It has been a bad year for Western intelligence agencies. Being front-page news every week for months at a stretch is not ideal when your business is secrecy. But, whatever the supposed threat to national security, the recent orgy of revelations is a healthy release of toxins
Browsing: Alistair Fairweather
Trust is the world’s most valuable intangible commodity. Economies, political systems, partnerships and marriages rise or fall based on it. All commerce – both online and offline – rests on it. And yet the US’s National Security Agency is actively and recklessly undermining
A slew of surveys have shown that many young people do not bother with wristwatches, using their cellphones to keep time instead. When Mintel, an industry analyst, surveyed Britons in 2010, it found 28% of 15 to 24-year-olds had no use for a wristwatch. Another survey, by YouGov, found that
Has the country’s foremost value-destroying monopolist finally seen the error of its ways? On the surface, that seems to be the case. In mid-July, Telkom meekly agreed to pay a R200m fine for anticompetitive abuses committed between 2005 and 2007, and to split its wholesale and retail businesses. TechCentral reported
Apple has hit a plateau. Its quarterly earnings results revealed flat revenues, falling iPad sales and markedly lower profits. But the company is not doomed to collapse, despite what some of the more excitable pundits are claiming. Apple is clearly going through a rough
On 18 July, Microsoft announced yearly profits of nearly US$22bn. Its shares immediately plunged by more than 11% and have yet to recover. What has made investors so nervous? Part of the problem is around expectations. Investment analysts had been expecting an additional $1,35bn in profit
Human beings can be exasperating creatures. We go from amazement to bored entitlement so quickly that even rapidly evolving technology is soon passé. Geosynchronous satellites? Ho hum. Smartphones? Yawn. So it takes something quite special to remind us of the wonders of technology, and Google Loon
Is it 1999 again? The heady days of the dot-com boom are long past and yet Yahoo’s sudden binge of acquisitions – some of them of dubious value – betray the same irrational exuberance and hope. This year so far, Yahoo has snapped up 10 companies. This is not that
Few people remember third place. Whether in sport, science or business, there’s little glory attached to the bronze medal. But two multinational giants, BlackBerry and Microsoft, are straining to be the third player in the burgeoning smart phone market. The latest figures from
It’s not much to look at — sleek, black and about the size of two decks of cards – but this little box may represent the greatest threat the television industry has faced. A large part of this threat is explained by the logo embossed discreetly on the top of the box – a stylised apple missing a single bite