The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is setting itself the task of analysing the revenue forecasts for Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), and has written to NBN Co requesting the release of a bunch of data to help.…
Twitter is broken for an unknown number of its 500-million-strong userbase.…
Startling figures show that iPhone owners pay bigger phone bills - but the stats are silent as to whether that's because they make a lot of calls or are just too stupid to notice.…
Nokia’s latest budget smartphone brings the price of admission to Windows Phone 8 below the £150 mark. From today O2 will sell the Lumia 620 at £149.99 on pay-as-you-go, a bargain considering what’s inside. The network will also chuck in an additional free colour cover.…
A single pixel device which can record three-dimensional images has been built at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics in China.
Single pixel "cameras" are already capable of of generating two-dimensional pictures through a process known as ghost images but the team in China have used a timed laser pulse to give the system the ability to detect spatial arrangements.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Liat Clark
BT bagged two more government-subsidised broadband contracts on Wednesday, when it confirmed that work on those separate rural projects would not be completed until 2016.…
Duncan Jones has been announced as the director of Legendary Pictures' live-action World of Warcraft movie.
The project has been in the works since 2006 when Legendary acquired the film rights to Blizzard's franchise and was previously assigned to Sam Raimi.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Sex trade workers have taken to using Facebook and Twitter as a 21st Century phone box by posting calling cards on the networks that show them clearly touting for business.…
As expected, RIM today launched its much-delayed QNX-powered smartphone operating system, BlackBerry OS 10, along with two new handsets. The Canadian company also changed its name from Research In Motion to BlackBerry along the way.…
US retailers reckon Google will end up dominating the pay-by-bonk/eWallet business, sidelining PayPal and bypassing operator-backed ISIS simply because the Google Wallet juggernaut is unstoppable.…
In a matter of hours RIM will reveal the pricing, specification and launch date for the new BlackBerry 10 device on which the future of the whole company depends.…
Security startup NetCitadel is tackling the problem of automatically applying security policies across physical and virtual environments with a cloud-based approach.…
Vodafone reckons the average duration of phone calls on its network has halved in five years. People how talk for around one minute and forty seconds, rather than over three minutes.…
Fujitsu has taken the wraps of a new data transfer protocol which it claims is 30 times faster than TCP and will help speed up mobile web browsing and file downloads and reduce virtual desktop latency.…
Microsoft has launched its first European Spectrum Observatory, joining research efforts in Redmond, Seattle and Washington to work out which airwaves might be empty enough to exploit better.…
The majority of Gifs usually fall into two categories. The first depict a small, cute animal, engaged in a whimsical action of some sort that, when looped, brightens any day. The other captures the moment a celebrity or actor makesthatfacial expression, perfectly emoting your brooding feelings toward the Monday morning commute.
The Gifs of Croatian artist Paolo Čerić fail to fit into either category. The pulsating, hypnotic animations the 22-year-old student of electrical engineering and computing transcend the usual Gif memery, highlighting the wider potential that the looped animation form holds for digital art.
By: David Cornish, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Do you want your home broadband to work at the speed advertised by your ISP? Then set your alarm and log on at 4am, according to a new survey that tested connections speeds across the UK at different times.…
Forget about a kill switch. Planned obsolescence? Already obsolete. In the US, the Pentagon's blue-sky researchers want tomorrow's military hardware to literally cease to exist at a predetermined point. Welcome to the age of suicidal sensors.
The Pentagon's think tank Darpa isn't imagining planes or ships that melt into a metallic puddle when their replacements come off the production line. The research agency is thinking, in one sense, smaller: sensors and other "sophisticated electronic microsystems" that litter a warzone -- and create enticing opportunities for adversaries to collect, study and reverse-engineer. Since it's not practical to pick them all up when US forces withdraw, Darpa wants to usher in the age of "transient electronics."
By: Spencer Ackerman, Edited by: David Cornish
If you're implementing a private or a hybrid cloud, then your network fabric needs a refit. You've virtualised your servers - but even in a mostly static environment, traffic patterns have changed. Add the flexibility of a dynamic IT infrastructure, and you need a network that can reconfigure instantly as loads move.…
Google has announced comprehensive new mapping data on North Korea, enlisting a team of citizen cartographers to chart the country's gulags, nuclear facilities and golf courses.…
Bad news for iOS application developers – Chinese language service Kuaiyong, which allows users to install pirated apps on their iDevices without jailbreaking them, is set to expand overseas with the launch of an English language version.…
PayPal has been hit by glitches that have in some cases confused users of the service so much they paid for the same item twice.…
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has signed off on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), a video compression standard expected to succeed the wildly popular H.264.…
Last week, NBN Co – the comany building Australia’s National Broadband Network – announced trials of a $AU108 migration incentive for retailers.…
Scientists have modelled the internal workings of lightning-filled "rocket dust storms" on Mars that rise at speeds 100 times faster than ordinary storms and inject dust high into the Martian atmosphere.
