How It Started - Site Review

Ever wondered how the world's most famous companies started out? I have. Now there's an amazing website where you can find out, it's called How It Started. The website features a whole range of companies from Mashable to Hooters and just about everything in between.

The site is a pleasure to use with each company featured in a colourful grid style on the homepage. You can filter companies by type to narrow down to your area of interest or simply browse them all. Once you click on a company their page opens with a brief description and a large video that details how they got started. You can then flick through the companies until you get to another that you find interesting.

It's not just businesses on there either though. There's a whole host of celebrities and public figures too, including Wretch 32 and Tim Lovejoy.

There's another cool section to the website and that's 'How do they make money?'. This part shows how different companies actually make money (if they do actually make money). It shows whether they're profitable and how they make their profit - advertising, freemium, subscribers etc.

The site's got a good blog with lots of posts about entrepreneurship, music and productivity.

Although the site doesn't quite seem 100% complete and a lot of the content isn't their own there is still a tonne of information on there and they seem to be growing quite quickly.

Take a look and see what you think, comment below with your opinions.

Samsung Galaxy S4

At 11pm last night through a very weird and cringe worthy presentation Samsung announced the details of their new flagship handset - the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Samsung have introduced a range of new features to the 5-inch smartphone, most notably a massively upgraded camera. The handset will feature a 13 mega pixel rear camera and a 2 mega pixel front-facing camera while the camera software gets a major upgrade with some brilliant new features.Dual recording, where both the front and rear cameras are used at the same time so that the person taking the picture can also be in the picture and the same when video calling or recording video looks like a particularly useful new feature.

The screen also gets an upgrade and is now a full 5-inches on the diagonal as well as being Full HD AMOLED with 441 PPI (Pixels Per Inch). The S4 will feature 2GB RAM along with 16GB storage - 32 and 64GB version will also be available.

To power all of this new tech Samsung have stuck in a 2,600 mAh battery although they haven't said how long it will stay charged.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec&w=560&h=315]

Hands free seems to be the way Samsung have gone with this new phone. They've introduced air gesture, smart pause and smart scroll. Air gesture allows the user to control certain aspects of the S4 without touching the screen but rather waving above it while smart pause stops video on the screen when the user looks away. Smart scroll - a much rumoured function - isn't exactly what people thought. The user can tilt their phone up or down to scroll rather than using their fingers. Although I can see a few problems with this already.

Despite all this new technology Samsung have managed to make the Galaxy S4 much thinner and lighter than the previous version and it now comes in at just 7.9mm thick (almost as thin as the iPhone 5) and weighs just 130 grams (slightly lighter than the S3).

The handset will be released at the end of April in 155 countries, on both 4G LTE and 3G networks.

There's a few things that weren't revealed though. The price is yet to be confirmed, there was no mention of the processor and no mention of battery life - something that will definitely be on people's minds.

Interestingly Samsung made absolutely no mention of Android or Google with much of the OS and built in apps being Samsung branded - something that smartphone companies have been trying to do for a while.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S4 stands to be a best selling handset and will most definitely be the most successful Android based handset. There's nothing revolutionary in there, it's more of an upgrade of the S3 rather than a new handset but still a great phone.

4G Bid Results

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator has today announced the winners of the 4G auction that's been taking place over the last couple of months. There were five winners of the auction; Everything Everywhere (EE), Hutchinson 3G UK Ltd (Three), Niche Spectrum Ventures Ltd (BT), Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone.

Between the five bidders £2.3 billion was raised with Vodafone paying for the most bands at a cost of £790 million. This is only 2/3 of the £3.5 billion that the UK government was hoping to get from the bidding process. Everything Everywhere (EE) has struggled to attract users to their existing 4G services which they released a few months ago and the UK government are already makes plans for 5G services to come online in less than ten years time. Is this why the bids are so low?

The bidding breakdown is as follows:

Telefonica (O2) who have won the bid for some of the 800 MHz spectrum are obliged to provide coverage to 98% of the UK population by 2017.

Mobile companies are expected to release their services within the next six months which should create quite a bit of competition on both price and data allowances.

Are you planning on switching to 4G? Are you already on 4G? What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Twitter creates Vine

Twitter have released a new iPhone and Android app called Vine. The app allows users to record 6 seconds of video, not all at once, and upload it to the service and to their Twitter accounts. It's been a hit so far with some quite videos being posted.

Apple release a 128GB iPad

A 128GB version of the ever popular iPad has now gone on sale for £639. It is aimed more at the enterprise market rather than consumers. Does this signal the end of the tiny 16GB version of the iPad and maybe iPhone?