Last year, Google announced something extraordinary: it was working on a wearable computer. Geeks around the world immediately began salivating at the very thought. Earlier this year, the company began sending early versions of the device to developers and technology commentators. Reactions have ranged
Browsing: Alistair Fairweather
Laying fibre-optic cabling isn’t normally considered a dangerous job — difficult, time consuming and labour intensive, yes, but not physically dangerous. Except in Johannesburg, where gangs of thugs have begun threatening contractors with guns. Why on earth are these gangs terrorising
At barely 15 years old, Google enjoys the kind of market dominance in web search that would have made the oil barons of the 19th century envious. Its market share in most countries is 90% or higher. Even in its competitive home market Google accounts for 70% of all web searches, despite rivals like Microsoft spending
For a company with a billion customers, Facebook can be quite stealthy. Its latest product, Facebook Home, could convert tens of millions of Android-powered phones into Facebook portals constantly connected to its services simply by encouraging users to install a piece of software. By doing so, Facebook has wheeled a
In a country where textbooks are routinely not delivered to thousands of schools, public hospitals are struggling to keep running and millions live in poverty, information and communications technology (ICT) might not seem like a priority. But the department of communications, which oversees ICT, is doing
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
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