One of the most curious and unintended side effects of rapid innovation is on language. Rather than making words up, we prefer to frame things in analogy and reference. That’s why we still talk about “opening a window” on a computer, and why we “cut and paste” text and save “bookmarks”
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Predictions are a tricky thing. Fifteen years ago, when the Internet was first flexing its gobal wings, futurists were predicting the end of all “traditional” media, particularly television. And while the dot-com bust deflated a lot of expectations, some of those predictions finally seem to be coming true. Time spent on everything from newspapers to cinema has been falling while Internet usage has been climbing inexorably higher.
If you sued one of the world’s largest companies for defamation and won, you might expect a bit more than €5 000. But in the case of “Mr X” vs Google, which was recently tried by a French court, it is a full €5 000 too many. The rather sordid tale of Mr X began when he was arrested and tried for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl.
South African national Luke McKend, who has worked at Google in London for several years, is the company’s new SA country manager. Google announced his appointment on Thursday, concluding a search that lasted for nearly six months. McKend, who will join Google SA on 1 November, replaces Stephen Newton, who resigned from Google in April to join mobile advertising specialist InMobi.
Microsoft believes that the latest version of Internet Explorer will enable it to recapture market share it has lost to Mozilla’s Firefox browser and Google Chrome in recent years. The beta version of Internet Explorer 9 launched yesterday.
Android, Google’s mobile operating system, is set to contest the top spot in market share from Symbian within the next four years, says international technology research firm Gartner. Android was launched in late 2007 and has climbed steadily towards being the most popular operating system since.
Google SA is sending out its Street View cars and tricycles again, with plans to photograph more of the country’s streets for the popular service. It even has plans to map out the Western Cape winelands. TechCentral has learnt that Google is expanding its existing Street View coverage by sending out its fleet of specially kitted-out cars.
A lot of fuss has been made over Motorola’s Droid smartphone, about how it saved the US handset manufacturer’s bacon. Now that the Droid has been released to markets outside the US, including SA — under the Milestone moniker — it’s hard to see what all the excitement was about. Fact is, the Milestone is a fairly bland Android handset in an intensely competitive field.
Web search giant Google has pulled the plug on its Wave service, saying it hasn’t gained the traction it needed to be sustained. In a posting on its official blog, Google says it will no longer develop Wave as a standalone system. However, it says some of the technology will be used in other products.
When it comes to the latest handsets, consumers want to know more about the software they’re buying than the hardware specifications of the phone itself. This is driving big competitive changes in the smartphone market and reshaping an industry. A few years ago, buying a cellphone was a relatively trivial exercise.