“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
IBM is announcing on Tuesday that it has made major advances towards creating a practical, full-scale quantum computer, a fabled, theoretical machine that relies on the tiniest atomic properties to compute problems faster than any supercomputer that exists today. Scientists at IBM Research said that their
Terry Lundgren and Kevin Ryan know and like each other. But when it comes to the future of retailing the boss of Macy’s, an American department-store giant, and the chief executive of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer, disagree wildly. Lundgren remains a firm believer in an empire of bricks and mortar. Ryan is betting big
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” observed Roy Amara, an American futurologist. This is certainly proving true of retailers and their attitude to the Internet. After a panic at the turn of the millennium about the impact on their
The application Windows Phone owners have been anticipating for eight months and counting has finally arrived, but it’s nothing to call home about yet. Skype, as expected, has finally released a beta version of its application for Windows Phone 7. The release includes support for Skype basics such as audio
The average Google+ user only spends an average of three minutes a month on the social network, while MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter are all seeing more time spent per user each month, according to research firm comScore. In a scathing Wall Street Journal report titled “The Mounting Minuses at Google+”, the case
Nokia has repositioned itself impressively as a high-end Windows Phone maker, but the company hasn’t forgotten about the lower end of the market either. On Monday, the Finnish company announced its cheapest Windows device yet, the Lumia 610, as well as three new
