Sony announced this week that it will stop selling Betamax cassettes from March 2016. It was a format that appeared not to succeed as Sony had desired. Betamax was introduced by Sony on 16 April 1975 with the SL-6300 video cassette recorder deck
Author: The Conversation
Legislation governing surveillance powers has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic: the draft Investigatory Powers bill has just been published in the UK while the US senate has voted through a proposed Cybesecurity Information Sharing Act. Following Edward Snowden’s revelations about
The transition to fully driverless cars is still several years away, but vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation, and it is set to disrupt business
Computer game publisher Activision Blizzard has this week announced that it intends to buy King Digital, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, for US$5,9bn. Unlike competitors such as Zynga, King Digital
Recently, a New York Times article on Russian submarine activity near undersea communications cables dredged up Cold War politics and generated widespread recognition of the submerged systems we all depend upon. Not many people realise that undersea
It has been an eventful year in South Africa, characterised by power cuts, parliamentary confrontations about wasteful expenditure and student fee protests. There has, however, been an elephant in the room that has impacted all these issues but enjoyed surprisingly scarce attention
Investors are still unsure about Twitter’s prospects. The tech company’s stock dropped by 10% after reporting low user growth in its third quarter earnings report, despite seeing revenue grow by 58% compared to 2014. The firm added just 3m new users since
Bond is back! The staggering success of new 007 movie Spectre demonstrates three things.
First, audiences are increasingly willing to put up with longer running times (it clocks in at over
The final of the 2015 World Championship of League of Legends, a fantasy-themed, real-time strategy videogame, is being streamed worldwide by British broadcaster the BBC. Like the most
It may sound far-fetched at first, but there’s a growing fear of the damage a newly aggressive Russia might inflict in a time of tension or conflict simply by damaging or cutting the undersea cables that carry almost all of the West’s Internet traffic. The New