed a six stage program.

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Stage 1: Understand
In this stage the different groups had to choose amongst the health, education and agricultural sector. We had to identify the various challenges in this sector.

Stage 2: Identify
Here every group had to list their target users and zero down to a main target user for their solution. This is important because it creates a focal point to further analyse and describe the problems they had listed.
Those reading this might think it was easy, but it’s actually a brain tasking activity. In fact some groups had spaces on their answer sheets.

I was impressed by the idea of buddy teams where different groups worked together using the ‘watering hole’ theme for animals in the savannah.

Abigail also concluded with the importance of catching up with trends. She shared the “SoLoMo” idea which stands for Social, Local, Mobile. There was a brief interaction on the new trends in technology and people shared what apps they used. Well for those who love keeping up with trends are in the right place.

The event continues tomorrow, unfortunately you will need to have registered today. You will need to catch up with Outbox’s website for another event that is relevant to you.

Apple launches the Apple Watch

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Apple announce its Watch during the Apple Event,Tim Cook announced this “new” wearable device. The Watch comes with a digital crown that looks like a dial that makes it simple to navigate features on your AppleWatch.

appleiwatch

It comes with beautiful looking software in comparison with the Android wear. It also has wireless charging, a tough strap band that uses magnets for locking together. You can use different straps to meet users’ multiple design preferences.

There are two sizes of Apple Watch, larger and smaller for bigger and smaller wrists. Apple has also added a Gold Edition that will have 18k gold. The Watch also plays music and suggests messages to reply to those who send you iMessages with by analysing the text. You can use animated emoji to reply to messages and select what parts on the emoji you want to move. The watch uses inductive charging that uses a magnet for charging.

The AppleWatch is also smart enough to open your Hotel room and connect to your BMW car. You will however need an iPhone 5, 5c, 6 or 6 Plus to sync with the iWatch. The pricing starts at $349.

iwatchcharging

iwatch2

iwatch3

Apple Launches iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus

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Apple launched two new iPhones during their keynote which had so many glitches over their official livestream. The iPhone 6 comes with 4.7 inch display and the iPhone 6 Plus comes with a larger 5.5 inches.

I was not impressed by the 8MP iSight camera announcement, Have they hit a wall at innovation because they still talked about optical Image stabilisation in this century, and wait the front camera is now 2 mega pixels, am pretty sure competition is laughing.

Apple says its new iPhones come with Retina HD display, that has a 1334×750 pixel at 326 ppi for the iPhone 6 and 1920×1080 at a 401ppi for the iPhone Plus. Apple slimmed its iPhones to 6.9mm and 7.1 mm in width.

iphone6price

 

Apple also launched ApplePay, a feature that uses NFC to make one press purchases without using a credit card, they claim the cashier won’t know your name because it creates a virtual card

applepay

The iPhone come with voLTE and calling over wifi, NFC and 802.11ac wifi.

The new iPhone 6 will cost $199, $299, $399 for the 32gb, 64Gb and 128Gb models of the iPhone 6 and the $299, $399, $499 for the iPhone 6 Plus respectively on contract. And starting $649 off contract

 

Apple Live Event Livestream

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Samsung Galaxy Edge is a funky futuristic looking phone

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Well you must be already wondering why Samsung used such a weird name. The Galaxy Edge is practically a Galaxy note 4 spec-wise with a curved screen, screen-wise.

Announced yesterday with the Note 4, the Edge changed the way we perceived Smartphone Screens.It’s a thin beautiful phone that has a curved screen along its right Edge, the “ticker”.

The Edge is practically 2 screens in one this gives this beast the 3D kinda feel when using it. It has an identical Quad HD display identical to the Note 4 and a thin strip having icons and widgets.

In the hands, this device feels good to use. It has accurate detection so it’s really hard to accidentally activate it with stray fingertips.

Galaxy-Note-Edge-Specifications1

The Edge by default harbours the go-to column of frequently used apps like Ruler, stop watch and weather; when in the app, the column fades away and can be brought back by a simple swipe with the thumb. The curved screen makes moving through Photos and Apps really cool plus the Animation effects that add Icing to the cake.

The camera controls are all on the curved Edge while the main Menu only has images. The curved screen also comes in handy with a black and white night-clock. This is really convenient as you can tell the time from your bed as the phone lies on the table.

Lefties don’t even wait for the Samsung release of the left-handed version. This beast can be flipped upside down triggering a 180 degrees rotation. Definitely the home button will be up but what the hell you can still use it anyway.

It also has a Stylus, heart-rate monitor, fingerprint scanner and almost whatever the Note 4 has. However, this amazing device will not have a Gear VR, not even the one for the Note 4 is compatible. The 5.6” screen phablet is powered by a 3,000mAh battery.

Besides being somewhat uncomfortable to grip, other specs are practically similar to the Note 4.

