Amazon is not a consumer electronics company. Yes, the e-commerce giant has sold tens of millions of its own devices to customers. And yes, it has just launched a smart phone, but measuring Amazon by Samsung’s or Apple’s standards overlooks the most important thing about its business. When Amazon
Author: Alistair Fairweather
Someone may be reading all your e-mail. At both security agencies and cybercrime enterprises, thousands of geeks are busily sifting through e-mails that they have intercepted. This is happening every second of every day, around the world. Of course it’s highly unlikely that anyone at America’s National
Their idea was simple — a line of high-quality headphones, each with Dre’s explicit stamp of approval. Recognising that more and more music was being consumed using mobile devices, Dre and Iovine capitalised on both the appetite for quality headphones and the enormous power and authenticity
A lot of people think Gareth Cliff is an idiot. I’m not talking about his usual detractors — mother grundies and religious nuts. I’m talking about many of his 2m fans, the listeners of the breakfast show he used to host on 5FM. Why on earth would he leave such a job to start an Internet radio station? Their argument makes sense, at least
As Internet access spread across the globe, a handful of giant American corporations ended up dominating industries. Google in search, Amazon in online shopping and Facebook in social networking. The one market that has proved consistently immune to these titans is China. Now, one of China’s homegrown Internet giants
Most people outside of technology circles have never heard of Vic Gundotra. The charming, bespectacled 45-year-old with the flawless Californian accent might be mistaken for a professor or a paediatrician. Yet many of us have used one or more of the products he championed during his eight years at Google. On 24 April, Gundotra
On New Year’s Eve in 2011, at one minute before 11pm, a British computer consultant named Stephen Henson finished testing a new version of a popular piece of free security software. With a few keystrokes, he released OpenSSL version 1.0.1 into the public domain. Now, more than two years later, the events of that night have
The story of Oculus VR is the kind of garage-to-greatness story that geeks usually love. A passionate, self-taught tinkerer barely out of his teens revives a dead technology and two years later, Facebook buys his company for US$2bn. So, why are many of the company’s earliest backers so angry? Oculus VR makes virtual reality headsets
Neil Young is angry. As he paces the stage at this year’s South By Southwest music conference he growls and spits about the cheapening of an art form, and the hollowing out of an industry by uncaring corporations. But he’s not talking about the record labels — he’s talking about MP3s. For more than a decade, Young has been
All is not well in technology land. The normally ebullient mood at the annual SxSW Interactive conference is darker this year, weighed down by concerns about the prying eyes of governments. A keynote address by WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange over the weekend captured this growing unease. Speaking to a