Take a look around your average office and what do you see? Chances are, rather than the office serf toiling away for the capitalist boss, you’ll see him or her pretending to toil whilst furtively "checking" Facebook.In 2007 a widely-reported study found that "233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees 'wasting time' on social networking", equalling over £130million in lost revenues. Like we needed to be told that.It’s hardly surprising that companies around the world ...

Apple plans to launch its next-generation iPhone later this year, The Wall Street Journal has reported.The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the situation," said Apple has placed orders for key components to used in the new version of the iPhone and that it would be thinner and lighter than the iPhone 4.Ahead of every major iPhone launch there is frenzied speculation about what the phone's new features will be. Gearburn offered a few of its own predictions recently.Apple released the ...

Facebook has added a Skype video calling feature in the face of a direct challenge from Google in the social networking arena."We think this is awesome because we're using the best technology that's out there for doing video chat with the best social infrastructure that's out there," said Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.The new Skype feature comes with improved group text chat, which allows for multi-person conversations and a camera icon which can be clicked on for instant one-on-one video calls ...

Twitter is looking to raise another round of private financing, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, quoting "people familiar with the matter". This time the value is US$7billion, almost double of what it was valued at the end of 2010.Clearly there’s still a hunger for tech stocks in the market. We've seen this in the spectacular Wall Street debuts -- though not in the press -- of tech companies like Groupon and Zynga which also filed for their IPOs ...

A “desperate, adolescent narcissism”. That’s the internet’s "defining vice", according to New York Times op ed columnist Ross Douthat. He is not the first to make this observation, and when American politicians accidentally tweet embarrassing photos of themselves (thus demonstrating that, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean you’re not about to make a gruesomely public mistake), the tut-tutting only grows louder.Anthony Weiner’s marriage is presumably taking some strain as a result of his digital dalliances, and the entire ...

Something interesting is happening in Afghanistan. It’s also happening in Kenya. I think that it is proof that it is possible to open the Internet to every developing country in the world. Back in December 2008, a group of individuals in Jalalabad, Afghanistan started working on a project to bring high-speed internet to a village, hospital, university, and an NGO in the city.The group was known as FabLab Jalalabad and they modelled their project on a system which was ...

Desiring something that you want for no reason needs some explaining. Perhaps it is beautiful and honest, doing only what it says. Perhaps it makes your desk look hotter. And it definitely looks hotter to cradle a retro modern soft-touch plastic handset than hold a tiny cellphone to your ear to talk into like a chimp. The Moshi Moshi telephone handsets are a whole new class of cellphone accessory: designed to be bigger, heavier and less function-rich than they thing ...

Many of today’s Technorati veer towards multiple computers and devices at home. Any home network worth shaking a stick at will have some sort of server, whether it is a standalone NAS device, a little firewall powered by Smoothwall, or the somewhat disappointing Windows Home Server. The past few years have seen the rise of a fantastic open source alternative to Windows Home Server, the Amahi Linux Home Server.It provides a set of common features for the home network: ...

On Friday, Memeburn will publish an exclusive one-on-one interview with Matt Mullenweg, named as one of the 25 most influential people on the web as a result of his revolutionary open source web software, WordPress.If you've published a blog or a website, you probably know about WordPress. In fact it powers millions of blogs and commercial websites on the web today. It's estimated that WordPress is used by more than 14% of the one million biggest websites including The New ...

Google has done what few other tech companies have done on this continent. Having 54 countries to scale across isn’t easy. However, in a speech I gave to a delegation of around 30 Associate Product Managers who are exploring leadership positions within Google -- along with Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice-President of Location and Local Services -- I looked at what is Google doing well in Africa (that they should continue) and what the company should be doing better, differently or ...