Google's chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about the role of technology in the "world we live in today" and how it will shape the societies of the future. Schmidt, for example, noted that the number of people who use smartphones is still very small, but "think how amazing the web is today with just 2-billion people" and what will happen when another 5-billion get online. The future according to Eric Schmidt In ...

Across Africa there is a vibrant culture of people creating things. Hardware products. It’s rarely glamorous as our inventors and micro-entrepreneurs innovate on products due to necessity -- there simply aren’t enough jobs and they need to feed their families. Regardless of the reasons why they do it, what this has created is a culture of innovation. When you have a problem in Africa, there isn’t another option, you either improvise, adapt and overcome, or you die. You don’t give up, you ...

For Joe Public, trying to determine the best service to successfully promote his small business, taking a highly detailed look at the different capabilities of specialised marketing software applications and choosing between them can be difficult. So what is he to do? There are two main roads to take: either one opts for email marketing software or marketing automation software, though many people mistakenly think that these terms are interchangeable or are just fancy ways of describing the same thing. As ...

“Ideas worth spreading”. That’s the motto of the TED conferences. But what kind of ideas will be worth spreading in 2023, for instance? Ridley Scott offers a hint of what might on offer in a promotional video for his new film Prometheus. The film is intended as a prequel to his 1979 hit Alien. The plot reportedly follows the crew of the spaceship Prometheus in the year 2085, as they explore an advanced alien civilisation in search ...

It seems that you can’t get away from advertising on Twitter -- even if you’re using its mobile app. Twitter announced yesterday that their promoted tweets will soon start appearing on their Android and Apple apps. Promoted trends and promoted tweets have appeared in search on the Twitter apps and mobile web for some time, and Twitter’s mobile site has included promoted accounts and promoted tweets in timeline for the last few months, but Android and iPhone users have had advertising-free ...

New government-enforced regulations may force Chinese internet giant Sina to change the way it makes money. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is worried about an upcoming government edict that will force it to verify the identities of users on its immensely popular microblogging service Sina Weibo. The Journal reports that Sina posted a fourth quarter profit but that it had already noticed weaker advertising revenue in the current financial quarter. The government’s demand that Weibo accounts ...

We all know social media plays an important role in the way businesses communicate with each other and the general public. That's old hat by now. It could, however, also play an increasingly important role in the way businesses deal with a crisis. Tech research company Gartner reckons that by 2015, 75% of organisations with a roadmap for continuing operations under adverse conditions will include public social media services as part of their strategies for communicating in the midst of ...

Bill Ford Jr., the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company used his keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last night to lobby for a stronger cooperation between mobile tech companies and the auto industry to avoid "global gridlock." Given numerous predictions that we will see global car ownership go from about one-billion to four-billion by 2050, Ford believes that unless these cars get smarter and become an integrated part of a larger and Internet-connected transportation system, ...

There was a time when you needed a credit card to shop online. Then a few pioneers engaged in some technical wizardry and brought out products that allowed you do use your debit card. But what if you have neither? A solution that allows for people who don’t have either to shop online would be particularly useful in emerging market economies, where large numbers of people might not have credit cards. Triloq Payment Services claims to have developed precisely such ...

Yahoo! claims that Facebook is infringing on between 10 and 20 of its patents -- and if the social networking site doesn’t pay licensing fees, it will pursue legal action. According to a report by the New York Times, Yahoo! accused Facebook of using its patented technology without paying license fees in areas such as advertising, messaging, social networking and personalised webpages. Some of the technology is reportedly used in Facebook’s news feed and privacy settings. “Yahoo has a responsibility to its ...