Browsing: Google

Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, was in SA last week to meet with the software company’s customers and to attend the soccer World Cup final in Johannesburg. TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sat down with Courtois, who is responsible for all of Microsoft’s operations outside the US, for an exclusive media interview and asked him about life at the company after the departure of Bill Gates, cloud computing and the plans for its Bing search engine.

The elements of the future of the desktop are slowly falling into place. No one company has a comprehensive set of products and services that will deliver the future of computing, but the shape of things to come is getting clearer. The key driver behind it all is convergence — convergence onto a single productivity device, and convergence in the “cloud”. In hardware, desktops are losing market share to notebooks, which in turn are being

The launch of Google’s popular StreetView service in SA, meant to take place last month, was delayed due to what Google has described as the technical complexity of the project. But TechCentral understands from separate sources that the launch was put off by several weeks because, as in other countries, its StreetView vehicles had collected private details about Wi-Fi hotspots, triggering privacy concerns

The debate about how, when and whether publishers should charge for the content they provide is reaching fever pitch. Facing some hard economic realities, an increasing number of publishers are looking to monetise their properties by putting walls around some or all of their content and charging for it

Pornographic websites could soon have their own top-level domain, alongside .net, .com and .org. That’s if the international body that manages Web addresses agrees to new proposals put to it at a meeting being held in Nairobi, Kenya this week. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) will hear arguments on Friday

Operating systems were all the talk last week at Mobile World Congress, the cellphone industry’s annual confab in Barcelona. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nokia and others are engaged in a battle over whose software will run the next generation of smartphones