Apple hires VR researcher Doug Bowman to catch up with Facebook, Google and Microsoft in Silicon Valley virtual reality race January 22, 2016 Apple has hired a leading VR researcher in a bid to catch up to its rivals in the great Silicon Valley virtual reality race. Doug Bowman can now add Apple employee to his cv, joining the company from his current role as the director of the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech, reports the [...]
Google has paid Apple $1bn to keep its search on iPhones – and has generated over $36bn from Android January 22, 2016 Google is paying a pretty penny to remain the default search bar on Apple’s iPhones. The tech giant paid its rival $1bn in 2014 to keep its search engine on iOS products like iPhones and iPads, court records have shown. Apple was also reportedly raking in a 34 per cent slice of Google’s sales through iOS devices [...]
New rankings show US democracy on the edge January 21, 2016 The Economist Intelligence Unit today releases its 2015 Democracy Index, ranking countries on a range of criteria including political participation, pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. One of the central conclusions of the EIU’s analysis is that “in many democracies, political elites worry about their inability to relate to the electorate and fear the challenge [...]
Spotify buys up Cord Project and Soundwave startups for product innovation in fight against Apple as Deezer raises $100m January 20, 2016 Spotify has acquired two startups, one specialising in voice messaging and the other in music discovery, in the fight against new rival Apple Music. New York-based Cord Project, founded in 2014 by two former Google employees, has one million users of its flagship app Cord. Soundwave is a Dublin-based startup founded in 2012. It boasts 1.5m downloads in [...]
Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk win 2015 Luddite Award for their “alarmist” warnings about artificial intelligence January 20, 2016 Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have just “won” the 2015 Luddite Award for their warnings about artificial intelligence. A world-renowned physicist and the entrepreneur behind ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, neither of the two are exactly what you might call afraid of technology. But the worries the two have expressed on the future of AI [...]
Apple iOS versus Google Play Store: Here’s the winner in each country according to downloads and revenue in 2015 January 20, 2016 In the ongoing battle of Apple versus Google, there's a surprising winner across the world – both of them. More people are downloading apps from Google's Play Store than Apple in most major countries. Only three of the top 20 countries – Britain, Canada and Japan – buck this trend, with iOS more popular than Google Play in [...]
Britain risks a talent crunch due to draconian policy on high skilled immigration January 18, 2016 London has the most talented workforce in the world. Research from Deloitte has proved it, finding that the capital has 1.5m people working in high-skill, knowledge-based business sectors. That compares with 1.2m in New York, our closest rivals. So it won’t come as any surprise that the business community gets twitchy when it sees looming [...]
Look out, hackers are coming for your Apple Watch: Cyber attacks against smart watches and other wearables rising sharply January 16, 2016 Cybercriminals are increasingly turning their eye to smart watches and other wearables, according to IT security group Kaspersky Lab. And it’s not just Apple Watches that are getting hit. Wearables are a rapidly growing segment with one in five mobile payments expected to be made from a smart watch, fitness tracker or other type of [...]
London had 1m contactless Tube journeys in a single day January 14, 2016 The number of contactless journeys on the Tube made with Visa surpassed one million for the first time in just a single day in the lead up to Christmas as paying with just a swipe of a card or phone grows in popularity. The use of contactless Visa increased 166 per cent annually in December alone and commuters spent £339m taking 7.75m [...]
With global shipments falling by a record 10.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2015, is the PC now dead? January 14, 2016 Andy Hobsbawm, co-founder of Evrythng, says Yes. Over 90 per cent of adults on the planet have a mobile, and about half of those are smartphones – soon they all will be. It’s a mistake to keep thinking of desktop and mobile as two separate categories. Smartphones are computers, just better. They’re more portable and come [...]