Blog

With the recent launch of Apple’s iPhone 5 making headlines all week, most of the focus has been on the usual debates about sales figures and comparisons with previous, or expected performance. In short, the iPhone 5 is a monster success – it has so far outsold every previous handset and looks set to earn Apple another massive wedge of …

Up and down the country a new academic term is starting for hundreds of thousands of students in the UK – an exciting and stimulating experience which will hopefully be vital in their personal, social, and professional development. The latter especially – professional development – is increasingly central to students’ priorities, knowing that the current job market for graduates is …

Tomorrow sees the start of the second Symfony Live conference in San Francisco following on from the success of the 2011 inaugural event. This year’s edition is particularly exciting following the announcement of forthcoming closer inter-compatibility between Symfony frameworks with Drupal earlier this year. The 3-day event will feature numerous valuable presentations, including a keynote address from Symfony creator Fabien Potencier, a look ahead …

Over the past week a video posted on Youtube has sparked a major international relations crisis as well as many incidents of violent unrest around the world – claiming the lives of almost 50 people and injuring many more. Although there is much to discuss in relation to this, there is also plenty of coverage already out there on most …

The Apple vs. Samsung patent war has recently been the major tech story in most mainstream media outlets: not surprising when we remember that many news organisations basically equate newsworthiness with Apple relatedness. However, with this type of coverage, it’s sometimes easy to miss some of the finer points which reveal themselves if we take a broader perspective. With that …

The smartphone is a complex beast. Once upon a time we used to have pagers, mobile phones, digital cameras, mp3 players, gameboys, PDA’s, calculators and GPS navigators. All these separate gadgets have now been successfully incorporated into the modern (top-end) smartphone. Some people still use individual devices – but the trend is clear: smartphones are gobbling up anything and everything …

It’s not often that Star Trek accurately forecasts the shape of technology thirty years down the line. Warp speed and teleportation, for example, remain distinctly in the fiction half of the sci-fi equation. And yet, it ocurred to me today that there is one thing Star Trek’s designers seem to have nailed – the advent of the touchscreen (not that hard to predict) …

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine is always worth a read, especially for those interested in issues of intellectual property, journalism, publishing and the web. This week he’s been discussing something particularly interesting – the notion of Creditrights. Creditrights are addressed at a problem that is not new – the fact that, as content increasingly becomes digitised, it is also much …

Computer geeks and hackers are an increasingly common breed in Hollywood films these days, having come a long way from their early appearances in features of the 1980′s such as Tron (1982). There were titles like Wargames (1983), Real Genius (1984), and Weird Science (1985), aimed mainly at teenage audiences, in which young computer geniuses, sometimes alienated from the popular …

Every now and then most tech bloggers allow themselves a post or two in which they simply let their imaginations roam, dreaming up what technology will look like in a hundred years or so. Some of the better bloggers focus on areas where they know about long term trends and have some expertise, while others simply concoct what is essentially …