Mobile operators discover the dangers of being reduced to a dumb pipe
AS HANDSETS turn into computers, laptops are becoming more like mobile phones. Even industry veterans have been surprised by the rapid take-up of mobile broadband—using built-in receivers or plug-in “dongles” to provide internet access to laptops via high-speed mobile networks. The advantage of this is that it works anywhere—unlike short-range Wi-Fi technology, it is not limited to a few hotspots. In Western Europe alone, the number of mobile-broadband users will grow by 50% to 27m this year, according to …
Science inspired the world wide web. Two decades on, the web has repaid the compliment by changing science
“INFORMATION Management: A Proposal”. That was the bland title of a document written in March 1989 by a then little-known computer scientist called Tim Berners-Lee who was working at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory, near Geneva. Mr Berners-Lee (pictured) is now, of course, Sir Timothy, and his proposal, modestly dubbed the world wide web, has fulfilled the implications of its name beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved at the time.
In fact, the …
Darren Waters
A second generation of Microsoft’s Surface computing device is two to three years away, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.
Developer Joe Olsen, whose company Phenomblue writes applications for the Surface, said he had been told the device was still in the development stage.
“They haven’t even got to point where they are going to commercialise,” he said.
Chris Bernard, user experience evangelist for Microsoft, said he could not confirm a release date.
Surface is a multi-touch computer in the shape of a table, with a flat screen that can “read” multi-touch …
What can banks learn from the clean-up after the telecoms crash of 1997-2003?
BEFORE banks, the last global industry to commit collective suicide was telecoms during the boom and bust of 1997-2003. The parallel is imperfect—banks are uniquely vulnerable to runs and have a special role in the economy. Reflecting this, only a few telecoms companies received state bail-outs. But in a narrower corporate sense, the meltdown rivalled that of the banks. From peak to trough the industry lost $2.8 trillion of market value, compared with the $4.6 trillion banks have …