The year has not started well for advocates of net neutrality, the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, without discrimination. A US federal court struck down a key part of the Open Internet Order, a set of Federal Communications Commission regulations
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Eight leading American technology companies have joined forces to demand changes be made to US surveillance laws, calling for current laws and practices to be reformed in light of revelations of mass surveillance of Internet users’ activities by the National Security Agency. In a letter
When Roy Amara was president of The Institute for the Future, he famously remarked: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Looking at the current crop of start-ups now hitting their stride, it’s safe to say online
It emerged this week, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, that Snapchat, a Californian start-up that develops a smartphone app of the same name popular among teens, recently spurned a US$3bn-plus all-cash offer from Facebook to buy it out. The offer value was at least three times the already
Stellenbosch-based Mxit, the social mobile chat company now chaired by outgoing First National Bank CEO Michael Jordaan, has released version 7 of it social network for feature phones, with iPhone and iPad versions coming later in the week. The launch of Mxit 7 is
Twitter has to be one of the more interesting modern-day concepts: a platform where people from all over the world can share ideas, thoughts and breaking news in bite-sized portions of up to 140 characters. Apart from being a means for celebrities to
Users of home-grown mobile messaging platform Mxit remain highly loyal to the platform, despite the fact that the service was recently supplanted by Facebook as the country’s biggest social network, according to what World Wide Worx and Fuseware are calling a “final analysis” of their “SA Social Media
It began in 2006 as a pretty stupid idea: a service that let you post public messages on the Internet but limited them to 140 characters. Seven years later, Twitter has burrowed deep into the fabric of parts of society. Its highly anticipated initial public offering provides a fascinating glimpse
Naspers is within a whisker of smashing through R1 000/share for the first time and reaching a market capitalisation of R400bn thanks to an 80%-plus surge in its share price in the past 12 months. The growth in its value in recent years has been nothing short of
Writer and activist Cory Doctorow says competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had. However, as it moves into sectors where it faces fewer rivals this may not always be the case. “In the areas where Google actively competes