Google recently acquired eight high profile start-up robotics companies, providing strong evidence of a strategy to create breakthrough applications for robotics over the next decade. This strategy is…
With Microsoft losing its controversial CEO, Apple launching new iPads and iPhones and the rise of wearable devices all making headlines, it’s been another huge year for technology. That’s before you look…
A race to the bottom on cloud costs sounds good on the surface, but it could also drive volatility for cloud users.
shutterstock.com
Since Google announced the launch of its Compute Engine in mid 2012, the competition for this lucrative slice of the cloud market has heated up. Amazon AWS, which has the lion’s share of the cloud infrastructure…
Where is this building? It really doesn’t matter.
brionv
The question of accountability under national law for the wrongs committed by international companies has been debated and litigated for many years in many different courts and across many different countries…
You can wait a long time for a postman to show up in the country.
amandabhslater
The biggest names in internet retail appear to be dramatically stepping up efforts to make delivering your online orders, fast, reliable and extremely hi-tech. But in a week in which Amazon talked up its…
Starting a new mobile phone company in today’s competitive market could be seen as a suicidal business plan, but a new smartphone announced this week may have some features that make it appealing. Finland’s…
Are search engines really at the front line in the fight against child pornography?
GoodNCrazy
Google and Microsoft have agreed to install filters on their search engines to prevent them being used to search for child abuse images. Some queries on Google and Bing will be blocked, while others will…
With more internet users going dark, will tech companies follow them?
Owen's/Flickr
With each new revelation of the scope of the American National Security Agency’s spying, perceptions of the importance of privacy are hardening around the world. Systematic monitoring of the world’s communications…
Engaging with the creative industries gives companies such as Google a competitive edge.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Will the web create more Australian culture than it destroys? How do we tell Australian stories in the digital age? Why would Google host an event and ask questions such as these? On Friday, Google will…
Adam Kucharski, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
When people talk about ‘big data’, there is an oft-quoted example: a proposed public health tool called Google Flu Trends. It has become something of a pin-up for the big data movement, but it might not…
Microsoft is running out of temptations to sell Office software to consumers.
Sunfox/Flickr
With the release of new iPads and Mac hardware, Apple announced that not only would the latest version of the Mac OS, Mavericks, be free, but it would also be giving away its iWork office productivity…
Twelve winters of grief for Hrothgar, for he had clicked ‘agree’ without reading to the end.
Helen Stratton
Have you ever tried reading Beowulf and decided it was a bit too hard to follow before giving up? How did you get on with War and Peace? If you struggled with either of these notoriously unwieldy classics…
Google plans on ditching cookies as a personal identifier and going with an in-house version.
Mark Poblete
The indelible digital footprint associated with your internet usage is worth gold to others. Around the world, online advertisers are expected to spend around $117 Billion this year alone. And it’s Google…
Tax avoidance shows no sign of abating. Google, the company with the slogan “Don’t be evil”, is at it again. The company has been named and shamed by the UK House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee…
Many consider manufacturer’s versions of Android to be
“bloatware” when compared with what’s available on Google’s own Nexus 4.
Janitors via Flickr
The practice of installing modified versions of the Google Android operating system on other smartphones is about to become mainstream. CyanogenMod, the people behind one of the custom ROMs (as these versions…
From massively open to really massively open.
oxyman
The entrance of Google into the Massive Open Online Courses market this week has the potential to reignite the spirit of openness that saw these alternative routes into higher education emerge in the first…
What do you get the company that has everything? Cake.
Cakehead loves
What did you achieve by the time you were 15? For most, a summary of our first decade-and-a-half of existence would not make for a bestselling biography. But one teenager celebrating a significant birthday…
Google says it can change the world with its Loon balloons.
iLighter
A flurry of initiatives aimed at connecting the billions – mainly in Africa – who still do not have access to the internet are underway. A few weeks ago, Google’s possibly aptly named Project Loon was…
Unexpected item in bagging area. Tesco is striking out into tablets.
ell brown
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he argued that unless the device was better at doing everyday tasks than smartphones or netbooks, it wouldn’t deserve to exist. Consumers and corporates embraced…
And this is how we grab the cookie.
cactusbeetroot
“You are being spied upon” is a warning that seems to greet us from the pages of our newspapers almost every day at the moment. The government is stockpiling your data, your Internet service provider is…