In the three months from July to September last year, 3.8 million smartphones were shipped to shops in India. In the same three-month period this year, that number grew to 12.8 million smartphones, according to research firm IDC. Indians, it seems, are finally getting into this whole smartphone thing. Year-over-year growth of 229% is nothing to sneeze at.
It’s been a while since Britain could really be called a land of dark satanic mills. These days it’s more office parks and service centers. But some vestiges of Britain’s industrial past remain. Coal-fired power plants generate nearly 30% of Britain’s electricity and are responsible for 1,600 premature deaths every year, according to a new study (pdf) by the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), a non-profit that represents various public-health and environmental groups. That means Britain is home to one in nine of the 18,350 premature deaths caused by coal power across the European Union.
What happens when you let people watch what they want, when they want? Netflix tells us that, given a choice, people consume television shows by “binge-watching,” which is the practice of watching back-to-back episodes until your eyes melt. And binge-watching is generally associated with weekends (paywall), suggesting that people save up for their days off. Yet the BBC, whose iPlayer streaming service offers live as well as on-demand shows to viewers, tells a different story (pdf). In Britain, viewing patterns for the iPlayer’s television shows resemble those for traditional TV-viewing—but with a more gradual climb and delayed peak.
Something strange is happening in the world of smartphone sales. People are buying more and more Windows Phones. Having been written off as a delayed, failed bid by Microsoft to make its presence felt in mobile, with an app store that didn’t even offer Instagram (it does now), the phones made by Nokia, HTC and others with a version of the Windows operating system were hard to take seriously.
Cricket is often accused of being rather dull. Not so if you played Ashes 2013, a video game so bad it makes the sport entertaining even for those who don’t know how it works. Produced by 505 Games in time for the biennial England-Australia bilateral series known as “the Ashes,” the game has achieved what John Walker, a games blogger, says “must be a first in gaming“—being cancelled by its makers after its release.
The Netherlands is one of the most liberal societies in the word, and one that treasures openness. Many people don’t close the curtains in their windows; passersby are simply expected to resist the temptation to look in. But today the Dutch concluded that Google has been doing a lot more than sneaking a harmless peek at citizens’ private lives. The Dutch data protection authority says that Google’s privacy policy is in breach of its data protection laws.
In 2014, Target will set up a tech incubator in Bangalore. The Target Accelerator Program will invest up to $30,000 in one or two companies every year, likely in return for equity but more importantly for first dibs on new products the start-ups make. As Target’s Beth Jacob told TechCrunch, which first reported the story, ”Innovation is core to our culture and strategy and we are always looking for new ideas to enhance the shopping experience of our guests.”
If last year is anything to go by, Americans will spend over $60 billion in the four days from Thanksgiving, this Thursday (Nov. 28), to the end of the weekend. That doesn’t include “cyber Monday,” when merchants put up post-Thanksgiving deals online; Adobe reckons Americans will spend another $2.3 billion on that day this year, up 15% from last year.
Industry reports from investment banks are turgid things, rarely fit for human consumption. A recent report about big data from boutique bank GP Bullhound, however, contains this gem.
“Money transfer is actually incredibly boring. Nobody cares about money transfer,” says Taavet Hinrikus, the co-founder of TransferWise, a—you guessed it—money-transfer company.
It remains a mystery why some of the fanciest hotels in the world, which offer everything from free designer toiletries to chocolates on your pillow, still charge a separate—and often extortionate—fee to connect to the internet. If you’re in a foreign country, you often have no choice but to pay the hotel; using mobile internet with data roaming is pricier still.
Airtel, one of the world’s largest mobile networks, today announced a new way for its subscribers to get online in the 17 African countries in which it operates. Called Opera Web Pass, the service may not seem very radical: A user starts up the Opera Mini web browser in her phone and chooses from a list of subscriptions. But instead of picking how many gigabytes of data to buy, her options include a two-hour internet connection, or access just to Facebook.
