WhatsApp launches Desktop Application for Windows and Mac Users

The most popular messaging app WhatsApp now has a fully functional desktop app – both for Macas well as Windows platform.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging software has been a mobile-only messaging platform forever, but from Tuesday, the company is offering you its desktop application for both Windows and OS X.

Few months back, WhatsApp launched a Web client that can be run through your browser to use WhatsApp on your desktop, but now users running Windows 8 or Mac OS 10.9 and above can use the new desktop app that mirrors WhatsApp messages from a user's mobile device.

According to the company's blog post, the WhatsApp desktop app is similar to WhatsApp Web with synchronized conversations and messages

Since WhatsApp desktop app is native for both Windows and OS X platform, it can support desktop notifications and keyboard shortcuts.

WhatsApp has been rising at an extraordinary pace recently. The service has over 1 Billion monthly active users.

At the beginning of the year, the company removed its yearly $1 subscription fee. Just last month, the company rolled out end-to-end encryption for all its users' communication by default.

Here's how to Download WhatsApp Desktop Software:

1. Users running Windows 8 (or newer) or OS X 10.9 (or newer) can download WhatsApp desktop app available for direct downloading.
2. Once Downloaded, open the WhatsApp desktop app.
3. Scan the QR code with your mobile phone to Sync your device.

Now enjoy WhatsApping your friends and family straight from your desktop.

Quantum Computers.. Now a Reality - IBM launches Publicly

Quantum computers are expected to take the computing technology to the highest level, but it is an experimental and enormously complex technology that Google and NASA are working on and is just a dream for general users to play with.

Hold on! IBM is trying to make your dream a reality.

BM just made its new quantum computing project online (with tutorials), making it available for free to anyone interested in playing with it.

Quantum Computers — Now A Reality!

The technology company said on Wednesday that it is giving the world access to one of its quantum computing processors, which is yet an experimental technology that has the potential to perform much faster calculations than today's computers.

You can now access IBM's five-qubit quantum computing processor, which is located at its a research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, through the cloud to run experiments and test applications.

All you will need to do is request an invitation from IBM through a web form that will ask for your institution details and your level of computing experience.

Quantum Computers Vs. Regular Computers ?

Quantum computers can theoretically be much faster than traditional computers because they take advantage of quantum mechanics.

While traditional computers use the "bits" to represent information as a 0 or a 1, Quantum computers use quantum bits or "qubits" to represent information as a 0, 1, or both at the same time. This means that 2 qubits could potentially have 4 values at the same time: 00, 01, 10, and 11.

In other words, a quantum computer with just 50 qubits will be much more powerful than any supercomputer available today.

360° Tour of the IBM Research Quantum Lab:

According to IBM, its five-qubit quantum computing processor is just a "small step" towards a useful quantum computer, though the company hopes to build a quantum computer with a medium-size quantum processor of 50-100 qubits within the next 10 years.

With a step ahead in the quantum computing, IBM's qubit processor is the world's first quantum processor accessible to the public, even if through the cloud.

Users who want to access the quantum processor can stay in the comfort of their homes or offices and work with qubits, study tutorials, and run simulations using the cloud and their computers or mobile devices.

Microsoft to Store Data on DNA

INFO:

Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years.

Microsoft has purchased 10 Million strands of synthetic DNA, called Oligonucleotides a.k.a. DNA molecules, from biology startup Twist and collaborated with researchers from University of Washington to explore the idea of using synthetic DNA to store huge amount of data.

Detailed:

Microsoft is planning to drastically change the future of data storage technology as we know it today.

The volume and rate of production of data being produced and stored every day are so fast that the servers and hard drives needing to be replaced periodically, potentially increasing the risk of corruption and data loss.

According to stats, 5.4 zettabytes (4.4 trillion gigabytes) of digital data, circulating and available worldwide, had been created by 2015, and it will boost to 54 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020.

How will the world suppose to store this 10 times amount of data in next four years?

For this, Microsoft has partnered with scientists at the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a data storage medium, the companies announced on Wednesday.

Yes, Microsoft is planning to store data in DNA.

The data storage density of DNA is enormously higher than conventional storage systems, as just 1 gram of DNA can store close to 1 Billion Terabytes of data.

Besides this, DNA is also remarkably robust, which means the data stored in DNA can stay intact and readable for as long as 1,000 to 10,000 years.

