The practice of installing modified versions of the Google Android operating system on other smartphones is about to become mainstream. CyanogenMod, the people behind one of the custom ROMs (as these versions…
- Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, The University of Western Australia
In a tweet that could represent US$110 million for every one of its 135 characters, Twitter last week announced that it would be following fellow social network providers Facebook and LinkedIn in becoming…
In a move that was paradoxically as unexpected as it was inevitable, Finnish mobile phone company Nokia has sold its mobile phones business to Microsoft for US$7.2 billion. The deal comes at a time when…
For those still believing that MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) pose no threat to established universities, Georgia Tech has launched the first accredited fully online Masters of Computer Science based…
Mike Lazaridis, founder and former CEO of BlackBerry, may be forgiven for not having the foresight of recognising the threat that the iPhone and Android smartphones would pose to his business. However…
50 years ago, Marshall McLuhan the renowned philosopher of communication theory wrote about the role of mass media (the press, radio and TV) in education. He argued that it should be treated as an educational…
Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have created an application called Immersion, which uses your email to display all of the people you communicate with in a highly visual way. Although it was designed primarily…
The government has failed to meet a self-set target of 500,000 registrations of its Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) by July 1. As at June 30, the Department of Health and Ageing…
Not a day goes by now without a story about on the one hand foretelling great change in higher education brought about by revolutionary changes in open online education, and on the other, loud wails of…
Personal Audio is the company behind attempts to assert claims on patents that cover podcasting and audio playlists. James Logan, its founder, believes that he and his company have been misrepresented…
In an incident that highlighted for me how far Australian media organisations have moved in their drive for “efficiencies”, I discovered how hard it must be to be a journalist trying to make a living from…
When US President Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he was planning to raise the thorny issue of China’s alleged sustained hacking of US computers and ongoing theft of US intellectual property…
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Edward Snowden revealed that the US had been hacking computers and network infrastructure in Hong Kong and China for some years: “We hack network backbones…
Patents may have once seemed like a good idea. At least it seemed that way to the Venetians, who in 1474 declared the publication and protection of the “works and devices” of “men of great genius” would…
In a further development of the PRISM story, the source of the leaks has been revealed to be 29 year old Edward Snowden who was a systems administrator working for defence contractor Booz Alan Hamilton…
The revelation that the US has been engaging in systematic surveillance of potentially every user of US-based technology since 2007 has come as a shock to everyone. PRISM, as the project is called, has…
The shutdown of online currency exchange Liberty Reserve and the arrest of its CEO and founder Arthur Budovsky may not have surprised some in the security industry. The company did not require its users…
In less time than it takes for the average teenager to get bored, Yahoo has put its acquisition of blogging site Tumblr behind it and moved onto its next potential target, Hulu. A couple of years ago…
In Daphne Koller’s TED talk about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), she discusses what she believes are the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs. For her, and also restated on the Coursera website (the…
This is the ultimate stuff of hipster dreams. Despite the protestations of user defections, Tumblr bloggers couldn’t help but be beguiled by the attentions of 37-year-old Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whose…
Although perhaps not willing to admit to it, many people are guilty of having gone into a shop and used their phone to check if a prospective purchase was available more cheaply elsewhere, including online…
It has been a bad couple of weeks for social media and Twitter in particular. The degree of misinformation spread by social media sites in the aftermath of the bombings at the Boston marathon has given…
While the federal election is still months away, issues of health funding are already dominating the news. A Grattan Institute report released yesterday, for instance, noted the greatest budgetary pressure…
If there was ever any confirmation needed that the tipping point of the PC’s dominance as a computing platform has been reached, the IDC has just provided it with their latest report on PC shipments in…
For most of us, banks represent a trusted and safe harbour for our money. Investing in fixed term deposits for example, is widely seen as a low-risk strategy. The global financial crisis changed that view…