The Red Planet is a very dry and dusty place, with global storms that sometimes obscure the entire surface. Satellites orbiting Mars have seen persistent dust layers reaching very high altitudes, as much as 30 to 50 kilometres above the ground, though scientists are at a loss to explain exactly how the dust got there.
By: Adam Mann, Edited by: David Cornish
What is non-alcoholic and non-toxic but gives you the buzz of a beer? Synthetic alcohol, according to David Nutt of the Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London.
Nutt, formerly the government's senior drugs adviser, has identified a substance that is alcohol-free but acts as a substitute. It has a chemical structure similar to benzodiazepine, a class of psychoactive drugs that treat anxiety and insomnia. The as-yet-unnamed drug can produce alcohol's desirable effects such as sociability and relaxation, but without negative effects such as nausea.
By: Sam Scott, Edited by: David Cornish
Following the release of Twitter's Vine app, a website has sprung up that shows a real-time feed of six-second videos shared with the world.
The results are enthralling. Depending on the time of day you log into the site, you'll get a glimpse of life in different timezones. In the European morning, for example, you get to see nightlife in East Asia, afternoon in Russia and India, and other people waking up in Europe.
By: Duncan Geere,
The Scottish city of Glasgow has won a £24 million grant from the UK's Technology Strategy Board (TSB) to become Britain's first "smart city".
The money will be spent by the council on services for residents that will make the quality of living in the city better. Glasgow beat 30 other UK cities to the prize.
By: Duncan Geere,
Unlocking a phone to use it with another carrier will be illegal in America from midnight tonight unless the cellphone is already in your hands.…
Walk ten minutes up the road from Tokyo's Shibuya station and you'll find an unusual cafe that will make chocolate versions of your face -- in the name of love.
Fab Cafe is offering the service as a Valentine's Day promotion. Over the course of two sessions, you are encouraged to have your face and head captured in a 3D scanner. A cast is then produced on a 3D printer and chocolate is poured in. Once that is complete you'll get a collection of chocolate faces to give to your loved one and the cast is yours to keep for future sculptures.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Five new Special Interest Groups (SIGs) will promote the use of Near Field Communications as the panacea which can cure what ails ya, rather than the electronic-wallet tech it has become.…
This week we discuss the murky world of revenge porn, get behind the science of human beatboxing and discuss the rest of the week's best Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Home broadband isn't yet deemed a vital utility in Europe, but that hasn't stopped a German court ruling that ISPs should compensate customers who suffer from network service disruptions.…
Cisco and NetApp are drawing closer together with their FlexPod converged system effort, an attempt to grab branch office, data centre and public cloud infrastructure business.…
Barrett Brown, a self-proclaimed spokesman for Anonymous, has been hit with new charges by authorities in Texas for concealing evidence.
It's the third round of charges in a case that his former attorney describes as an attempt to silence the outspoken and provocative activist.
"Clearly they're more worried about what they perceive as his egging people on to go after defence contractors and secret spy organisations," says Brown's former attorney Jay Leiderman. "Barrett believes in privacy for individuals and transparency for corporations and government. The government doesn't like his belief system. And Barrett was effective in expressing that belief system."
By: Kim Zetter, Edited by: David Cornish
The ZigBee Alliance - which looks after the low-power radio comms standard - has now introduced wireless communications that are powered by the act of pressing a key.…
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has assembled a Whitehall, BT and bumpkins* crack team in Norfolk to try to speed up the process of broadband deployment to local authorities in mainly rural areas.…
iPhone users feeling the strain from chucking wads of cash into the Apple's cavernous maw can now get a bit of relief in the form of money off potato scones and haggis spring rolls in Aberdeen.…
Cisco has found a buyer for its unwanted and unstrategic Linksys low-end networking brand, in the form of accessories and small networks player Belkin.…
Nokia announced a pre-tax profit of €375m for the fourth quarter of last year today, suggesting the deep cuts of the past year, including the axing of around 20,000 employees, have allowed management to steady the ship. The profit included sales of its corporate HQ and $250m support payments from Microsoft.…
The US Bankruptcy Court has approved the sale of assets of the once-mighty games developer and publisher THQ, with stuidos and titles heading in a variety of directions.
