The words "Microsoft" and "security" are synonymous, but often for all the wrong reasons. It’s the curse of success really. When you own an overwhelming slab of the world’s desktops, naturally the Black Hats will come after you rather than other niche operating system providers. And let’s face it, Windows is hardly Helm’s Deep when it comes to repelling Orcs.
Tech companies are notorious for turning their legal departments into profit centres. Anyone who has had a key supplier acquired by Microsoft understands what this means. In earlier times, companies like Computer Associates turned license re-negotiation into an art form, and of course they were pretty creative with their accounting as well.
Google is a one trick pony, but it's a pretty spectacular trick. However, its reliance on search revenues is well known, and by extension so is the risk to its value. Now, Wall Street analysts are starting to question whether that overreliance on search and the advent of new modes of discovery like Apple's Siri might be problematic for Capital G.
Business Insider always runs a good line in infographics and one from earlier this week caught our attention. Sourced from MBA Online, it provides a boggling array of "A Day in the Internet" stats — certainly enough to keep your average marketing manager in PowerPoint rapture for months to come.
In just 15 short years, the Web hived off huge slabs of audience from print, but left most of the money behind. Now, in just a fraction of that time, mobile platforms may be visiting the self-same acrimony upon their desktop antecedents, and once again there's no real evidence that the money will come along for the ride.
Twitter is like standing in a room with 10,000 other people who are all shouting at each other simultaneously. You're unlikely to come across too many blinding insights at 140 characters at a time, but that's hardly the point of the exercise.
The first serious holes in Facebook's otherwise relentless march towards a $100 billion IPO appeared over the weekend with credible reports that claim the company will miss its Q1 revenue forecasts.
Is Pinterest the next Twitter, or just another Chatroulette? In case you are wondering Pinterest basically lets users pin images of interest to social cork boards. The site - founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp - recently claimed to be the fastest growing Web destination ever.
As we close in on Facebook's IPO, the numbers are starting to come through thick and fast. This morning for instance, in Business Insider, TBG digital CEO, Simon Mansell, had a stab at calculating Facebook's maximum annual advertising revenues based on its current growth trajectory and inventory limits.
The best and the worst of Apple are on display this week. On one side of the coin, its stock cruised through $US500, making Apple the biggest company in the world (but still not the biggest ever).
The Great Game for philosophical hegemony in this post-historical epoch continues to unfurl. Yes, that's right — smartphone market share figures for Apple and Android have been updated. It appears that in the last quarter the natural order was restored, with iPhone dominating US sales again, according to one survey, and dominating worldwide shipments, according to another.
Facebook's IPO will no doubt generate screens full of digital media in the coming weeks, and Grok will certainly get in on the act.
Company executives who conspire to manipulate prices are breaking the law. Generally, this involves a company agreeing with competitors to keep prices high. But conspiring to keep prices artificially low, if that's what's happened, may land some of the tech sectors’ biggest firms in very hot java.
No sooner had the dust settled on the SOPA debate — a bad law the tech sector did a good job of torpedoing — than the nerdlingers were up in arms once again about copyright theft. But it's not what you think.
Grok has always considered Google to be its own worst enemy, and its biggest threats to be hubris and antitrust. Now they have found a way to combine the two and as a result, the blogosphere and Twitter streams are thick with the stench of cordite, or at least baloney.