When the US Air Force designated six “cyber tools” as “weapons” in April this year, Quartz asked, “What the heck is a cyber-weapon, anyway?” The answer, we found, was vague: Any computer program meant to inflict damage could qualify. These could be developed by military, government, commercial entities or lone actors.
Robots are already doing everything from making coffee to high-frequency trading. Now they’re after dogs’ jobs as well. A prototype robot that herds cows is being tested by researchers at the University of Sydney, and early results show that the four-wheeled fellow does a better job than his four-legged competition.
Brand.com knows the value of brands. That’s why it spent a US dollar amount reported to be in the six figures to change its own name from “Reputation Changer” to “Brand.com.” It expects its clients will spend just as happily to safeguard their online reputations.
The numbers: Business as usual. Tencent, one of China’s biggest internet companies, reported third-quarter profits of 3.87 billion yuan ($630 million), up 5.3% on the last quarter and 19.6% on last year. That’s roughly in line with growth from the previous quarter, but not quite enough to satisfy analysts, who expected profits of 3.94 billion yuan. Total revenues stood at 15.53 billion yuan, up one-third from the same quarter a year ago.
In July, the Scanadu Scout raised $1.37 million, way above its $100,000 target, on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. In the process, it became the highest-funded campaign in the site’s history. What made it so attractive is was its simplicity—and the fact that nothing like it exists.
The standard narrative about mobile in the poor world is one of ever-cheaper phones for more and more people. This is broadly true. But there are rich people in the poor world too, and for them, the economics of phones are reversed.
On Jan. 29, 2014, you will be able to navigate over to your friendly neighborhood domain registrar and register a website on any (or indeed all) of nine new top-level domains (TLDs). So far, the English-language internet has gotten along just fine with a mere 22 TLDs, the best known of which are .com, .net and .org. Last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which runs the internet’s addressing system, approved the first nine of some 1,400 new TLDs that are set to go live in the coming months. These are: .camera, .clothing, .lighting, .singles, .guru, .holdings, .equipment, .voyage, and .ventures.
Micromax, the Indian cellphone-maker that sold its first phone in 2008 and now commands nearly a quarter of the domestic market, behind only Samsung, said today it will start assembling its phones in India. Just two weeks ago, Micromax announced it would start selling its phones in Russia and Romania with a view to entering mainland Europe. That prompted some (okay, maybe just Quartz) to call Micromax the Xiaomi of India: An aspiring Asian giant beating the big boys on home turf before aiming for the world, thanks to cheap phones and smart marketing.
It’s already the second-biggest toy maker in the world, after Mattel. Now Lego wants more. In 2014, it will go from having one global headquarters, in Denmark, to five. The company is expanding its offices in London, Singapore, Shanghai and Enfield, Connecticut to form a network of global hubs.
It’s been a strange couple of weeks for Germany. After revelations last week that American spies had been tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, news emerged over the weekend that Germany was pushing to have data protection rules included in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a trade deal between the United States and the European Union. Even the most ardent supporters of strict data protection rules realize that this is a bad idea: At best it would lead to a watery compromise that leaves everybody unhappy. At worst it could derail the talks altogether.
First they came for the librarians. Soon after the passing of the US Patriot Act in 2001, FBI agents bearing national security letters began visiting librarians. These letters compel recipients to turn over information—such as the reading and internet-surfing records of a library-user—and can be issued without a court order. Moreover, the letters bar anyone who gets one from telling anybody else about it, except for lawyers or people needed to comply with the letter’s requirements. That means it’s hard to argue with one and impossible to start a debate about it.
This morning, India successfully launched a rocket to Mars. Christened Mangalyaan, or Mars vehicle, the rocket is part of a scientific mission that cost a grand total of Rs 4.5 billion, or $73 million. In terms of the space business, that’s a bargain. By contrast, NASA’s next Mars mission will cost $671 million and do the same thing as India’s craft: orbit the red planet collecting data.
