An interesting report from the BBC this morning suggests that smartphone sales will decline worldwide except in developing nations over the coming 12 months. Well, duh. It's been known for a while at least in the UK that there are now actually more handsets than there are people. And as the... (Read More)

Yet another nebulous set of organizations are exhorting people to help "save the Internet!" by making high-speed Internet more broadly available but where it's not altogether clear just how the organization is planning to do that. And surprise, some of the people are the same between the two... (Read More)

You cannot have missed the story this week about how a picture of a naked girl on an album cover led to Wikipedia being blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK. That blacklisting, which in turn prevented people from being able to edit Wikipedia posts depending upon their ISP, was... (Read More)

Occasionally there's a story that happens on this side of the pond (I'm in the UK) which one imagines the rest of the world will find thoroughly bewildering. Take the fact that it is about to become law that ISPs will have to declare how fast their connections can be to the Internet. Now hang on,... (Read More)

'Internet for Everyone' sounds like a laudable goal. Very Mom and apple pie. Who could be against that? The problem is that the name of an organization doesn't necessarily accurately depict what it's trying to do, and what Internet for Everyone is actually trying to do is far from clear -- and... (Read More)

Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology Correspondent, is apparently the most visible person online in the UK according to the latest MostPublic Index due to be published tomorrow. The NowPublic network, which acts as a detailed barometer of whose voices are the most heard in the digital landscape,... (Read More)

It seemed too good to be true: A Britax Marathon child car seat, the top rated seat from Consumer Reports, usually with a price tag of nearly $300, on sale at Target for $43, with free shipping. It was. The news spread like wildfire between members of the wired mommy community, and many people... (Read More)

If you spend anytime online, posting in forums, discussing blog entries and getting involved in heated IM conversations then the chances are you have said it. Even Lisa and Bart Simpson have said it. Meh. We said meh! Now, meh is officially a word rather than just an online utterance. It has... (Read More)

With only a couple of weeks left until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion officially launches in many regions around the world, on 13th November to be precise, Blizzard Entertainment has announced a huge milestone for an online game. Yep, it would appear that global subscriptions to World of... (Read More)

This is possibly going to be very badly timed. A lot of users are going to get very confused. Essentially in the UK we have a lot of free or very cheap Internet services. We also have a lot of people - Apple, the BBC, many media providers - offering us rich media experiences through the... (Read More)

Sex on the Internet is nothing new, in fact it has been one of the great unspoken drivers of ecommerce and ecommerce technology over the years. Selling stuff on the Internet is nothing new, it too has been pivotal in driving online development. In particular, when you think of eBay and... (Read More)

In recent weeks, both American Airlines and Delta Airlines have announced that their in-flight wireless Internet services will include a filtering service to keep passengers from viewing porn on their laptops. I admit it, I'm torn. Porn proponents such as Violet Blue, in the San Francisco... (Read More)

The other day, I saw an article on Forbes.com named Ellison Shoots Hole in Cloud and just had to read further. I did read it. The whole thing. I was puzzled, then I laughed, and finally I was mystified by his comments. The article made me wonder just what the hell is wrong with Larry Ellison and... (Read More)

Over the last week or so, I've been exploring cloud computing. My basic thesis through this series has been that as the economy sours--it's darn close to curdling--cloud computing gives you access to sophisticated applications without expensive hardware. Sounds like a smart play on the face of... (Read More)

Last Saturday, Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin held a rally in Los Angeles in the Home Depot Center, and the California Democratic Party rented a giant electronic billboard during the event, and solicited questions from people, via texting, to display during the... (Read More)

If you were offended by that headline, or perhaps felt intimidated by it, then you are not alone. In fact, a new study published by the Journal of School Health has revealed that cyber-bullying is so common amongst teenagers who use the Internet a lot (so that's most teenagers then) that it... (Read More)

My post the other day, Does Using Gmail Mean You're Stupid, produced some thoughtful comments from people that made me me think harder about the advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing. There are security risks and data ownership issues that you have to take into consideration. To get... (Read More)

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, stated the other day that he thought Cloud Computing was stupid and we were all being duped by the cloud vendors. Specifically, in an interview with London's Guardian newspaper, he said, ""It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's... (Read More)

Sometimes I really love living in the English countryside. The fresh air, the sheep and horses at the bottom of the garden, the lack of crime, the sense of community that still exists in a small village, the lack of seriously fast broadband. Ah, yes, that's not so good is it? In fact, most of the... (Read More)

...with the idea that the world is coming crashing down around our shoulders, particularly with IT stocks falling and banks making tech staff redundant, let's have a think about one particular story. The EU is going to try to get broadband to every house on the continent from which I am writing... (Read More)

Here's a fun game played by journalists from time to time. There's a piece in today's Times newspaper in the UK about how the Internet is going to run out of addresses, maybe next year, maybe the year after. Thing is, the same piece also links to this piece from the same newspaper over a year... (Read More)

Buddhist writer Scoop Nisker used to close out his news reports on a San Francisco radio station by saying, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Now, if you don't like political advertising, you can go out and make some of your own. Using Google AdWords, anyone can... (Read More)

We were all treated this week to a lovely example of why it's a good idea to use standard email for government business (or corporate business, for that matter). First, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin mentioned that she used Yahoo Mail for some of her email, which is a problem... (Read More)

This is a strange one. Forgive me for bringing the subject up but airline staff are asking that their providers restrict the sites people can look at when they're flying. Essentially they're asking that people shouldn't look at porn while they're serving coffee, and funnily enough some of the... (Read More)

The BBC in the UK has been interviewing Tim Berners-Lee, the effective inventor of the Internet. The news item is here. He's expressing concern that the Net is being used for rumour (or rumor in America) rather than fact and he'd like it repurposed. Well, sure. But how in blazes are you going to... (Read More)