There you have it. The SDK will be out pretty soon for developers to put that curved screen to good use.

This genius piece of equipment will be available in your Samsung store in black and white very soon

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Unveiled

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Early Wednesday, Samsung introduced two new beasts; the Note 4 and the Note Edge. Well here is all you need to know about the Note 4.

The note 4 phablet has a 5.7 inch Super AMOLED display; it also has a metal band wrapping its side pretty much like the Galaxy Alpha. It also has a virtual-reality headset known as the Gear VR which will be sold as a companion to the Note 4 but won’t work with other Galaxy devices. It still has its old school faux-leather style back but all these slight changes go a long way to making it a better phone than its predecessors. Samsung is in the bid to keep up with its design strategy pacing up with Apple that is rumoured to launch a 5.5 inch beast a week from now.

This bad boy is pretty much designed to attract Gamers. It also features an improved pen stylus with double the pressure sensitivity of the Note 3 and related software as a handwriting alternative to typing with the keypad.

Multitasking is much easier on this device taking advantage of its massive screen. There’s also this feature of shrinking an app into a smaller window that can hover over top of another running app. Apps can also be put in a two-app split-screen view which is really exciting.

Although this amazing phone is packed with cool new features and the latest hardware specs, there is almost nothing in the Note 4 that will excite old users, many mobile phone analysts suggest.

Samsung is in a bid to recover from the 2 year decline in the market share. This is majorly due to the Galaxy S5 that was released in April which caused massive disappointment to highly anticipated users. Research puts it that the older flagship, iPhone 5S out sold the Galaxy S5; a failure to deliver major improvements from its predecessor. Samsung however reveals that it will focus on a narrower set of products and also get more aggressive on pricing to recover from the decline.

Galaxy-Note-4-Product-Specifications

Taking a closer look at the specs, we have a 5.7” Super AMOLED Capacitative screen protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It’s packed with an expandable 32 GB of internal memory and an amazing 3 GB of RAM.

Internet speeds of 40 Mbps up to 300 Mbps depending on your Service provider. A 16MP camera with simultaneous HD video recording. Also having a secondary Camera with 3.7MP

It has a heart-rate monitor as earlier Galaxies from this year and a fingerprint sensor as well running on Android v4.4.4 Kitkat.

The SM-N910S model has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset and the Exynos 5433 for the SM-910C powered by a 3220 mAh battery.

Well, as said earlier, there’s nothing mind blowing about the Note 4 that its bigger brothers haven’t done already.

Gear VR
Gear VR

It will be available at your trusted Samsung outlet in black, white, pink and bronze.

Good Bye Google Authorship, We’ll miss you

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You might have seen profile photos of writers in your Google Search result recently, or perhaps a name of the author of a new story in Google Search results. That’s what Google Authorship is. As a blogger, Google Authorship has been an awesome link between authentic authors and Google search results, it gave authors, bloggers and writers this pride when users looked up their content on the web. In fact one was able to see the count of all posts a particular author had writer.

Setting it up wasn’t a piece of cake either since you had to edit meta data and link accounts, Today the service was silently killed, because your results won’t show up in the search results anymore, and John Mueller a webmaster and Trends analyst at Google shared a post on his Google Plus explaining that leaving the code in your head won’t be harmful and Google will treat just like any other meta-data in your website.

[quote_box_center](If you’re curious — in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.) – John Mueller – Google [/quote_box_center]

Google also claims that they carried out varies experiments which proved that removing Google Authorship from search results didn’t reduce traffic to website and neither did it increase AD clicks.

Most publishers will probably raise their virtual candles to the death of a feature we loved

You’ll worry about Africa when you see this ‘All Devices on the Internet Pinged’ Photo

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The Internet is one global handshake that connects most of us, It the biggest way of connectivity today. But we have to ask our selves, where is the the internet? On what device does it reside? These are questions John Matherly answers using his company Shodan. Shodan was able to create an image visualization of the location of all devices on the internet pinged.

You will then notice that the biggest concentration is in Developed countries and Africa is almost dark, with some countries only showing a mere-small dot. The connected devices in Africa are mostly located in the capitals and big cities.

[quote_box_center]This leaves many wondering what steps Africa needs to take because grumbling about our problems won’t solve them, rather innovations from start ups, Telecoms and governments are required to extend internet access to more people in Africa. In Uganda, Google Fibre is being laid and companies like Facebook are working with ISPs to bring the dark world to the light of the Internet. [/quote_box_center]

There is however doubt it whether the proclaimed “Internet of things Search Engine”  (Shodan) was able to ping all devices since its technically not possible since some devices are hidden under NAT restrictions and some configurations on some networks do not allow external pinging.Some tweet users questioned him about Canada which appeared dark but its figures show large Internet activity.

However this image still gives us a bigger picture of the location of most internet enabled devices.

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