Jeff Bezos isn’t easily satisfied. He’s the 26th richest person on the planet, and he’s been a (self-made) billionaire for nearly two decades. And yet the 48-year-old founder of Amazon.com continues to push his company, and himself, into new territory. When Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader in late
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Touch-screen smartphones, once an expensive rarity, now generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue every year. And Apple, a pioneer in this market, is bent on ensuring its rivals don’t profit from its original ideas. Apple’s first big case has just born
A year ago, the tech press was all aflutter about the possibility of a new bubble in the internet industry. The blogosphere hummed with dire predictions of “dot-bomb 2.0” and equally passionate rebuttals. It’s amazing how much can change in a year. The most
Remember five or six years ago when everyone thought they could start their own social network? Then Facebook arrived and effectively crushed everyone else in the market. There was no point anymore — it owned the market. But while the bean
It’s no secret that Nokia is in trouble. It lost close to US$1,5bn in 2011, its market share, particularly in the profitable smartphone market, continues to plunge and its big bet — a partnership with Microsoft — has yet to produce significant revenues. So when I received a review model of Nokia’s newest phone, the Lumia 800
“You’re being irrational.” No one likes to hear those words. They are the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. But, like it or not, we are fundamentally irrational beings. And the area in which we should be the most clear-headed, our personal finances, is usually
Just over a year ago I asked whether Facebook was really worth US$50bn. On Thursday I got my answer: no, it’s worth more like $100bn. After years of flirting with the market, Facebook has finally opened its kimono and started the process of offering its shares for public trading. On 1 February
You could almost feel sorry for Google’s management team lately. Their every move draws stinging criticism from the media, regulators and customers. The latest kerfuffle? Google is changing its privacy policies on 1 March. Now, website privacy policies are generally like Ayn Rand novels and the Government Gazette
It seems such an obvious truth now: the Internet can be catalyst for political and social change. But until the Arab Spring of 2011 few people fully realised or believed quite how powerful it could be. Now the US government, accustomed to celebrating the democratising power of the Internet, is getting a taste of
It’s become a rite of passage for the world’s biggest technology companies. As soon as you’ve fought your way to the top and become the darling of both stock markets and customers, regulators begin to cry “monopoly”. It happened to IBM in the 1960s