Leo Mirani

The precise location of the boundary between art and science has been in dispute for as long as there have been arts and sciences. With the rise of computer science as a mainstream vocation, the debate has taken on new life. In 2003, Paul Graham, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, argued that “of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.” Earlier this year Vikram Chandra, a novelist and sometime programmer, investigated the issue at length in his book Geek Sublime, concluding that coding is not, in fact, akin to poetry.

One hundred is a deceptive number. In the rich world, mobile phone penetration, measured by the number of active SIM cards, exceeds 100%. That would imply that not only does every man, woman, and child have a mobile phone, but that some of them have two. In fact, the real rate of penetration, even in the developed world, is closer to 80%.

For anyone following the Paris Motor Show, one thing is clear: Automakers are taking the connected car seriously.

In the small Japanese town of Anan, in 1993, Shuji Nakamura, an employee at Nichia Corporation, invented the blue light-emitting-diode (LED), which today lights up homes, offices, billboard and streets across the world. This morning Nakamura, along with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

It is hard to overstate the impact of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo on Ferrari. In his time as chairman of the company, the famously stylish Montezemolo oversaw eight Formula 1 constructors’ world championships, and took the consumer brand from one that made what one analyst calls “a range of not very special cars in the late 1980s to the preeminent super-sportscar manufacturer of the decade.”

When Facebook executives meet potential advertisers, their biggest selling point is that the company knows whom it’s advertising to. In contrast to the wilds of the web, the proposition goes, Facebook users sign in to the service and make themselves known. Match their data with third parties—data brokers who provide loyalty card spending, for instance—and you have a fairly good idea of whether your ad has been effective. If user x saw ad y and made a purchase, there’s the return on investment. (Facebook stresses that these data are anonymised and the data are analysed only in aggregate.)

This item has been corrected.

The State Duma, Russia’s lower legislative house, was today supposed to discuss a bill that would impose restrictions on the way Skype and other online telephony services operate. Instead, they postponed it to October, following reports in the Russian press that the government wanted to ban Skype and the like altogether, reports ITAR-TASS, the state news agency.

There are some 10 billion internet-connected devices in the world today. These include phones, computers, cars, and the assorted grab-bag of devices that fall under the rubric of the “internet of things” (IoT). By 2050, there will be over 100 billion internet-connected devices. The vast majority of those will be “things”: lightbulbs, doorknobs, coffee machines, and, yes, fridges.

Remember the old days, when Google sincerely thought that Google+ was the future of Google? That future is no more. As of this month, Google no longer automatically creates a Google+ account for new users to Gmail.

If you look at it in terms of design, either Facebook is turning into Twitter or Twitter is turning into Facebook. But by almost every other metric, the two companies remain entirely unlike each other.

In the West, where mobile operators sell phones alongside service contracts, the proposition to customers goes something like this: Buy your talktime, texts, and data from us, and in return we will give you a free—or heavily subsidized—smartphone.

All modern tech companies have privacy policies. Most of them are unreadable, and remain unread. Apple, on the other hand, is drawing attention to its new policy, updated yesterday to reflect the new iOS operating system. The headline news from its latest update is that the company has locked itself out of your device:

In most parts of the world, Samsung smartphones rules the market by virtue of their ubiquity, affordability, and variety. Not South Africa. For the fourth year in a row, the most popular phone in South Africa is the BlackBerry 8520 Curve, released in 2009.

Mail.ru, Russia’s most popular email provider, this morning announced that it has paid $1.47 billion for the 48% that it did not already own of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. Mail.ru already owns Odnoklassniki, the second-most popular network. It’s as if Gmail (if it were an independent company) were to buy Facebook.

In August, a widely reported report from comScore, a measurement firm, concluded that the majority of smartphone users in the United States download precisely zero apps in any given month.

This morning, London’s entire transport network took a baby step into the future. Travelers can now tap in and out of the network by waving a credit or debit card equipped with near field communication (NFC) technology—the same used by Apple to enable payments in its new iPhones. Barclays has also launched a wristband that lets commuters through the turnstiles simply by waving their hands.

Britain woke to the news this morning that Phones 4u, a third-party retailer that sold mobile phones, mobile contracts, and SIM cards, had gone into administration (effectively, declared bankruptcy), after EE, the last big carrier in Britain that still had contracts with the retailer, decided not to renew them. EE—a joint venture in the UK between T-Mobile and Orange—follows Vodafone, O2 and Three, the country’s other big operators, in withdrawing from Phones 4u. Some 5,600 jobs at 550 Phones 4u stores depend on what happens next.

China is the world’s biggest smartphone market. Google dominates that market, with nearly 85% of smartphones running a version of its Android operating system. Yet Google receives little benefit from its immense success there. Google Play, the company’s store for apps and more, does not work in China thanks to several diverse and ad hoc bans on Google’s services. And many device-makers either alter Android so much as to render it unrecognisable or delight in being able to break free of Google’s strict rules and offer their own app stores.

Here’s the most important thing you can do this weekend: Turn on the television.

Wi-Fi, that thing we only notice when it doesn’t work, is having a bit of a moment. Earlier this week, Apple announced that its new iPhone will be able to use Wi-Fi to connect calls, something that ought to help if you’re in an area with lousy cell coverage. The next day, America’s T-Mobile announced that all new smartphones it sells will be able to use Wi-Fi to make calls.

The gaming industry is a lot like Hollywood, with its inexhaustible supply of X-Men, Spidermen, and Batmen. As in the movies, endless versions of game franchises dominate the top-seller lists. The first Call of Duty game, for example, was released in 2003. More than a dozen sequels later, it remains one of the most popular first-person shooter games in existence. The fifth edition of Grand Theft Auto, released late last year, is the most successful game in history. And World of Warcraft, derived from a desktop computer title released in 1994, remains hugely influential. Heck, even old Mario is still around in some form or the other. These things can run and run.

The new phone is bigger. Heck, it’s “bigger than bigger,” boast the marketing folks at Cupertino. They are talking about the size of the device, but they may as well have been talking about the bill Apple must pay to produce the thing. By keeping the off-contract retail price for the base model at $649, but giving customers more iPhone for their money, Apple will make less per unit than on any phone it has produced in the past.

Last month, Google’s top executive in India forecast that Indians would outnumber Americans on the internet by the end of the year. Signs of India’s long-pending explosion in internet users have been visible throughout this year. The smartphone market is growing by over 10% a quarter, according to IDC. India alone signed up more new mobile subscribers in the first quarter of this year than all of Africa did.