Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) is that blockbuster movie we all waited years to go see, it was the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Batman of the tech world. Mark Zuckerberg, the James Cameron who took eight years to create his masterpiece just waiting for the world to be ready for it. Now we have it. Facebook has filed and all over the internet everyone is talking about the Zuck and his US$100-billion company. Interesting fact, when the ...

Foursquare checked into our lives in 2009 and has rapidly grown its user base to 15-million, tripling in just over a year. And now the US-based service reports that just over half of its users reside overseas, largely in emerging market countries. The social network is a piece of innovation that has won the hearts and minds of the fickle early-adopter crowd. It’s an online tool that plays in the rather hot and bubbly SoLoMo space. It’s a mobile-social network designed ...

Microsoft has posted its take on Google’s privacy policies, somewhat ironically, on YouTube. The campaign centres around the software giant’s bid to sell itself as a viable alternative for any Google users who find themselves frustrated by the search titan’s knack for delving into their private emails and chat messages in order to sell targeted advertising. The video features "the Gmail man" rifling through people's private post before delivering it. According to leading tech news site TheNextWeb, the video was ...

More and more people get smartphones every day. It’s only natural, therefore, that they should play an increasingly important role in the mobile health sector. In fact, high-tech analysis firm Juniper Research reckons that some 3-million smartphone users will be using their devices for remote health monitoring by 2016. The monitoring of cardiac outpatients is currently leading the field, the research firm says, largely driven by reimbursement from US insurers. The management of other chronic diseases, such as diabetes and ...

After reading one too many ignorant articles and tweets about how personal financial management startup 22Seven must be safe because Yodlee is safe and so on -- I cracked. I banged out a bunch of tweets in quick succession with the hash tag combination #22Seven my #2c. The response was interesting, ranging from "love your work" to respected tech journalist Simon Dingle’s "How do you know I'm not a computer scientist? And why does that matter? Do you have to ...

The echo-chamber has flooded the web with all the details following the filing of Facebook’s IPO. It will raise $5 billion in the listing. It will be valued somewhere between US$75-billion and US$100-billion. We even know that the graffiti artist who took stock instead of cash for painting the walls at Facebook’s first HQ is now worth US$200 million. But what’s behind the numbers and how do they compare? 1. We're all going mobile Out of 825-million monthly users on Facebook, more ...

The media had been speculating on Facebook's IPO for months. On the day the social giant announced it would be going public, there was a veritable frenzy of reports. The tech world has only seen that kind of frenzy for an IPO once before: Google's back in 2004. I remember vividly the day Google filed its "red herring" with the SEC in preparation for its IPO. I was out at lunch when our bureau chief Richard Waters, called me, "They've ...

Online retail giant Amazon is taking its first tentative steps into the Indian market, with the official launch of Junglee -- an online shopping aggregator. According to Amazopia (which bills itself as "the unofficial Amazon blog"), federal regulations stopped Amazon from entering the Indian market under its own branding. The laws are reportedly designed to "restrict foreign companies on multi-brand retail in the country". So while the site looks like Amazon and feels like Amazon, the only mention of the ...

SOPA is on ice for now -- some say dead -- but we need to remain vigilant. It’s difficult however, when governments create new laws that threaten internet freedom of speech and privacy, in secret under the guise of trade agreements. There’s a lot of discussion around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). While some hail it as the next SOPA, others see it as less insidious. Much of the anti ACTA histrionics are actually ripple effects from the interpretation of earlier ...

Last year, it looked like augmented reality apps were on the cusp of becoming mainstream as numerous ad campaigns and mobile apps started to use the technology. The same goes for QR codes. For the most part though, neither has been able to go beyond being a gimmick yet and, according to a new study by youth marketing and research firm Ypulse, even the members of the tech-savvy Millennial generation either have no idea what QR codes and augmented reality ...