Speech by Zuckerberg? No thanks, I prefer Facebook Home, says new ad

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Facebook has released yet another advertisement for its newest iteration, Facebook Home. Quite like the previous “Airplane” advertisement, this one shows news stories from Facebook feeds come to life, this time inside the Facebook office.

The minute long advertisement shows Mark Zuckerberg announcing the launch of Facebook Home to his employees, talking about the product and its qualities. We all have that one person we know who has his nose buried inside his phone, even in the most important situations. Zuckerberg has one such employee on his hands.

Even as Zuckeberg is droning on, the employee, Jerry, is busy bringing to life scenarios from his Facebook Home enabled phone to life. There is a goat bleating hilariously at Zuckerberg and dirt-bikes roaring past him.

There is also a guy in extremely tiny tennis shorts who wants Jerry to come out and play with him. Turns out, it was an IM he received on the Messenger and Jerry replies back to him by clicking on the chat-head that he’s almost done. He then goes on to nod his head and show that he's been paying attention when Zuckerberg asks him for his opinion. "You know it, Mark," he massages Zuck's ego. Kinds of rude to be paying attention to your phone when your CEO is addressing you, but let’s face it, most of us do that in office anyway, even if we do it slyly.

And “rude” is the theme that seems to be running throughout this Facebook Home campaign, whether we like it or not. The “Airplane” TV commercial released on the day of the launch has the rude vibe going for it too.

Dealing with a rude employee

The ad doesn’t seem keen on telling you about the various aspects of Facebook Home. We see a guy boarding a flight and flipping through Facebook Home's news feed on an HTC One. Each time he looks at a post, friends and content from that Facebook post are shown to present around him inside the aircraft. The overhead luggage compartments have a couple of his friends lying around looking like they’re sunbathing on a beach, while a couple of singers sing when he looks at a post of a video. We also see a kid's party, people dancing in a club and, of course, cats inside the flight. The guy can't seem to take his hands off the phone when inside the flight, even when the airhostess asks him to switch it off.

The ads do kind of stump us with the message it is trying to send across. Should we not put our phones away in a flight when asked to? Should we risk our jobs going through our feeds even as our CEO is talking to us? Are we supposed to be so addicted to Facebook Home that we can’t stop going through our feed? Facebook Home’s first batch of commercials simply makes us go “huh?”

Report by : Nishtha Kanal

Video of Gates and Zuckerberg talking about coding goes viral

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It isn’t exactly Harlem Shake, but the latest video to go viral on YouTube has Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg explaining the importance of coding. Within just two days of being online, the video has garnered over five million views on YouTube. The sudden popularity has resulted in increased donation to the organisation that commissioned the video, Code.org—a non-profit foundation that is dedicated to growing computer programming education.

The aim behind the short film is to encourage kids to learn computer programming. The video is about ten minutes long and is a combination of animated characters and eminent personalities sharing their experiences as coders. Apart from Gates and Zuckerberg, people appearing in the video include Jack Dorsey (creator of Twitter), Drew Houston (founder Dropbox), will.i.am (Musician/The Black Eyed Peas and Entrepreneur), and a basketball star who coded in college.

Zuckerberg coded his way to success

What works in the video's favor is the fact that it doesn’t contain technical jargon and instead emphasises on the fact that you don’t have to be a geek or a genius. It has managed to do so by having the speakers share their experiences, the joys of coding, and even the lines of code they wrote. The video tries to drive home the point that coding isn’t just a flash of brilliance, but a collaborative team effort in a stimulating environment.

Zuckerberg, who happens to be one of the youngest millionaires today, debunks the myth that you need to amass a vast amount of knowledge to be able to write codes. He says you need to start small. What the video also highlights is the fact that computers are involved in almost every field, which means that there is a growing demand for people who can code.

The video also leaves the audience with the glimpse of the lives led by the coders. Thanks to the great demand, companies ensure that the coders have a fun work environment and perks, right from free food to laundry services, recreational areas, open spaces and much more.

Report by : Priyanka Tilve

Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates urge kids to learn coding in new video

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When Hadi and Ali Partovi immigrated to America from Iran in 1984, they slept in the same cramped bedroom as their parents, who exhausted their life savings on the teenage boys' education.

Nearly 30 years later, the twin brothers are firmly planted in the tech industry's elite circles, after selling companies to Microsoft and News Corp's MySpace, and tapping the rare connections to invest early on in Facebook, Dropbox and Zappos.

Hadi Partovi says the arc of his own successful rise in the tech world was shaped by an early interest in computers and a formal education in writing software, or coding, which enabled that spark to flourish into a career.

Along the way, the twins made influential friends.

Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey - three people who became billionaire tech industry luminaries thanks to their computer programming abilities - appear in a new video released Tuesday by the Partovi brothers as part of their new computer science-education nonprofit, Code.org.

The goal of the online video campaign is to encourage parents to demand more schools to teach computer programming - a potentially lucrative skill that "equalizes opportunity" but is only available to a fraction of U.S. high school students, Hadi Partovi said.

"Computer programming, right now, is the best embodiment of the American Dream," Partovi said. "The American Dream is to be the next Mark Zuckerberg."

"The tragedy is the skills it takes are not hard to learn, but only 10 percent of schools offer (computer science) courses, and these are usually the privileged schools."

After graduating with computer science degrees from Harvard in 1994, the Partovi brothers founded LinkExchange and sold it to Microsoft in 1998 for $250 million. Hadi helped co-found Tellme Networks, a telephony company, while Ali went on to found iLike, a music service that became one of the first apps to integrate with Facebook.

The Partovis' campaign comes at a time tech executives warn of a new digital divide emerging between job-seekers who possess programming skills and those who do not. They also point to statistics showing that while coding jobs are among some of the most well-paid, especially in Silicon Valley, there remains a dearth of computer engineers, who are recruited aggressively by companies like Google and Facebook.

But there have also been strong signs recently that government officials are increasingly raising the issue of technical education, beginning at the secondary level.

In his state of the union speech this month, President Obama vowed to redesign U.S. high schools to meet "the demands of a high-tech economy," while New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week introduced a new computer programming pilot program for 20 schools.

Hadi Partovi, who financed the video with his brother, lined up endorsements from Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and American Federation of Teachers union leader Randi Weingarten, although they did not appear on camera. The 10-minute video was directed by Lesley Chilcott, the producer behind the documentaries "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman."

Partovi said he hoped to eventually raise money to fund programming courses in low-income school districts and perhaps even advocate for certain policy reforms that champion computer science education. In California, he noted for example, computer science courses are not counted toward high school graduation requirements.

"We owe our success in business to having learned to code," Hadi Partovi said.

Although the video mostly contains interviews with tech entrepreneurs and has familiar startup scenes - like shots of young employees skateboarding inside startup offices - there are some unexpected appearances by pop celebrities, including Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh and Will.i.am, a part-time startup investor himself.

"Great coders are today's rock stars," the music producer, sitting in his recording studio, says into the camera.

But what is considered a truism in Silicon Valley may not be apparent elsewhere, Hadi Partovi said.

"Middle America doesn't realize it's an issue," he said. "We can't solve the problem until we realize it exists."

Report by : Reuters