This situation is very preferable to those businesses who are dealing with customers online. That is why the sale of online gaming has surged at a tremendous rate. On the other hand, online streaming websites such as Netflix is also having golden days; they added 15 million new subscribers during this pandemic crisis.

The sale of video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and many more soar as the billions of people are trapped inside their homes. There is no activity outside as the cinema and theatres are closed to minimize the spread of Covid-19.

According to data, about $1.6 billion worth of businesses is done by selling gaming accessories, software, and hardware. One of the best online selling games is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a life simulation video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch.

The Xbox and Sony’s Play Station 5 new generation consoles are expected to come out later this year. At present, the sale of gaming consoles of Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Play Station 4 rose 63% as compared to last year and we are just in the month of April.

The growth in videogame sales is expected to escalate as the coronavirus keeps on spreading and it will take months to end the restrictions and start a normal daily routine. So far above 3 million people have contracted coronavirus, over 200,000 people died and more than 1 million patients recovered all over the world.

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Coronavirus disease has spread all over the world and most of the world is living in their homes in self-isolation mode. All the communication has come down to using an online platform to connect to the near and dear ones. In such an unprecedented situation everybody wishes to have a good quality-oriented call experience.

When talking about calls everybody is concerned about the quality of video call and different apps are available for Android and iPhone. They vary about the quality of the call, most of the top apps require internet like WhatsApp and Skype, and Duo made by Google is also one of these apps.

According to experts, 99% of all video calls have some data loss and 8% of the calls lose audio data. Google aims to improve the quality of calls for countries where there’s a problem of bandwidth and slow internet. Google wants to make your call’s privacy protected and guarantee an end to end data encryption.

Google is constantly working on new features and updates in the app and the latest feature of Google is the addition of machine learning algorithms into their app. For this Google is working on new technology to improve the quality of an audio call, and it’s called WaveNetEQ.

Google’s DeepMind division is already working on it, most of the noise on audio call is created by the audio jitter and Google aims to solve it by applying machine learning algorithms replacing audio jitter with the voice of a human. During an audio call, most of the packets of data are lost and google will reduce this loss with AI techniques. Google says, “Because Duo calls are end-to-end encrypted, all processing needs to be done on the device.”

Google launched this feature on Pixel 4 devices in Dec 2019, the same will be applied to other mobile models but Pixel devices will be first to have it. Google is also going to shut its local community app on May 12.

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Simply stated, a VPN connects your computer, smartphone, tablet, smartwatch or laptop to another computer anywhere on the internet, and allows you to browse the internet using that computer’s internet connections. For example, if VPN connects you to a server situated in Europe then it looks like you are from Europe and can access those websites which are banned or restricted in your region.

Nowadays they are very popular. At the start, they were created for business purposes to access different services through the business network from home but now it is used everywhere.

Following are the key features you can do by using a Virtual Private Network:

1. Protect yourself from non-trusted Wi-Fi networks
2. Protect yourself from torrenting
3. Be anonymous by hiding your true identity
4. Bypass restrictions on websites
5. Hide browsing activity from your local internet provider
6. Have a powerful online protection from hackers

Enjoy unrestricted access worldwide. The VPN beats limitation and censorship to deliver every content on the internet from anywhere in the world.

Stay organized and stay safe and secure whenever you go online. The VPN hides your IP address and encrypts your data so that no one can see and try to track it down. Through Virtual Private Network you can easily bypass the hacker and spies by encrypting your network data. Now say goodbye to geographic restriction and access any content no matter where your location is.

How Does a VPN work?

When someone connects their computer to a VPN then the computers act as if it’s on the same local network as the VPN. The computers and VPN addresses will be the same. When you are connected to a VPN and you wanted to browse any website, it will forward your request for you and brings back the response to you through a secured connection.

For example, if you are on a computer in the USA and using a Russian based VPN then all the sites you browse see that the request is coming from Russia, not the USA and that makes the browsing safe and secure.

There are so many VPN’s in the market available at an affordable price, like NordVPN, TunnelBear, StrongVPN, VyprVPN, CyberGhost

These all VPNs are trial based and if you are not satisfied with the service you can have your money back.

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Amazon is taking some innovative steps to verify all sellers by first testing video calls to verify third-party sellers. The world’s largest e-commerce giant has already been under criticism due to the authenticity of their products. For Example, some of the sellers were selling products with Fake labels of “Apple” and “Nokia”.

This unique verification process started earlier at the start of this year and initially, there were plans for verifying every person but due to the current scenario of coronavirus pandemic, the company delayed this and later decided to only verify via video calls.

An Amazon spokesperson said recently, “As we practice social distancing, we are testing a process that allows us to validate prospective sellers’ identification via videoconferencing. This pilot testing will allow us to connect one-on-one with prospective sellers while making it even more difficult for fraudsters to hide.”

