Browsing: World

By many measures, Turkcell is thriving. It is Turkey’s biggest mobile operator, serving 35m subscribers there and another 30m through subsidiaries and minority stakes in other countries. It boasts 10bn Turkish lira (US$5,6bn) in annual revenues and a market capitalisation of $10,7bn (it is listed in both New York and Istanbul). And all

Social network giant Facebook is allegedly targeting 17 May as the potential date for its initial public offering, according to a TechCrunch report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the company. The IPO date might be off depending on how much time federal regulators need

Research in Motion (RIM) is reportedly attempting to sell itself after rejecting the former co-CEO’s plan to open up its network to carriers. But for some reason it is not pursuing the creation of a lucrative category between smart phones and feature phones — the super feature phone: less than a smartphone, but far more than a feature phone

Mali’s new prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, is an accomplished astrophysicist who worked on five Nasa missions and became a US citizen, but said he never forgot the Malian town of his birth. He earned degrees from universities in France and the US, where he later taught mechanical and aerospace engineering

A common dig at Apple-desktop users is that they are delusional about its operating system’s resistance to viruses, worms and other malware. Your correspondent has been a Mac owner since 1985, and has lived through the original waves of viruses and worms, which targeted the Mac long before Windows. He and many other IT wonks

Microsoft has finally shed some light on the different versions of Windows 8 we’ll see upon release and, thankfully, things are much simpler than past versions. This time around, there are only three flavours Microsoft is pushing heavily: Windows 8, the version geared towards most consumers; Windows 8 Pro, for enterprise and

It is too much to expect one man single-handedly to rescue Sony, the Japanese firm which formerly made world-beating electronic products but is now almost as well-known for making losses. Even so, Kazuo Hirai, who unveiled his outlook for the company on 12 April, less than a fortnight after taking its management back into Japanese

The price-fixing complaint that America’s department of justice filed last week against Apple and five of the world’s “Big Six” book publishers has a triumphalist tone, describing secret meetings in “upscale Manhattan restaurants”. But it seems to take a rather narrow view of what is going on in the e-book industry. Until two years

There is no doubt Research in Motion’s (RIM’s) fortunes have been receding of late. The share of BlackBerry smartphones in North America is plummeting (although still strong in other parts of the world) and revenues are down. Competition is fierce. Can new management and stated objectives for future products at RIM turn things around

Most companies preparing for a huge stockmarket flotation would try to keep a low profile. Not Facebook. On 9 April, the giant social network stunned the business world by announcing it was buying Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, for US$1bn in cash and stock. This surprising combination, swiftly dubbed “Facestagram”, has