On the eve of Apple’s much-hyped iPad HD event, Google has fired a shot right at Apple when it comes to media with its new Google Play store. Google Play will combine all of Google’s other stores like the Android Market and Google Music into one cloud-based marketplace
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For a generation of baby-boomers it has been a source of huge disappointment. They grew up believing that one day they would fly to work in their very own sky cars — only to find themselves still very much grounded. More than a century after the Wright brothers first took to the air, personal aviation remains an
Apple and BlackBerry aren’t the only fruit-flavoured brands that can cause a stir with new hardware releases. The UK-developed Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized, bare-bones computer selling in two variations for US$25 and $35 respectively — slightly less than an iPad 2 plastic cover. After the Raspberry Pi’s pre-order
Sunny countries are often poor. It is a shame, then, that solar power is still quite expensive. But it is getting cheaper by the day, and is now cheap enough to be competitive with other forms of energy in places that are not attached to electricity grids. Since 1,6bn people are still in that unfortunate position
Towards the end of the Gulf war in 1991, an American armoured scout unit in Iraq’s southern desert stumbled upon a much larger elite force of dug-in Iraqi armour. Rather than retreating, the nine American tanks and 12 Bradley fighting vehicles attacked. When the battle ended about 25 minutes later, the Americans
Imagine yourself with a thousand small crates that must be moved from A to B along roadways. Inside each is part of an intricate construction that cannot be complete until every piece has arrived. You have options. One is an oversized lorry that may pass only along the largest motorways, but can carry all
“Ideas are like rabbits,” said John Steinbeck. “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” The same could be said of ideas fora, whose population expanded again in February with the birth of Solve For X, an experimental Google-sponsored conference where entrepreneurs
Spain has just reported its first quarter of negative growth in two years, but Barcelona feels like a boom town this week as it plays host to the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecommunications industry’s biggest annual trade fair. The number of smartphones, mobile-broadband connections and app downloads
Quantum effects are vital to modern electronics. They can also be a damnable nuisance. Make a transistor too small, for example, and electrons within it can simply vanish from one place and reappear in another because their location is quantumly indeterminate. Currents thus leak away, and signals are degraded
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt channelled famed futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku in his keynote at the Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. What started as an overview of new features in Chrome for Android turned into a powerful discourse on the power of technology and what it means for the