For the better part of a decade, the US has been in a slump. Its unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, its growth rate even more stubbornly low. Its government is deadlocked, its debt is rising quickly and its populace is largely gloomy about the future. And yet, at least in one city, the optimism is palpable
Author: Alistair Fairweather
Brian Chesky doesn’t have a home. He has spent the last three years sleeping on strangers’ couches, in spare rooms and in vacant holiday homes. In 2010, he decided that the best way to improve Airbnb’s service was a tried and trusted method called “eating your own dogfood” – in other words
The rocket is 10 storeys tall. As we watch, it ignites and rises slowly skyward on a tongue of flame. A few hundred metres into the air it stops and slowly descends again, landing gracefully on the same launchpad it just left. Elon Musk smiles ecstatically at his audience, like a proud father at the birth of a
It reads like a bad spy novel: a secret unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is accused of spending the last seven years covertly infiltrating – or hacking – over a hundred large US corporations and stealing terabytes of sensitive data from their computer systems. Unit 61398 of the
Remember the late 1990s, when everyone was predicting the end of “bricks and mortar” businesses? The Internet was going to make all that tedious infrastructure redundant, according to Web prophets. Pity they didn’t see the dot-com crash coming. And now, in a delicious piece of irony, Google is
After years of threats and lawsuits, the French publishing industry has essentially blackmailed Google into paying for linking to its websites. Of course, Google isn’t spinning it that way. According to chairman Eric Schmidt, the €60m is for a “digital publishing innovation fund to help support
If you launched a brand new product just before Christmas and then sold around 700 000 units, you’d be pretty pleased. But if your company was Microsoft, and the product was the Surface tablet, those numbers would look a bit pitiful. But wait a minute
When was the last time you heard people, young or old, arguing the merits of different rock bands? I’m guessing it’s been a while. But what about a tiff about their choice of mobile phone? In the last five years, I’ve heard too many to count. Does that make personal technology the rock ‘n roll of this century? The
What if I told you that modern life as we know it relies on a vast army of thinking machines? There are at least 50m of them on the planet, yet relatively few people would recognise one in a picture. I’m talking about servers – the powerful computers that underpin the Internet, accelerate scientific research
While titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google are grappling for global dominance, ordinary people around the world have begun tinkering with gadgets again. Just look at the Raspberry Pi. It’s barely bigger than a credit card and costs less than R250, but the Pi is a fully fledged computer. Hook it up to your TV and a