USSD Protocol for GSM phones and Its Uses

Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is a service used by GSM cellular telephones for browsing, prepaid callback service, mobile-money services, location-based content services, menu-based information services, and as part of configuring the phone on the network.

Upto 182 alphanumeric characters in length, USSD messages, unlike SMS messages, create a real-time connection during a USSD session. The connection remains open, allowing a two-way exchange of a sequence of data.

An USSD message has no store and forward capability like that of SMSs. It is supported by almost all GSM phones. A typical USSD message starts with an * (asterisk) symbol followed by digits and ending with a # (pound) symbol. The message may also contain additional * symbols in it. These digits are usually commands to perform certain tasks.


Examples where we make use of USSD codes are while viewing balances on our mobile phones or recharging our account. USSD codes are also used to avail services like PNR Enquiry from Mobile Phones, Mobile Banking, Using Facebook From Mobiles Without an Internet Connection etc.


Some Popular USSD Codes are as follows:

*139*# - display's Indian railway PNR inquiry results, short-code working across all the Indian operators network.

*325# - Facebook on USSD, working most of the countries, across all the GSM operators.

*595# - State Bank of India USSD banking service.

*141# - display's user's balance on the Vodafone network

Watson Developers Cloud Service

"It does not require that you understand anything about machine learning other than the need to provide training data," Rob High, IBM's CTO for Watson, said in a recent interview about the new platform.

IBM's famous Jeopardy!-champ-destroying Watson system is now available as a cloud service. Developers who want to incorporate Watson's ability to understand natural language and provide answers need only have their applications make a REST API call to IBM's new Watson Developers Cloud. Besides making money from it, IBM primarily aims at creating a large community of developers in the world of cognitive computing.

IBM has also recently launched a university partnership that focuses on numerous aspects of cognitive computing including the field of deep learning that is driving significant advances in computer vision, text analyses and natural language processing.

The real beauty of these types of systems is not just in the intelligence of computers, but also in what effect they throw on the thought-processes of those making use of them.

Presto :: SQL Query Engine From Facebook For Hadoop

Presto is a low-latency, SQL-compliant query system for Hadoop developed at Facebook. It is yet another fast query option to Hadoop. Facebook is one of he largest data warehouses in the world with its size more than 300 petabytes. The huge amount of structured and unstructured data at Facebook has driven it towards the development of its own tools working at a high scale. Presto was up and working in the early 2013 and is now actively used by more than 1,000 employeesrunning more than 30,000 queries each day against a database of petabyte scale.

Facebook had previously developed Hive interface to support SQL like querying of unstructured data, and made it an open source product. It is now a popular tool used by most companies that use Hadoop. Facebook has also come up with its decission to contribute Presto to the open source community.

Facebook reports that Presto is "10X better that Hive/MapReduce in terms of efficiencyand latency for most queries". It also provides support for a large subset of ANSI SQL queries, subqueries and joins.

What Is Hadoop

An open-source software framework library, used to store and analyze huge amount of unstructured data distributed over large clusters of machines.
It does not work with traditional DBMSs, because the data is unstructured but is comparatively faster than those. The data to be analyzed using Hadoop, ranges from a few Terabytes to Zeta-bytes in size.

Hadoop was developed by Apache Software Foundation. It is open-source and is freely available for download from the official website.

1. What is C language ?

The C programming language is a standardized programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the UNIX operating system. It has since spread to many other operating systems, and is one of the most widely used programming languages. C is prized for its efficiency, and is the most popular programming language for writing system software, though it is also used for writing applications.