Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the ailing BlackBerry platform, has hired a law firm to help it with a company-wide restructuring plan aimed at making the company profitable again. The plan could include selling off resources, seeking joint ventures, or licensing its patents. After losing a significant portion of
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Lorne Gladstone of Toronto is 58, but prudently pondering how to bequeath his digital property. Doing the paperwork after his parents’ death was a challenge. “When my time comes, I wonder if my children will even know what paper is,” he says. As a software developer, his virtual assets are both valuable and vital to his business. That
Larry Ellison and Larry Page, the bosses of Oracle and Google, share a name. But they clearly do not share the same view of a particular intellectual property (IP) matter. On 16 April, a jury began hearing arguments in a trial to determine whether Google’s Android operating system infringes copyrights and patents owned by Oracle. The
On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded Nokia’s debt to near junk status. The share price has been in freefall in the past year, with some analysts painting a bleak future for the Finnish company. Yes, it’s bad. But Nokia is already planting the seeds of its turnaround. There’s no doubt that fortunes are made and lost
It’s like 1999 all over again. On Monday, Facebook announced it was buying photo-sharing company Instagram for US$1bn, netting the start-up’s cofounder, Kevin Systrom, a cool $400m. It’s paying over the odds, but the deal makes sense for Facebook ahead of its flotation on the stock market. At first glance and based on the
Remember that time in the 1990s when Apple was almost bankrupt and in disrepair? Take note, Yahoo, Apple’s market capitalisation reached the US$600bn mark on Tuesday, the second company in the world to reach the milestone. Apple reached a high of $644/share, reaching a market cap that continues to put space between
“Ideas so simple,” reads a cartoon on an elevator door, “that they feel like the completion of a thought,” continues its twin. Similar doodles adorn the walls of HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan, near Taipei, and business cards carried by the smartphone-maker’s staff. John Wang, the chief marketing officer, lays out a set of four: concentric
Continuing its trend of turning science fiction into reality, Google officially announced its augmented reality glasses on Wednesday — and yes, they look about as geeky as you’d expect. Dubbed Project Glass, the glasses will allow you to do many of the same things you do with your smartphone without whipping out a separate device
If there is one company that does not have to throw alms from the gilded corporate carriage to the unwashed masses of small businesses out there, it is Google. Its very existence is already a potent form of small-business support. Yet the Internet juggernaut has recently stepped up its outreach to SA small businesses. Woza Online
When he isn’t talking at technology conferences and seminars, or travelling to them, 49-year-old Steve Song lives and works in Durbanville near Cape Town. He’s perhaps best known for his map of the various submarine cables that have landed in Africa in recent years, and for his passionate advocacy of the use of television white-spaces