The court approved the sales of three THQ owned studios and a host of titles, which will raise the THQ estate $72 million (£45.6 million).
By: David Cornish,
The Pope has urged Catholics to use Twitter as a "portal of truth" and a way of converting non-believers to Catholicism.…
Seventeen female victims of a "revenge porn" website have banded together to sue an online outfit that published their names and compromising pictures of them without permission.…
Google wants permission to build its own wireless 2.5GHz network to test secret technology using 50 base stations and 200 devices.…
A lot more short-range devices, including US-safe models, could be used in the UK, as Ofcom asks if anyone minds another 12MHz of spectrum being released for public use.…
Investors may have cringed at Apple's revenue numbers in its Q1 2013 earnings call -- with earnings per share dropping short of market expectations for the first time in nine years, resulting in Apple shares falling by ten percent in after-hours trading -- but CEO Tim Cook took pains to point out that there is still a lot of room for growth when it comes to Apple product sales and profits.
There are a number of different ways Apple could continue to expand iPhone and iPad growth: introducing lower-priced options for emerging markets, bringing major changes to its product lines, or focusing on expanding to new geographic regions. For now, Apple seems to be focusing on the latter.
By: Christina Bonnington, Edited by: David Cornish
While superfast fibre lobbyists continue to try and push nations around the world into deploying more nimble broadband networks, a report out today showed a 7 per cent slip in average global connection speeds between the second and third quarter of 2012.…
Another day, another controversy: storage locker launcher Kim Dotcom says a video of the all-signing, all-dancing party for his new Mega service was taken down from YouTube on suspicion of copyright naughtiness after a request from German authors' society GEMA.…
Microsoft has unveiled a cloudy content distribution service that will intensify its competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).…
Not only is Asia home to the world's fastest internet connections, but it's also the source of the most internet attack traffic, according to new data from content delivery provider Akamai.…
Cisco has bought Israeli mobile network traffic management software firm Intucell for $475m in cash as it seeks to expand its footprint on the mobile market.…
Telstra has announced a new software unit it hopes will deliver revenue streams to help replace the doomed old-telco income from fixed line services – and to protect its mobile business against the threat posed by app businesses.…
According to data released by Google, it is receiving by far the most requests for users' personal data from the US government, but global demand is steadily rising each year.
The search engine published the figures 23 January as part of its efforts for total transparency. The report reveals that the US leads the trend, with 8,438 requests for information about 14,791 users in the second half of 2012 -- India is a distant second, with 2,431 requests for information, followed by France, Germany, the UK and Brazil.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: David Cornish
VMware injected a little money into systems management software upstart Puppet Labs in its third round of funding back in November 2011. But now the server virtualization juggernaut has its hands firmly up the backside of Puppet Labs as it has become one of the bigger investors in the company after doing the fourth round of funding, weighing in at $30m, all by itself.…
Kim Dotcom's comeback cloud storage service, Mega, has responded to criticism about its approach to cryptography and password security after security researcher Steve Thomas (@Sc00bz) released his MegaCracker tool, which cracks hashes embedded into emailed password confirmation links.…
Ofcom has discovered that mobile phones are used for making calls, and that mobile data is generally used to access the internet, so now it wants help deciding what to find out next.…
Spanish communications giant Telefónica has been fined €66.8m by the European Commission for agreeing not to compete with Portugal Telecom, which was slapped with a lighter €12m penalty by Brussels officials.…
A £52m government-subsidised superfast broadband project in rural parts of Somerset and Devon that was won by national telco BT has been delayed over "contract issues".…
A "leak" of more than a hundred screenshots purporting to be from the release version of BlackBerry OS 10 has washed up on a blog.…
A team of wounded or injured service personnel are planning to fly light aircraft to the South Pole to raise awareness of problems facing veterans with disabilities.
The British Antarctic Microlight Expedition which is being run by Flying for Freedom and Help for Heroes launched on 22 January but will not see the polar pilots taking their trip until early 2014.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Olivia Solon
The UK has opened its auction of radio frequencies suitable for high-speed 4G mobile internet services. Who exactly is bidding in which bands will remain a secret until the sale ends.…
You are looking into the world's largest wind tunnel devoted to automobile testing. This tunnel is the heart of General Motors' Aerodynamics Lab in Michigan, where the automotive giant tests the shape and design of every car it develops. With a 5.5 x 10.5-metre test area, this cavern is where General Motors appraised its most streamlined cars from last year, including its electric model, the Chevrolet Volt, which has a drag coefficient of 0.28 (the lowest in the company's 104-year history), and the Opel Adam, one of the most fuel-efficient cars of its class, which was unveiled at September's
Paris Motor Show 2012.
