Browsing: Alistair Fairweather

It has been a lively year for technology, despite the bad state of the world’s economy. Technology is now so intrinsic to both business and personal life that it might appear recession-proof. But this high-level view masks the Darwinian ferocity of the battles raging between the tech titans. The year 2011 will be remembered as

Something momentous happened on Wednesday — something most people will never even hear about. Adobe, a software firm, announced that it is ceasing development on the mobile version of its Flash platform. That probably doesn’t sound very momentous

The only consistent thing about the Internet is its ability to surprise us by changing virtually over night. It’s a Darwinian market that crushes the weak and elevates the strong within months rather than years. That makes investing in online businesses a roller coaster ride

The mobile phone industry is a brutal business. There may be gold in them thar hills, but it can be painful to extract. Witness the howls of rage from tens of millions of BlackBerry customers around the world who were cut off from services like BlackBerry Messenger

There’s a wave coming. Its first eddies were felt almost a decade ago, and by now it has already engulfed some outlying regions. But the general public has been largely unaware of its approach. Until now. I’m talking about the arrival of fully

Alan Knott-Craig Jr is looking for attention. He wants so much of it, in fact, that he’s just bought the attention of 40m people in 120 countries. Yes, I’m talking about the MXit acquisition. Last week, in a completely unexpected move, Knott-Craig swooped in and bought Africa’s biggest social

To most of us, the Internet is pretty close to magic. Type in a search, click a link, and the info just arrives on our screens. There isn’t any visible evidence that actual work is needed to make this happen; no grinding gears or roaring burners, and there

Michael Arrington may not be a household name outside of the technology sector, but if you run a tech start-up anywhere in the world, he might as well be a god. Coverage in his six-year-old blog, TechCrunch, has become the gold standard for getting noticed by both investors and

The folks who run Google+ want you to just be yourself. In fact they’re so serious about you being yourself, that they will kick you off their playground unless you use your real name. How do they know if your name is real? Well, it’s obvious, right?

No matter how you look at it, twelve and a half billion US dollars is a lot of money. Sure, in the billionaire playground of Silicon Valley that’s merely a medium-sized company, but in the real world it’s the GDP of Botswana. So when Google