Do mobile phones damage your back? This is what your smartphone is doing to your spine November 20, 2014 Using your smartphone while walking is generally a bad idea, as one unfortunate tourist discovered when she fell off a pier while using Facebook last year. But mishaps aside, our phone use is doing serious damage to our spines, a new study has found. In fact, according to the research, published in the journal Surgical [...]
YouTube could be about to lose 20,000 songs, including videos from John Lennon and Pharrell Williams November 20, 2014 There's a fight brewing between YouTube and a group representing 46 artists and songwriters including Pharrell Williams, John Lennon and, er, Ira Gerschwin, which could result in all their songs being removed from YouTube. Let's put it this way: Pharrell is not Happy… Global Music Rights (GMR) is the company behind the dispute. It was [...]
PMI signals “weakest Eurozone growth” for more than a year November 20, 2014 The speed of recovery in the Eurozone has slowed down again in November, Markit's Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), published this morning, suggests The flash composite index, which measures output in the region, fell to 51.4, its lowest in 16 months, and down from 52.1 in October. The figure is still above the 50 mark, below [...]
Quindell share price rises as it denies plans to sell off Nationwide Accident Repair stake November 20, 2014 Shares in beleaguered insurance services provider Quindell rose at much as eight per cent in early trading as it quashed rumours it had attempted to sell off its 25 per cent stake in Nationwide Accident Repair Services. The statement, issued to the stock market this morning, was in response to reports that Nationwide's broker, Westhouse, [...]
Uber investor Ashton Kutcher: ‘What is so wrong about digging up dirt on journalists?” November 19, 2014 Actor and sometime tech VC Ashton Kutcher – who also happens to have a stake in Uber – has come out strongly in support of the taxi app in a rant on Twitter. Kutcher, who also has stakes in Spotify, Airbnb and Foursquare, according to Crunchbase, came out in apparent support of executive Emil Michael, [...]
Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge will be a privately managed tourist spot attracting “30,000 visitors a day” November 19, 2014 The Garden Bridge will cost £175m to build (Source: Arup) Those who had envisaged long afternoons languishing amid the vegetation on Thomas Heatherwick's £175m Garden Bridge may be in for an unpleasant surprise: it turns out that the bridge will be a privately managed tourist attraction, requiring large groups to book in advance. The bridge, [...]
Royal Mail share price falls more than 8 per cent after it warns on parcels business November 19, 2014 Shares in Royal Mail had fallen more than eight per cent to 431p in early afternoon trading, after the company posted disappointing half-year profits and warned its parcel business is likely to be impacted by heavy competition. The business, which was floated at 330p last October, has been the subject of fierce debate, with MPs [...]
Emoji klaxon: 37 new ones to be released next year, possibly including “unicorn face” November 19, 2014 Emojis are those little smiley faces teenage girls pepper their text messages with – but it turns out they have a serious source. As with characters like letters and symbols, they're determined by the Unicode Consortium – which has just announced a whole raft of new emojis, to be released next year. Excited face. In [...]
100,000 new homes could be built on government-owned land in London November 19, 2014 Potential sites for new homes on government-owned land in London (Source: Savills) As many as 100,000 homes could be built on land in London owned by the government, according to research by property services firm Savills. The figures, which also found that across the whole of the UK, public land could provide enough space for [...]
Victoria Station evacuated after fire alarm: Commuters resume travel following alert November 19, 2014 Services have now been resumed at Victoria Station after a fire alert left rush-hour passengers stranded on trains for up to 30 minutes. Travellers coming into London from Kent and the surrounding areas were thrown into chaos when the station was evacuated. Fire crews attended as hundreds of passengers as services going into and out [...]