Leo Mirani

South Africa’s—and indeed Africa’s—biggest mobile operator, MTN, this month released the “Steppa,” an Android phone for 499 South African rand. At present exchange rates that is a few cents over $44, and is “unlocked,” meaning the purchaser doesn’t have to buy a mobile contract. It comes with full 3G and it’s still more than $50 cheaper than Nokia’s much-hyped Asha 501, which uses an in-house operating system and operates on the slower 2G network.

Government servants are hardly the best paid employees in the world, even if they are spies. But the older ones do have pensions of the sort most young people could never imagine. So why would a 30-year veteran of Britain’s secret service, with a “gold-plated” pension to look forward to, leave his position as deputy director for cyber defense operations at GCHQ (The Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s equivalent to the US’s National Security Agency) for a start-up with no history and no security?

Note: This article was first posted on Jan. 30. On Feb. 4 Microsoft announced that Nadella is indeed its new CEO.

With the possible exception of Pou, every one of the 10 most downloaded apps worldwide, when you include downloads on both Apple and Android devices, is a game. (Pou is a virtual pet, which is not strictly a game, but it’s also not not a game, depending on how you look at it.)

This is what 21st century globalization looks like: Mxit, an African company has just announced its intention to enter the Indian market, taking on established players from the US and newer contenders from China and Japan. Mxit makes a popular mobile messaging app and claims 7.4 million monthly active users, with just under a million of those outside South Africa. Some 35 million Indians use WhatsApp and 10 million use the Japanese app Line. China’s WeChat doesn’t disclose country figures but it also appears to be popular based on anecdotal evidence.

In 2013, the world’s phone manufacturers shipped (as opposed to sold) just over a billion smartphones according to IDC. Strategy Analytics, a competing research firm, puts the number for smartphones slightly lower at 990 million. Either way, what’s interesting isn’t the nice round ten-digit number—it’s the suggestion that the big manufacturers at the top are running out of road.

This item has been corrected.

Hundreds of new top-level domain names (the last bit of a web address, like .com) will hit the web this year. Of nearly 2,000 proposed domains, 101 belong to Google, one of the largest single applicants. That’s odd, for Google has worked hard to make domain names as irrelevant as possible.

The buildings in the video above do not exist. And until a few years ago, neither would the camera angles they were filmed from.

Connected cars have a problem—most of the things that they are supposed to enable, like browsing Facebook while you roar down the autobahn—are illegal. And the ways they were supposed to enable this—for example, touch screens—are disliked by drivers, who still prefer good old-fashioned knobs. Whoever can solve these design challenges without increasing roadway deaths or cheesing off purchasers of new cars could transform how we interact not only with cars, but also everything else in our environment that might benefit from a less obtrusive interface.

Nintendo thought it might sell 9 million units of its Wii U gaming console and make as much as ¥100 billion ($958 million) in operating income in the financial year ending Mar. 31. 2014. Market-watchers knew this was going to be hard. By the middle of the year, it had sold fewer than half a million. It comes as little surprise, then, that Nintendo has finally woken up to its excessive optimism, slashing its sales forecast to 2.8 million consoles and operating income to a loss of ¥35 billion (paywall).

The short answer: India will be, after China, the single largest market for smartphone sales in 2014, according to a recent forecast.

What does a nearly six-century-old private school that charges $54,000 a year in tuition do when confronted with start-ups with bright ideas about how education should work? If you’re Eton College, alma mater to much of the British establishment including the serving prime minister and the mayor of London, you work with them. 

Nigeria doesn’t have the best reputation online, thanks to years of fraudulent emails that claim to come from assorted princes, ambassadors and kings. Since the emails aren’t really fooling people anymore, scamsters have developed a new ploy: fooling their countrymen on social media. Fraudsters have set up at least 16 Facebook accounts and 24 Twitter accounts in the name of Patience Jonathan, wife of president Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian newspaper Punch reports.

Russia and the former Soviet states at its periphery have remained steadfastly immune to the charms of Facebook.  The American social network figures nowhere in a list of top 10 websites by the number of unique users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus or the Central Asian ‘Stans. Instead, Russians and their neighbors prefer VKontakte, a home-grown social network that, in addition to connecting friends and groups, also functions as a dating site and offers free streaming movies and music, much of it pirated. VKontakte has over 100 million active users on the Russian internet, or RuNet.

This week, the City of Westminster, one of London’s local councils, will start embedding the first of 3,000 sensors into the streets. They will be in the ground by the end of March, making London the world’s first major city to adopt the long-heralded “smart parking” revolution.

Facebook just acquired an obscure company in India with this sole purpose in mind: Encouraging data-poor people—or in other words, most of its customers in emerging markets—to spend as much time on Facebook as possible by removing the infrastructural barriers to hanging out online. The company, Little Eye Labs, makes tools that help Android app-makers monitor and improve the performance of their apps by keeping an eye on how much data, power, memory and disk space the apps are using. It can be immensely useful for developers trying to make their apps as lightweight and easy on the system as possible, and it was acquired to do the same for Facebook’s own Android apps, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

This has been a big week for smartwatches, especially here on Quartz. So far we’ve already published four pieces on the putative next big thing. Much of that was linked to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the industry’s annual jamboree for new products, during which smartwatch pioneers Pebble announced an app store. But if past experience is anything to go by, 2014 will not be the year of smartwatches and face computers. Instead, wearables such as watches will probably slink into the background after the CES-spurred hype dies down.

DUBLIN—The world’s tech companies are coming to Dublin, as the Irish prime minister and his various trade representatives will tell you. Yet every morning, the man in charge of overseeing how these companies use our data cycles to Heuston station, takes a 50-minute train ride out of Dublin, and walks the last five minutes to his office next to a convenience store in Portarlington, a town of some 7,500 people in the Irish midlands.

The great rush for smartphones and tablets in the mature markets of the western world is over.

The numbers: Gloomy. Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC managed to avoid a second straight quarter of losses with the sale of its stake in Beats Audio, a headphone maker. The $85 million from the sale helped HTC post a net profit of $10 million, an improvement over last quarter’s $100 million loss, but a far cry from its $34 million profit in the same quarter last year.

The headline of this article has been corrected to make clear that Chromebooks only outsold Macbooks to commercial buyers.

Expect a lot of hype this coming year about the “connected car.” At the Consumer Electronics Show, the industry’s main event, which starts on Jan. 7 in Las Vegas, the big car firms are all due to show off how their cars are taking advantage of internet access, and Google and Audi will announce that they’re working together on an in-car entertainment and information system based on Google’s Android operating system.

This has been a particularly rich year for internet hoaxes, but no less rich for the hoax’s less malicious but equally damaging cousin: the inaccurate report that goes viral on social media before the accurate version has a chance to catch up. And so it’s apt that this year’s last “oh, that’s not exactly true” story (or maybe not the last—tomorrow is another day, after all) is about social media: The “Facebook is dead and buried” story, which was retweeted and rewritten with much enthusiasm.