"To simulate what happens when cars move through air, we move air past cars at speeds as high as 220 kilometres per hour," says Frank
Meinert, the lab's senior engineer. "In the 32 years that we have been in operation, we have run about 21,000 tests in total."
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan, Edited by: David Cornish
Felix Tsai was as far from a hacker as you could get. He was a lawyer.
In the mid '90s, he practiced corporate law for a firm in Manhattan. During the dot-com boom he did mergers and acquisitions. But he never loved his work. After quitting law and starting a pair of tech-minded companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, he realised that what he really wanted to be was a programmer. So he went to bootcamp. And now he is.
By: Klint Finley, Edited by: David Cornish
Nasuni, Nimbus, TwinStrata and Whiptail have all announced flying starts to 2013, suggesting it's going to be a quite a year for both cloud storage and flash array technology.…
If you've experienced the frustration of a jammed GPS while driving, BAE Systems' new device will be good news. NAVSOP (Navigation via Signals of Opportunity) is an alternative to GPS that uses local-radio, mobile and TV-transmitter signals to locate itself. "Whereas GPS uses data from satellites orbiting Earth, NAVSOP builds up a database of satellites on the ground, which don't move," says the project's principal scientist, Ramsey Faragher. "If GPS is jammed, or fails due to adverse weather, NAVSOP kicks in at the same level of accuracy."
What's unusual is the way it calculates its location. "We wanted something that learns independently, so after a few days it doesn't need any external sources of data to work." The NAVSOP uses a learning algorithm that constantly corrects and recalibrates itself, based on confirmation from GPS. Quickly, it learns which signals to trust. "Eventually NAVSOP starts to treat GPS with suspicion and can tell if it's been tampered with," says Faragher. "All those signals can't lie to you."
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan, Edited by: David Cornish
The website for the United Parcel Service receives 32 million package-tracking requests per day. That's more than two for every package they ship. Clearly, people hate waiting - just think back to the last time you suppressed the urge to hit your computer while staring at an endlessly… loading… progress… bar.
Not surprisingly, companies have responded to our wait hate by speeding things up whenever possible: faster search, faster shipping, faster service. But speed can sometimes backfire: when we get what we want too quickly, we can feel that the company didn't really do that much for us -- leading us to question why we're paying so much for something that took so little time and effort.
By: Michael I Norton & Ryan W Buell, Edited by: David Cornish
A "fragmented" legal framework, the "attitude" of regulators and a naturally cautious approach to security issues are among the reasons why UK businesses have made less use of cloud computing than US counterparts, according to experts.…
The Scottish Funding Council has bunged Strathclyde University cash to set up a boffinry base to develop cunning uses of spare radio frequencies known as White Space.…
Google has released a substantial trove of code for its Cloud Platform to github.…
Cupertino’s prudery has struck again, after photography market 500px’s app was pulled from the AppStore over its depiction of nudity.…
Mozilla has taken a small step closer to finding out whether the world wants another smartphone operating system, with Spanish startup Geeksphone (working with Telefonica) announcing developer previews of two Firefox-based devices.…
A day before Apple's quarterly results land, Tim Cook will also have to deal with the some unwelcome stats on iOS smartphone market share, showing that the iPhone still trails Android in all markets but the US and Japan.…
Microsoft first learned about Google's plans to drop support for Redmond's ActiveSync for those signing up for a free Google account last summer, but now it wants the search giant to delay the decision, according to a report.…
UK 4G network EE has announced a change in its pricing and data plans, reducing the price of its entry-level contracts and increasing the data allowances on others.
From today, customers will be able to join EE's 4G network for £31 per month, on a 24-month contract. This is a reduction from the original £36 per month the company launched with.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Phones 4U, the successful reseller, is launching its own network offering, and will operate a mobile virtual network that piggybacks on EE's infrastructure so it can offer 4G later in the year.…
Sky has confessed it has overloaded its broadband service by putting far too many Brits onto its network. The media giant told The Register that it has run out of capacity in certain corners of the UK, which has knackered its users' internet connectivity at peak times.…
Telefonica customers in Germany who have a Samsung NFC phone will be able to pay by bonk from next month as the operator starts "friendly user" testing as a prelude to national rollout.…
Less visible (at least in terms of headlines) than invisibility cloaks, illusion cloaks are a field of great interest to materials scientists.
