Their idea was simple — a line of high-quality headphones, each with Dre’s explicit stamp of approval. Recognising that more and more music was being consumed using mobile devices, Dre and Iovine capitalised on both the appetite for quality headphones and the enormous power and authenticity
Browsing: Alistair Fairweather
A lot of people think Gareth Cliff is an idiot. I’m not talking about his usual detractors — mother grundies and religious nuts. I’m talking about many of his 2m fans, the listeners of the breakfast show he used to host on 5FM. Why on earth would he leave such a job to start an Internet radio station? Their argument makes sense, at least
If there was any doubt about South Africans’ interest in the results of last week’s election, the traffic numbers from News24 – more than 102 000 concurrent users and 8,5TB of data served in two days – should put that to rest. According to the statistics from website analytics firm Effective Measure, News24, which is ultimately owned
As Internet access spread across the globe, a handful of giant American corporations ended up dominating industries. Google in search, Amazon in online shopping and Facebook in social networking. The one market that has proved consistently immune to these titans is China. Now, one of China’s homegrown Internet giants
Most people outside of technology circles have never heard of Vic Gundotra. The charming, bespectacled 45-year-old with the flawless Californian accent might be mistaken for a professor or a paediatrician. Yet many of us have used one or more of the products he championed during his eight years at Google. On 24 April, Gundotra
On New Year’s Eve in 2011, at one minute before 11pm, a British computer consultant named Stephen Henson finished testing a new version of a popular piece of free security software. With a few keystrokes, he released OpenSSL version 1.0.1 into the public domain. Now, more than two years later, the events of that night have
The story of Oculus VR is the kind of garage-to-greatness story that geeks usually love. A passionate, self-taught tinkerer barely out of his teens revives a dead technology and two years later, Facebook buys his company for US$2bn. So, why are many of the company’s earliest backers so angry? Oculus VR makes virtual reality headsets
Neil Young is angry. As he paces the stage at this year’s South By Southwest music conference he growls and spits about the cheapening of an art form, and the hollowing out of an industry by uncaring corporations. But he’s not talking about the record labels — he’s talking about MP3s. For more than a decade, Young has been
All is not well in technology land. The normally ebullient mood at the annual SxSW Interactive conference is darker this year, weighed down by concerns about the prying eyes of governments. A keynote address by WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange over the weekend captured this growing unease. Speaking to a
Silicon Valley is as much about creating legends as it is about changing reality. Where else could a guy get turned down for a job and then, five years later, sell his company to the people that turned him down for US$19bn? I’m talking, of course, about