In the developed world, Internet access is getting close to saturation point, with the proportion of those online in many countries in the West approaching 80% for fixed broadband access and 30% on mobile phones. On the other hand, in the
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A prime driver of human progress has been trade, in both goods and ideas. Isolation, in contrast, leads to stasis, suspicion, even regression. As Matt Ridley described in The Rational Optimist, when the land bridge connecting
People have a mental model of shopping that is based on experiences from brick-and-mortar stores. We intuitively understand how this process works: all available products are displayed around the store and the prices are clearly marked. Many stores
In sport, we don’t just want to know who won. We now want to know how to replicate success and then improve on it. And to do this, we’re using data — and lots of it. The field of “big data” analytics has come to sport and athletics, with massive implications for sport as we know it. The Women’s Tennis Association
Tigo subscribers in Tanzania will get free access to basic Internet services, including Facebook and Wikipedia, through Facebook’s Internet.org app. They join Airtel subscribers in Zambia in getting this free access. Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative to make affordable Internet access
In 2004, Bill Gates pronounced usernames and passwords dead. Gates, a man consistently thinking ahead of the crowd, was right. Most of us — including our employers and the online services we rely on — just haven’t caught up yet. Gates’s statement came at a time when the devastatingly simple consumer-focused
Apple Pay has been launched to much fanfare. People with the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus are now able to make credit card payments at certain shops and restaurants in the US. But Apple Pay isn’t the first of its kind and the technology it uses has actually been around for the past 15 years. So why has
Just how bad a mother am I? I wondered, as I watched my 13-year-old son deep in conversation with Siri. Gus has autism, and Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant” on the iPhone, is currently his BFF. Many of us wanted an imaginary friend, and now we have one. Only she’s not entirely imaginary
According to TechRepublic, Google produced two of the five worst technology products of 2009 – Android 1.0 and Google Wave. The fact that Google remains dominant suggests that, while not infallible, it’s rich enough to take risks and weather occasional failures. If you are as rich as Google, it’s not extravagant to allow
It should be no surprise to anyone that many smartphones may have been designed to last about 24 months — the length of a typical contract with a network service provider. After all, it is a fast-moving, high-turnover market and planned obsolescence is how it is kept moving. Being high turnover means