Amazon has started its verification trials of testing video calls in different countries of the world like China, Japan, the US, and the UK. It will verify the ID and documents of the seller and so far more than 1000 sellers have been verified with this starter verification project. Amazon is also using a machine learning system to identify sellers, it will also check for other misuses of accounts, that either the seller has any link or associated with previously suspended accounts in the past.

According to research from firm Marketplace Pulse in 2019, 40% of the top 10000 sellers in European countries were from China. There were misuses of accounts from most of the sellers that were from China because Chinese based sellers have a history of multiple accounts registered as the seller.

Project Zero was also part of this game, in which Amazon allowed the sellers to provide logos and trademarks for their products. Only last year, the company banned 2.5 million invalid seller accounts at Amazon, and Amazon is also taking some legal steps to withdraw such products from the market.

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Almost 15 years ago the first video of YouTube was uploaded by the cofounder of YouTube Jawed Karim. The first video uploaded was simple and short and it was just 18 seconds long. Till now it has been watched 90 million times.

These were just the starting days for YouTube and in the last 15 years, it has changed a lot. It has changed the life of a lot of professional actors, artists, musicians, and vloggers, who share their work and monetize their videos to earn money from YouTube.

The most famous song Despacito is the most popular video on YouTube and it has hit more than 6.7 billion views as of April 2020. Overall, one billion hours of content is watched daily on YouTube. As per the statistics of YouTube, it has more than 2 billion users visit each month. YouTube also provides profit to its content creators, they can earn money via ads on their videos.

YouTube has been generating a lot of money due to its ads and just last year, YouTube Generated a whopping $ 15 billion dollars, which is a huge amount when compared with money generated by Facebook and Amazon. There’s has been also an increase of 36.5 % in Revenue of YouTube.

Looking at the size of YouTube now, It is so interesting to see how all it started with just an 18 second video.

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Now Google AI team is working on a new and advanced translating model that would minimize gender-based bias when translating from other languages.

“We have made significant progress since our initial launch by increasing the quality of gender-based translations & also expanding it to 4 more language pairs. We are committed to further improve gender bias in Google Translate and plan to extend this work to document level translation as well, ” Google Research senior software engineer Melvin Johnson said recently.

There were some flaws in olden techniques of translation, e.g. the system was unable to translate Turkish to English and more than 40% of queries of translation didn’t work with Neural Machine Translation.

The old system of translation was not working adequately with gender-based translations, In the first step, the system did translations and when the translations were done successfully, the system used a rewriter that used AI and it produced alternative translations. For training the rewriter, the system divided the whole data into training and testing. More than a million English sentences were used, feminine and masculine data were also used to train the AI.

In the next step, training from both sides was merged into a single transformer based sequence to sequence and in the end, all the results obtained from this technique had 97% accuracy.

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Flutter apps are developed using Google’s Dart programming language. Flutter has four major components in its development. (1) Dart platform. (2) Design specific widgets. (4) Flutter engine. (5) Foundation library.

Due to the hybrid development nature of the Flutter the amount of its developers is increasing day by day, and now as per the latest statistics released from Google nearly 2 million developers have used Flutter since version 1.0 that was released in Dec 2018 and nearly half a million developers are using Flutter each month. Currently, there are almost 50000 apps published at Google Play developed by Flutter developers and only 10000 apps were uploaded in the last month.

Google has also revealed some statistics and nature of the use of Flutter by different ecosystems, one of the top five regions where Flutter developers are based are India, China, the US, the EU, and Brazil. Out of all users, 7 % are working in companies, 19% are self-employed freelancers, 26% are developers in large companies and 35% of users are in small startups. Most of the developers are building apps on Windows OS. 60% of Flutter users are developing on Windows 10 OS, 27% on Apple OS, and 13% are building on Linux OS.

Like other frameworks, Flutters has also competitors in the tech market and the main is React Native which is developed by Facebook. It is also well known due to its nature of hybrid development. In hybrid development, you have to write code once for a single framework and it will run on all platforms albeit with some minor changes. Developers are able to write code for mobile apps, desktop apps, wearables, and web.

Flutter is also using some popular framework packages in apps that are http, intl meta, path_provider, pedantic, and shared_preferences. Some popular third-party packages used in Flutter apps are provider, cached_network_image, font_awesome_flutter, flutter_launcher_icons, rxdart, and sqlite.

Flutter still has some issues and Google is trying to fix them, Google is trying to optimize the testing and quality of Flutter branches and also working on the release and stability process of Flutter, so developers can better understand about the upcoming release of Flutter.

Tim Sneath Group Product Manager for Flutter and Dart has said, “We will now branch at the beginning of the month for a beta release and stabilize this release by cherry-picking any critical fixes. Roughly once a quarter, the current beta branch will be promoted to our stable release. We will continue to do hotfixes on this release if necessary.”

