Amaya Toman Although many entrepreneurs are rather concerned about the future of their companies due to the current situation, there are also those who, on the contrary, have decided to start a new business. Among them, for example, is Carl Pei, one of the founders of OnePlus. Pei announced this week that he had managed to raise enough funding to run the new firm. It will be called Nothing and will deal with the production of smart electronics. In addition to this news, our roundup of important IT industry events today will talk about the new features of the Telegram and WhatsApp applications.
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Vratislav Holub Telegram introduces the option to import from WhatsApp
The situation that prevailed around the communication platform WhatsApp is constantly gaining momentum. Literally millions of users have already said goodbye to WhatsApp, and Signal and Telegram appear to be the hottest candidates – despite complaints and concerns from non-profit organizations. The creators of the latter platform seem to be well aware that a part of WhatsApp's user base is moving to Telegram, and they want to do everything to make the transition as comfortable as possible for these users. Telegram for iOS has a new feature that allows users to import their chat history from WhatsApp. Telegram currently has more than 500 million users worldwide. The import process works for both individual and group conversations – in WhatsApp, tap the conversation you want to import, then tap the user name or group name at the top of the screen. After clicking on the export option, a sharing sheet will appear, from which you only need to select the Telegram application.
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The co-founder of OnePlus has his own company
OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei launched his own company this week. The company bears the remarkable name Nothing, its headquarters are located in London, and it will deal with the production of smart consumer electronics. The first products of the Nothing brand should see the light of day during the first half of this year. "Nothing's mission is to remove barriers between people and technology in the process of building a digital future," stated Carl Pei, adding that he believes that the best technology should be beautiful but natural, and that its use should be completely intuitive. Pei managed to collect seven million dollars for the purpose of operating his new company in December of last year, among the investors are, for example, the "father of the iPod" Tony Fadell, YouTuber Cassey Neistat, co-founder of the Twitch streaming platform Kevin Lin or Reddit director Steve Huffman. Pei has not yet specified what products will come out of Nothing's workshop, nor what existing companies his company will compete with. However, in an interview with The Verge magazine, he said that the offer will be rather simple at first, and will grow as the company expands.
We rethought everything and came up with #Nothing. pic.twitter.com/VSz905Kgug
- Nothing (@nothingtech) January 27, 2021
WhatsApp and Biometric Verification
WhatsApp will also be discussed in the final part of our roundup of important IT events today. Although this communication platform has had to deal with a really massive outflow of its users in recent weeks, who switch to applications such as Telegram or Signal due to the new conditions of use, its creators do not give up and continue to work on the gradual improvement of all its variants. As part of the improvements, the web version of the WhatsApp platform will soon get a new feature that will make it even more secure. Before users can use WhatsApp on their computer, they will have the option to authenticate using biometric technologies - fingerprint or facial recognition - on the paired smartphone for added security. The new system will be automatically activated on all iPhones with the operating system iOS 14 and the Touch ID or Face ID function. It is not yet clear whether it will be possible to use the Touch ID function on newer MacBook models to authenticate on the desktop version of the WhatsApp platform.
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I would be quite interested in why there is such a halo around Telegram, it seems to me like a transition from mud to puddle. Why doesn't it say that Telegram uses its own proprietary Mtproto encryption? No expert will recommend such a tool to you when it comes to security and data protection. Especially when there are proven opesource encryption tools on the market and they make their own, why?
In addition, if you read their consent to use, in point 5.2 they clearly mention that they collect metadata, such as IP addresses, phone numbers... and there is a beautiful abbreviation written at the end, etc., to "improve" the services. So what do they collect? After that, etc. could be many other things.
And besides, nobody does anything for free. The money that must cost development, testing, infrastructure, renting servers around the world and it's free and without ads?
I share exactly the same opinion.