On one level, the European Commission’s argument with Google is unsurprising. The EC’s commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager’s job is to investigate possible breaches of EU competition law…
- Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, The University of Western Australia
The assault on illegal downloaders by the movie industry last week was put forward as a form of making a highly visible example of a few individuals in an attempt to change public behaviour. Sadly for…
Within hours of the pre-order launch, the initial batch of Apple Watches were showing shipping times of 2 months. Not only had the cheapest Apple Watch Sport at AUD $499 sold out, but so had the Apple…
Despite the rhetoric coming from Voltage Pictures, they are nowhere near sending letters to anyone in Australia about their alleged downloading of the movie Dallas Buyers Club last year. Australians whose…
There will be thousands of Australians who are now concerned about the prospect of receiving lawyers letters accusing them of downloading the movie the Dallas Buyers Club in April or May of 2014. The Australian…
Amazon’s announcement for its new vision of shopping, the Dash Button, was so bizarre, that people thought it was an early April Fool’s joke. The premise is simple. Push a button on a small gadget labelled…
Social media has entered what is likely to be a wildly popular new phase with the advent of live video streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat. Both apps allow people to broadcast live video and sound from…
A columnist at the New York Times has written that he believes that technologies like Apple’s upcoming watch could be as as dangerous as cigarettes and cause cancer. The idea, and the evidence that the…
The recent South by Southwest festival in Austin Texas this year featured the US premiere of a new movie about artificial intelligence called Ex Machina. The movie, directed by Alex Garland, has received…
Last week, prominent tech site Gigaom ceased operations with the terse note “Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time”. Started in 2006 by Om Malik, the site had raised about…
The Internet, and world media, have erupted over the growing scandal of Australian mobile app entrepreneur and social media presence Belle Gibson. Her app, “The Whole Pantry” lists recipes promoting a…
There was lots of hype about the new gadget, but Apple has also unveiled a new software platform called ResearchKit.
In a public show of force against cyber crime, 56 suspected hackers were arrested in the UK by the National Crime Agency. The list of those arrested included a 23-year-old man (those arrested were all…
Samsung is nothing but persistent. Having lost 10% of its market share over the past year, it has reverted to doing what it really knows how to do best, which is to copy Apple. With a few tweaks of the…
Mobile phones have become central to our lives. In the US, 90% of adults have one. Although we think of mobile phones for their primary role in communication, they have quietly become a global identification…
Despite the rise of social networks and messaging apps, email continues to be the dominant mode of written electronic communication. Over the next few years, email use will continue to grow in the business…
If you thought it has been a while since you heard any more rumours about the long-awaited Apple TV, they are about to be replaced by even more exciting possibility that Apple may be about to build an…
Google has rolled out a new health search feature that details basic facts about 400 common medical conditions. Available initially only in the US, searches for conditions like “Common Cold” will bring…
In a wave of Snowden-primed paranoia, the Internet has erupted about the possibility that TVs are being used to spy on their owners. This particular story started with someone taking the time to actually…
The Superbowl Fitness tracker company Fitbit have analysed heart rate data from people living in the Seattle and Boston metropolitan areas around the time that the 2015 Superbowl was playing. What they…
The world’s move into the mobile post-PC age has accelerated, it seems, after Apple’s record quarterly sales of 74.5 million iPhones. To put this in perspective, this is almost the same as the total global…
A spate of articles have reported a study that claims the ability to predict a communities’ risk of heart disease from the language most commonly used by that community on twitter. Analysing 148 million…
When technology, and the companies behind it, fails, the end can come in a number of different ways. A technology can be mercifully put down, as with Google’s failed hardware media player, the Nexus Q…
Bitcoin was dubbed the worst investment of 2014. As predicted however, 2015 has seen the continued fall in value of the currency that was supposed to fuel the digital age. In the last 10 days alone, it…
With the pervasiveness of social media, it is still an unanswered question as to how fundamental a role it plays in everyone’s lives. Part of the complexity comes from the fact that we regard social media…