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For using this smart debit card, a user will be connected via the Google app. For developing this card google is considering partnering with Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union. Google may extend it to other payment companies as well, like Master Card and there will also be an option for payment via virtual cards.

Google Spokesperson did not tell or cleared the speculations regarding its plans for a smart debit card, who was recently on record saying, “We are exploring how we can partner with banks and credit unions in the US to offer smart checking accounts through Google Pay, helping their customers benefit from useful insights and budgeting tools while keeping their money in an FDIC or NCUA-insured account. Our lead partners today are Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union, and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.”

Entering into the financial sector, Google will open new doors for itself. Transactions of money between multiple platforms will not only generate money for Google but it will also provide more customers’ data and revenue to Google, which can be used for making Google ads better and other campaigns.

As we know, tech trends are changing rapidly and every giant company wants to be part of finance. Google will have more advantage than other companies in decision making because it already has an insight into customer’s data, that will help it in making better decisions in the financial sector.

Although the final design of the card has not been released yet, Google will try to make it simple and attractive on the line with its own material designed apps. The card will have the name of the customer, Visa supported payment method and a chip installed on it. It will also incorporate fingerprint and pin as in other cards of banks, Google has also ambitions for releasing an online or virtual version of the card. The good thing about it if the customer loses the card or the card is damaged then the online version of this card can also be used via the online application of Google Pay.

Google has its main business in searching and advertising, but due to customer’s data, it will have more advantages than other companies. The card will be connected to all major banks of the USA and customers will be able to recharge it with other bank accounts.

Facebook has already its cryptocurrency as Libra, Apple has a smart credit card and Google will soon be launching its smart debit card.

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The OnePlus 8 Pro is a proper flagship phone. Forget previous generations of handsets from the firm, and its ‘flagship killer’ underdog mantra. OnePlus is now officially mixing it with the biggest names in mobile.

Whereas handsets such as the OnePlus 7 Pro and 7T Pro cut a few corners in order to hit a slightly lower price tag than the competition, the OnePlus 8 Pro isn’t pulling any punches – it’s now genuine competition for the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, iPhone 11 Pro and Huawei P40 Pro.

Unfortunately, it also means that the days of OnePlus offering an ‘affordable flagship’ option are over. 

OnePlus 8 Pro specs

Weight: 199g
Dimensions: 165.3 x 74.35 x 8.5mm
Display size: 6.78-inch
Resolution: QHD+
Refresh rate: 120Hz
Pixel density: 513ppi
Chip: Snapdragon 865
RAM: 8GB / 12GB
Storage: 128GB/256GB
Rear cameras: 48MP + 48MP + 5MP + 8MP
Front camera: 16MP
Battery: 4,510mAh
Rating: IP68
Dual Nano SIMs
Type C port

OnePlus has slapped the best display it’s ever made on the 8 Pro, and the Chinese company goes as far as to say it’s the best screen you’ll see on a phone all year. 

It’s a bold claim, and one which may prove unfounded as the year goes on, but take nothing away from this handset: the 6.78-inch ‘Fluid Display’ with a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR10+ support and QHD resolution is fantastic. 

There’s a quad camera setup on the rear providing a wealth of photography options through features such as an ultra-wide-angle lens, 30x zoom, powerful night mode, and the firm’s new ‘color filter’ camera that’s designed to give your shots a unique look. 

While the cameras are a marked improvement over the snappers on the 7 Pro and 7T Pro, they don’t quite hit the same heights as Samsung, Huawei or Google. They are still very good, though.

OnePlus has also, finally, given its fans what they’ve been asking for by including their most-requested feature: wireless charging. 

Not only that, but it’s fast wireless charging too, with the ability to get you from zero to 50% in just 30 minutes. The 8 Pro also features the biggest battery ever in a OnePlus phone, and it’ll easily last you a day on a single charge.

Add to that the flagship power under the hood that we’re used to seeing from OnePlus, with the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 865 chipset teamed with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM, plus the addition of 5G connectivity to both the 8 Pro and its smaller sibling, the OnePlus 8, and it’s clear the brand is no longer willing to take a backseat when it comes to any of its specs. 

In short, you’ve got a highly accomplished flagship smartphone on your hands.

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The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro is the most premium of the bunch with a better quad-lens camera array than the Mi 10, more storage, and faster charging capabilities. There are relatively few differences between this and the base device compared to, say, the Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20 Plus, but the Mi 10 Pro should still be the stronger device.

In fact, the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro could end up being the company’s most premium phone of 2020, given precedent. Below you’ll find our first thoughts on it.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro release date and price

The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro’s sale date depends on the country. It’s launching on either April 7 or April 15 in various European countries, but it’s set to come to the UK and other regions at an unspecified later date.

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