A piece I wrote on potential roadbumps in Samsung’s ride to smartphone dominance. Samsung Electronics is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer and biggest user of Google’s Android operating system. And, for some, that’s the problem. Samsung’s meteoric rise – in the first quarter of 2011 it shipped fewer smartphones than Apple, Nokia or Research in … Read more
Here’s a piece I wrote to coincide with Google’s launch of Street View in Thailand: Google charts a careful course through Asia’s maps Google rushed out its panoramic Street View maps in Thailand on Friday as part of the country’s efforts to show tourist hot spots have recovered from last year’s floods.But it also marked something … Read more
Once we lived in simpler times. Google was a search engine that made its money off ads that were based on what we searched for. Look for cocoa and you’d get an ad for hot chocolate alongside the search results. Google made lots of money from this and we got our hot chocolate. This worked … Read more
The whole Google/Firefox issue is an interesting one: Google is the default search engine in Firefox because it pays to be there. The three-year deal expired in November 2011. Would they renew? Some thought no. They were wrong. Not only has Google renewed the deal whereby it effectively bankrolls Firefox, but it’s the first time … Read more
This has absolutely nothing to do with what I should be working on but this piece in Gizmodo caught my eye: a number of weird lines and structures in the middle of the Gobi Desert in China’s western reaches. Like this one: They don’t seem to make much sense, despite some quite ingeniuous explanations by … Read more