Web & AI Analyst
Richard MacManus The next version of the iPhone is expected to be announced in September. Already there’s been a lot of speculation about new Augmented Reality (AR) features in iPhone 8. AR is when you overlay 3D objects and information onto the physical world. It’s not like this is a new technology in smartphones. Last year’s biggest … Read more
Last week I finished the second draft of my next science fiction novel. My goal now is to find a publisher for it, which probably means I’ll need to find a literary agent. If I don’t manage to do either, then I’ll go down the self-publishing route again. But I’d really like to get my … Read more
Live streaming of sports over the Internet is the future of sports broadcasting. But when it comes to our most popular sport, rugby, we’re beholden to a cable TV company: Sky. It’s not as if Sky hasn’t joined the online streaming revolution. It has no fewer than three live streaming apps in the iTunes App … Read more
I’ve just spent an inordinate amount of time creating an archive of all my past online writing work, in particular of the tech blog I founded ReadWriteWeb. I thought I’d outline my reasons for doing this, and why I ended up relying heavily on the Internet Archive instead of the original website sources. With ReadWriteWeb … Read more
Every day, more of our lives seem to fall under the control of computer algorithms. Think about the influence that Facebook’s news feed has on your daily life, for example. Do you have any idea why you see one friend’s posts a lot, but not another’s? It’s impossible to know for sure, because Mark Zuckerberg … Read more
The Apple Watch was supposed to reinvigorate the ailing watch market. Yet two years after its release, many of us still don’t wear a watch. For Apple, the product is a marginal revenue generator. While Apple doesn’t reveal sales figures, research firm Canalys estimated that 11.9 million Apple Watches were sold in 2016. That apparently … Read more
Last week I wrote about the bull market in bitcoin and other digital currencies. But in fact it’s blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, that has the highest upside for the global economy. A blockchain is a distributed database that is used to securely record transactions and other types of data. For the past eight years, … Read more
Yesterday I wrote a post about blogrolls. I published it on AltPlatform, the new tech blog I recently started with my old ReadWriteWeb friend Emre Sokullu. It was the second post in a series I’m doing about IndieWebifying my personal website. I got some great responses, which I’m going to discuss in this post. Firstly, … Read more
Earlier this month, the price of bitcoin went over US$3,000 for the first time in its eight-year history. The pioneering cryptocurrency has risen rapidly over the past few months, due to high demand in China plus Japan recently allowing bitcoin to be a legal means of payment. It’s price is still volatile (as I write this, it’s … Read more
Imagine being able to post a Facebook update by simply thinking it. Or starting a chat with your friend using mind-to-mind communication. While those two scenarios sound more like science fiction than reality, several big-name companies are trying to make it happen. Facebook, Elon Musk’s Neuralink and a well-funded startup called Kernel are all working … Read more
Every year, we’re used to computers getting faster and more powerful. If you buy a new computer every two years for the same price (let’s say $2000), you’ll basically get double the power each time. This phenomenon is known as Moore’s Law, even though it isn’t a scientific law at all. It’s simply a trend, … Read more
Autonomous cars is one of those tech topics we all love to speculate about. There’s little doubt that autonomous cars will rule our roads at some point in the future, but the question is when. Elon Musk claims his company Tesla will have a level 4 autonomous car ready by 2019. There are five levels, so … Read more
Earlier this month, the second annual Techweek was held in 24 locations across New Zealand. The week-long celebration of local innovation featured 287 events, from Whangarei to Dunedin. It was a big step up from last year’s Techweek, which covered Auckland only. Originally created by Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), Techweek was subsequently … Read more
Virtual Reality has had its fair share of hype over the past couple of years, not least from the entertainment industry. There’s been speculation about VR movies from the likes of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, and excitement about watching an NBA game or a Beyonce concert using the magic of VR. These are very … Read more
Former IBM and Siemens executive Steffen Schaefer, from Germany, has worked on mobile internet and sensor networks – what today is called the Internet of Things – since 2000. He was involved with IBM’s global Smart Cities initiative from the outset. But he says that many big tech companies have since scaled back, or refocused, their … Read more