This Week I Learned - Week #101

This Week I Learned:

* With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, you don’t have the luxury to deploy your farm solutions, which is where your traditional timer jobs normally live. Azure WebJob can be used to schedule our tasks.

Microsoft Azure Mobile Engagement is a new service that provides real-time actionable analytics to increase app usage. It is a data-driven user engagement platform that combines real-time analytics with push notifications and in-app messaging.

OneDrive for Business and Sites APIs now support cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). Soon, Mail, Calendar and Contacts are next in line for CORS support. The release means that developers can call Office 365 APIs from both the server and client sides. Client-side calls result in developers writing single-page applications that interact with Office 365 APIs. Calls no longer need to proxy through a server-side service. Microsoft anticipates the offering will lead to a better user experience and better performance. CORS support enables Web clients to request back-end resources from other Web clients in an entirely different domainProgrammableWeb

* You can publish hybrid apps in any of the major app stores: Microsoft Windows Store, Google Play, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore and even BlackBerry World.  Hybrids are essentially Web site wrappers. You can also build a Hybrid app using the Windows Phone HTML5 project template with C# or Visual Basic .NET. Finally, take any XAML-based app and add a WebView control for the same effect. The WebView control behaves as if it were a browser. This means you control it by calling methods like Navigate, Refresh or Stop, often mapping to an equivalent user-driven action - MSDN Mag

In Japan, mobile payments can be traced back more than a decade to 2004, when Japan’s mobile giant, NTT Docomo, debuted its Osaifu-Keitai system. It has become hugely popular and has morphed into Japan’s de facto standard, supporting a wide variety of e-money and e-ticketing functions, including ID and access cards, credit and store loyalty programs, and paying for public transit. The popular M-Pesa system (“M” for “mobile,” and “Pesa” means “money” in Swahili), which launched in Kenya and Tanzania in 2007, has become one of the world’s most popular mobile payments system, with an estimated 17 million users in Kenya, or 70 percent of the country’s adult population.

Opponents of genetically modified crops often complain that moving genes between species is unnatural. It has been known for a while that some genes move from one species to another given the chance, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. Genes for antibiotic resistance, for example, swap freely between species of bacteria. Human beings have at least 145 genes picked up from other species by their forebears. Admittedly, that is less than 1% of the 20,000 or so humans have in total - Economist

* The population of the world grew from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion by early 1900. It however crossed 5 billion before 2000 and now stands at over 7 billion. However, Stats superstar Hans Rosling sizes up the planet and says 'Don't Panic'.

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