1. Virgin Galactic Space Flight.

July-11-New Mexico

Sir Richard Branson became the first person to fly to space on a vehicle developed by his own company Virgin Galactic beating Blue Origin and SpaceX founders Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a race to reach space personally.

The spaceship named VSS Unity made a successful test flight 86km before gliding back to Spaceport America. The ‘spaceflight’ carried a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists. The spacecraft lifted off with the help of a propelling aircraft to 15,000 meters, where it detached and started a rocket flight up to 86km.

2. Xiaomi overtakes Apple as the second largest smartphone manufacturer.

July-16- International

The Chinese Smartphone giant Xiaomi overtook American Smartphone Manufacturer Apple for the spot of second-largest smartphone brand by shipments. In a report published by Canalys, the Chinese brand now has a 17% global market share topping Apples’ market share of 14% and just behind the heels of Samsung which has a 19% global market share.

According to Canalys, smartphone shipments increased by 12% last quarter. Xiaomi also leads the charts for the most growth as it sold 83% more phones than Q2 2020, where Samsung and Apple saw a growth of 15% and 1% respectively.

The rapid growth of Xiaomi is considered to be at the expense of Huawei as the company's smartphone sales plunged 43% in Q3 2020 because of the US sanctions sending one of the top smartphone manufacturers to the 6th spot by Q1 2021.

3. World Emoji Day.

July-17-International

The 8th World Emoji Day was celebrated on 17th July 2021. This specific date has been observed as the international emoji day since 2014. While emojis are considered as just images by some, for some people, emojis are indispensable parts of their daily lives. Emojis are used to breathe emotion into a boring text conversation.

Companies like Microsoft commemorated this day by announcing brand new 3D emoji packs for their upcoming Operating System Windows 11 and Apple added new surprise ‘Memoji’ customisations to their line of products.