Rather than rendering an object invisible to the senses illusion cloaks would allow the object to appear as something entirely different -- particularly useful for camouflage and in defence projects.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Disk drive manufacturer Western Digital, which has angling for a while to muscle into the SMB market, is buying privately owned backup software company Arkeia Software for its backup software and appliances. The myriad other suppliers in the fractured SMB data protection market now face having to compete with a giant. The obvious possibility for WD, of course, would be to link and combine NAS and data protection.…
Foxit Software has fixed a critical security hole in its PDF plugin for web browsers.…
Aviation investigators and Boeing are continuing to determine what went wrong with the lithium-ion batteries on the 787 Dreamliner this month, prompting the first grounding of an American commercial airplane fleet since 1979.
As the airplane maker tries to find a fix, its customers are trying to figure out how to juggle schedules and routes to fly passengers with 50 Dreamliners grounded around the world. And at least one of those airlines is already saying it expects to be compensated by Boeing.
By: Jason Paur, Edited by: David Cornish
Along with being a haven for breaking news, celebrity updates, and bad jokes, Twitter may have another use: a handy weight-loss tool.
Researchers at the University of South Carolina found the support and accountability provided by posting to the social networking site made a difference in how much weight people lost. Although the two groups in the study -- one that tweeted and one that didn't -- lost the same amount of weight during the trial, the individuals within the Twitter group who posted the most also lost the most weight.
By: Jeff Beckham, Edited by: David Cornish
Does anyone know what news Qualcomm announced at CES this year? What products it unveiled? No? But you do know that the chipmaker put Big Bird onstage. And Steve Ballmer.
While the bizarre ritual of the tech company keynote grinds on, the point of these exercises in social awkwardness, astroturfed enthusiasm, celebrity shilling and PowerPoint pandering has long since dissolved into the smoke machine-obscured mists. Of course, we in the media are key keynote enablers. We cover these things relentlessly because they're manufactured for us to cover and, hey, sometimes they even serve up little dribbles of news!
By: Marcus Wohlsen, Edited by: David Cornish
With one eye on Larry Ellison's Oracle in 2011 Salesforce chief Marc Benioff attacked “fake clouds” saying they aren’t the future.…
Developers have ported another 19,000 apps to BlackBerry 10, leading Research in Motion (RIM) to extend the deadline for its various programs aimed at encouraging coders to commit to its platform.…
Australian business travellers to Asia received a boost at the tail end of last week after telco giant Telstra announced the availability of 4G international roaming in Hong Kong courtesy of operator CSL.…
DataStax, the company that was founded to take the Cassandra NoSQL data store created by Facebook commercial and therefore usable by mere enterprise data centers, is keeping to its cadence and is rolling up a new release of its DataStax Enterprise Edition.…
Weightless, the would-be world standard that allows devices to talk to devices without human intervention, is set to reach its first major release milestone this spring. Version 1.0 of the technology specification is set to be published in the March-April timeframe and then it will be able to begin making the much-hyped but yet to be delivered ‘internet of things’ start to happen, or so its backers believe.…
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched a mobile wallet app with a more-than-passing resemblance to Apple's Passbook. It enables fandroids to pay each other over the air and squeaks every time it's used.…
Britons' willingness to post every little detail of their lives online is changing the way their identities are constructed, according to a report from the UK’s chief scientific advisor.…
A new space company will announce plans to mine the minor planets at a press conference in Santa Monica, California, tomorrow, 22 January.
Deep Space Industries intends to build a fleet of commercial asteroid-prospecting spacecraft that can harvest and process these chunks of space rock.
Until the 22 January event, the company's founders are keeping a tight lid on further information about their plans to plunder precious resources for profit.
By: Paul Sutherland, Sen.com, Edited by: David Cornish
"I thought it would be fun to set up a situation of cause and effect, where a concept is causing a musical outcome," says Drew Daniel, one half of experimental duo Matmos. Along with his other half -- both professionally and personally -- MC Schmidt, he has been making music for more than 20 years. Their latest project is split across an EP and album -- both conceived by a version of the ganzfeld experiment, a sensory-deprivation test used in lab studies of extra-sensory perception.
For four years, the pair have been conducting telepathic experiments in which Daniel attempts to transmit a concept to a subject. The opening riff and the title of their Large Green Triangles EP came from one test.
