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
Nineteen billion dollars. Two hundred and ten billion rand. Nearly R500/user. That’s how much Facebook has agreed to pony up for WhatsApp, the fast-growing but still very much loss-making cross-platform mobile instant messaging platform. It’s a daring – perhaps insane – bet by Facebook’s
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Facebook is stumping up US$19bn in cash and shares to buy popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp, which has 450m active monthly users and which is adding a million new users a month. The deal could have been driven, at least in part, by a “potentially massive threat from the
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Stellenbosch-based mobile messaging platform and social network Mxit is taking aim at the vast Indian market, launching the service in the south Asian powerhouse this week in the hope of dramatically expanding its reach. The South African team
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the phrase that’s launched a thousand editorials, most of them decrying the manifest evils of the insatiable 1%. But a large part of this increased inequality is driven not by greed or manipulation, but by technology
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
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
