What, where and when Durov launches in 2019

The topic of release is the future of Telegram

“2018 was a wonderful year for Telegram, but 2019 will become the most important year in the history of our company,” this begins the message of Pavel Durov, who interrupted in mid-January two and a half months of his silence. Within a month, the Telegram team should present investors with a working version of the Ton blockchain and products based on it, the Bell found out yesterday.

Having launched several arrows in IT monopolists working on an advertising model, as well as reporting that Telegram is one of the few messengers showing growth around the world, Durov completed the message with a vague promise “to introduce many long-awaited changes in the product that you asked” and finally emphasized that “2019 will become time when the wishes of our users are fulfilled related to the functions related [Telegram] ".

New Telegram functions can be divided into two parts.

Firstly, this is the Telegram Open Network (Ton) blockchain platform, as well as Gram cryptocurrency, which should be stored in a special Telegram Wallet wallet. The launch of a stable version of Ton and the wallet was originally planned for the IV quarter of 2018, but the latest letter investors says that this will happen in March.

Secondly, these are many functions of the messenger customers that the community discusses. Many of them are not related to cryptocurrency: this is a stable Telegram work during locks, improve VoIP calls, the ability to separate channels from chats or archive correspondence that no longer interests the user.

But it was on Ton and GRAM that the Telegram business model was tied: during the pre-sale of TELEGRAM tokens, he received $ 1.7 billion. In total, 200 investors were believed in Ton, including Roman Abramovich. According to Vedomosti, the largest Silicon Valley funds - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark and Sequoia Capital were also going to invest.

The key condition ICO Telegram: if the blockchain platform is not launched until October 31, 2019, investors will receive money back.

What will happen to Ton?

The @TGRAM telegram channel, following what is happening around Ton and Gram,, with reference to investors' information on January 21, reported that TONTNET test network has already been launched. The initial roadmap involved the launch of the test system six months ago, in the II quarter of 2018.

The last newsletter to investors (provided by The Bell channel @tgram, it was not possible to confirm the authenticity) reports on changes in the roadmap:

Ton readiness is estimated at 90%, and the project itself can be launched in early 2019, although there is a small delay of 2-3 months due to the “innovative nature of development”.
Fresh news about the development progress will appear in February 2019.
The launch of the test version of Testnet is scheduled for January (and, perhaps, has already occurred), and in February the Testnet audit will begin.
The working version of the platform (Mainnet) will be open and presented to the public in March 2019.

Durova’s announcement was released shortly before the World Economic Forum in Davos. Previously, Durov went to the forum, and therefore experts suggested that he would present Ton investors in Davos is unknown only in an open or closed circle. There is no performance in the program, in the list of participants in Davos (The Bell has) as of the middle of last week, too.

A source close to some developers Telegram says that Durov will most likely go to Davos, but without registration as a participant. He adds that Durov should show investors a test version of Ton in the near future.

The partner of one of the investors in Ton is sure that Durov will not show the test version of the system in Davos. He says that for a month she will be demonstrated in another place, "where there are more often durov." The assumption that it was Dubai, where the Telegram office opened at the end of 2017, he did not comment. Sources of Vedomosti confirmed that the meeting may occur in Dubai.

In the mailing list for investors, the deadlines and the place of the meeting are not indicated, but, according to The Bell, it was planned for December.

Dubai. Photo from Instagram Durov

Functions for users

There is no roadmap for future functions of Telegram customers, however, some assumptions about the directions of the team’s work can be made by analyzing the volume and topic of the changes made to the source code.

Long pauses in development, if they do not concern obsolete platforms, may indicate the preparation of fundamentally new updates in a separate branch.

This is especially true for the basis of development - libraries. The main cross-platform library of Telegram (TD) to create new customers has not been updated since September 2018.

And this is not the normal behavior of a dynamically developing messenger: the Libtgvoip voice library, on the contrary, is very often updated - programmers in December improved the voice transmission using proxy, added a microphone setting up and choosing audio devices.

As for the official Telegram customers, the last year is most actively working on the desktop version - small corrections and improvements are mainly added that turn the version for desktop computers into a working tool. The web version, as well as the iOS applications, is relatively rarely updated. The source of the Android application was last updated in mid-November.

It should be borne in mind that the updated source codes of Telegram customers is a showcase, what the company is ready to show. Therefore, for example, the contacts of contacts of contacts requested almost a month ago have already been implemented, but the request itself has not been processed. Internal versions of Telegram and libraries, presumably, are significantly different from external ones.

+270% to artificial intelligence

In four years, the introduction of artificial intelligence in companies increased by 270%, the Gartner survey said in the results of 3000 Cio from 89 countries.

In 2018 alone, the number of implementations of decisions on the basis of AI in corporations increased by 37%. For comparison, growth rates in 2015 were only 10%.
In 2022, the volume of the corporate market of and solutions will reach $ 6.14 billion.
According to McKinsey Global InSitute, changes in the labor market due to the implementation of AI will lead to 1.2% growth over the next 10 years and will help the world economy increase by $ 13 trillion over the next 12 years.

Read Later

The connection between the reduction in the time spent on the screen of mobile devices and the improvement of well -being is not obvious . This is stated in a new study of Oxford scientists published in Nature and criticizing the methods of their predecessors.
Scientists believe that the time spent on computers and smartphones has neither a negative nor a positive effect.

Alexander Ambzin, Irina Pankratova, Irina Malkova