By: Ailbhe Malone, Edited by: David Cornish
There could be trouble on the horizon for Google. Consumers in the world's biggest mobile phone market appear to be shunning big-name Android handsets for no-name Androids - with Google stripped out. That's the trend identified by Enders analyst Ben Evans in a must-read blog post here.…
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has established a new centre for its activities in China with the aim of encouraging more local developers and companies to get involved in the global debate to shape the future of the web.…
Oracle is rolling out private infrastructure as a service clouds, with capacity-on-demand (CoD) pricing, based on its various "engineered systems" setups.…
Kim Dotcom's new cloud file locker, mega.co.nz, has all-but-failed to appear online, with its mastermind claiming global enthusiasm for the site has overwhelmed its resources.…
Massively-multiplayer theremins, wireless disco lights and audio-mangling running apps were just a few of the creations that sprung out of Music Hack Day Stockholm.
The event, one in a long-running continuous series of hack days held in locations across the globe, once again yielded an impressive array of imaginative hacks that fuse music with technology.
By: Duncan Geere,
Deloitte is predicting a looming spectrum crunch that will result in higher prices and poor performance, even on LTE networks.…
Filesharing kingpin Kim Dotcom has opened a new websitein the wake of the closure of Megaupload at the start of 2012.
Mega will allow users the ability to upload and store files of any kind, like Dropbox or other cloud storage services.
By: Duncan Geere,
UN talks in Geneva have yielded a global treaty that controls the use of mercury, with the objective of reducing the amount of the toxic metal released into the environment.
Delegates from more than 140 countries agreed limits on the supply of and trade in mercury, and the use of the substance in products and industrial processes. There was particular focus on measures to be taken to reduce mercury emissions from small-scale gold mining, and power plants and metal production facilities.
By: Duncan Geere,
An American college student named Tyler McNaney is developing a machine that recycles plastic household waste into the raw materials for use in 3D printing.
The Filabot performs the 21st century equivalent of alchemy, melting down unwanted material and turning it into plastic filament - the goop that 3D printers melt down and layer out to form objects.
By: Duncan Geere,
Operators are bleeding revenue to over-the-top players, and pinning their hopes on the GSMA-based Joyn standard, but a year after launch platform developer OpenCloud thinks the GSMA might be the problem rather than the solution.…
OKCupid's CrazyBlindDate app aims to cut down on profile building and attract more women -- the idea being "Just meet someone. Meet someone quickly."
Unless you're after casual hookups (and Grindr's success will tell you that plenty of people are) it seems that internet dating involves a resource-intensive profile building exercise followed by messaging, browsing, vetting and coming up with a list of appropriate venues which say "I'd like to get to know you better but in a well-lit public environment".
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Ian Steadman
What does Windows 8 cost? I don’t mean in the sense of what’s the fallout of poor Q4 sales for Microsoft and the PC makers, but rather: what do you get for your money?…
You might think talking to an animated cat is a waste of time, but you'd be disagreeing with 120 million people. Cyprus-based startup Outfit7 has built a business -- 19 mobile and tablet apps -- out of exactly that. Its Talking Friends series of apps, in which animals repeat what you say, have been downloaded 500 million times in 26 months. Outfit7 has more than 120 million active users, 30 per cent of whom have downloaded two or more apps. With no outside investment, the firm has set up offices in California, London, Slovenia and Seoul.
"When we founded the company in early 2010, the goal was to make a mobile game for pure entertainment," says Narry Singh, Outfit7's "chief business guru". So they launched Talking Tom, an animated talking cat, which is now one of 18 different versions. The apps allow users to feed the animals, play games and watch videos featuring the characters. The company collects vast amounts of data from users: "Talking Tom was fed 1.7 billion virtual glasses of milk [in 2011] by users," says Singh, 44.
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan, Edited by: David Cornish
The Wikimedia foundation has extended its “mission is to empower a global volunteer community to collect and develop the world's knowledge” by adding a travel site to its portfolio of online services.…
The new mega.co.nz will launch with 50 gigabytes of cloud storage for all comers and a global customer support line, but just 15 to 20 staff to handle calls.…
Earlier this week, Telstra wrapped up its contracts for the duct remediation the carrier committed to under its National Broadband Network agreements. The telco contracted Visionstream to carry out remediation work in Victoria and Tasmania, at a cost of $AU90 million.…
Web giants, telcos, media companies and a host of mobile start-ups will be salivating over today's Gartner forecast that predicts a heady doubling of global mobile advertising spend in the next three years.…