According to Twist, all of the digital data that exists today could be stored in less than 20 grams of DNA.

Though the technology is long away from ready for commercial products (so you will not see a DNA-powered smartphone anytime soon), the initial tests done by the company last fall demonstrated 100 percent of digital data encoded on DNA could be recovered, Microsoft Research's Doug Carmean said in the press release.

Recently, the American Chemical Society said in a statement that storing data on DNA could last up to 2,000 years without deterioration.

This Tiny Computer Runs on Radio Waves Powered wirelessly & hasn't battery

No matter how smart and fast your devices would be, the biggest issue is always with the battery technology.

Whenever you go to buy any electronic gadget — smartphone, laptop, or any wearable — the most important specification isn’t its processor speed or its camera quality but its Battery Backup, which is not getting better any time soon.

What if you could eliminate the very thing entirely?

Well, that's exactly what the electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington’s Sensor Lab and the Delft University of Technology has developed a new gadget that doesn’t need a battery or any external power source to keep it powered; rather it works on radio waves.

So, this means you have to turn on your radio every time to keep this device charged. Right?

No, you don’t need to do this at all, because the device sucks radio waves out of the air and then converts them into electricity.

Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform

Dubbed Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), the device is a combination sensor and computing chip that uses a standard off-the-shelf RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader to suck in radio waves and convert them into electricity.

Though the WISP is not designed to compete with the chips in your computer or even your smartphone, it has as much processing power as the Fitbit, which is enough to run sensors and transmit data.

The discovery could highly transform the Internet of Things (IoT) world as the WISP is even more low maintenance compared to Bluetooth Low Energy sensor chips being used today.

The next step in making the WISP usability even more convenient and easy is to create Wisent that would allow for wireless programming of the WISP. For this, the team has recently collaborated with the Delft University of Technology.

With the help of Wisent, the WISP can be programmed wirelessly and uses the very same radio waves to communicate.

"So far WISP required cables to reprogramme it, nullifying the advantage of battery-less-ness. Therefore, we present Wisent, a protocol that allows WISP to be reprogrammed wirelessly," said Przemysław Pawełczak, assistant professor at the TU Delft’s Embedded Software group.

"Our vision is to have truly wirelessly reprogrammable software-defined battery-less computers wherever and whenever we want."

For more details, you can head on to the research paper [PDF].

Though the ultimate aim of WISP is in fully realizing the Internet of Things and giving "dumb" objects some smartness, it might even find its way into smartphones as a sort of emergency backup calling module that works even when your phone’s battery is dead.

However, there is no detail on when the WISP will be made available for purchase, or how much it will cost.

Built-in VPN service in Chrome -here is how to get it

After Opera announcement of Free & Unlimited Built-in VPN with its latest or Updated Browser, Google also offer VPN service free with external ad-ons.

This is a great feature for current Opera users and once it's released in a public Opera build, it might even attract some new users. But you can already get unlimited free VPN service in the Chrome browser, and we'll show you how in this post.

In an age where your private browsing data is being hunted down by everyone from advertisers to hackers, VPN service is becoming more and more of a necessity. And no, the private browsing mode baked into your web browser isn't the same thing at all. VPN services can completely hide your identity from companies that try to track you and prevent them from building the online profile they so desperately want.

Of course, some people don't mind companies tracking them and for those people, VPN services aren't quite as essential most of the time.

Whether or not you want to guard your browsing with a VPN service all the time or only when the need arises, there's an easy way to add unlimited free VPN capabilities to Chrome. And the best part is that it's not complicated or convoluted at all. There are a few services that offer free VPN using a couple of different models, and our favorite among them is Betternet.

So how does it work? Simply visit this link from your Chrome browser and install Betternet's Chrome extension. That's it. You're done. You don't even have to register an account.

How is it possible that Betternet offers free VPN service while other companies charge for it? Check out this page on the company's site, which explains how it makes money. In a nutshell, Betternet offers an optional premium version and monetizes its mobile apps foriOS and Android, and that covers the company's operational costs. It's not trying to turn a profit with this service, so it hopes to maintain the same model indefinitely.

If you're not happy with Chrome and unlimited free VPN appeals to you, definitely give Opera a try. But if you'd rather stick with Chrome, Betternet is the way to go.