China needs to be "more forceful" in the way it manages the web. That's according to one top government official, as the country attempts to tighten online controls amidst fears of social unrest. Government officials should also use the web to "guide public opinion and promote positive social values," said Wang Chen, head of the State Information Office -- a newly set up government department to supervise online content. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, Chen also said "All regions ...

A student from the University of Cape Town (UCT), a prominent South African tertiary institution, has won an international innovation award for a wind generator built using components from recycled hard drives. Harmut Jaigu, a master’s student in electrical engineering, won the Student Poster Presentation award at the 2011 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Energy Conversion Congress & Exposition that was held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Jagau’s design reuses the permanent magnets from discarded hard drives to create a ...

Taiwanese Nokia fans will be the first to get their hands on the Lumia 710, the surprisingly agile Windows Phone and digital brother to the Lumia 800. The Lumia 710 is priced at US$322 and ships to Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Russia over the coming week, then globally in early 2012. Why should you care about the Lumia 710? As Nokia puts it, the Lumia 710 is an “affordable Windows Phone experience,” based on the surprisingly awesome Windows Phone 7.5 ...

Billionaire internet investor Sean Parker took the stage in Paris at LeWeb with a simple message for his audience: There are "too many venture capitalists in the world and not enough entrepreneurs". Parker has a CV that would blow the mind of most people. He was co-founder of that great music industry disrupter Napster, and more recently an investor in Facebook and Spotify, among many other things. But don't call Parker an "investor", he finds the term a bit insulting. He ...

The launch of a major new version of Twitter’s service signals one important thing: Jack Dorsey is back. And Jack is in charge. His strength has always been in the "product" and up until now, there's been an obvious void at Twitter. In many ways, it was trying to do everything for everyone -- Evan Williams’ strength was never in product (think “lists”), and temporary boss Dick Costolo was never going to be a visionary when it came to the ...

Fernando Madeira is the co-founder and CEO of Terra, the largest internet company in Latin America. He boasts that the "next Twitter, Google, Facebook" will come from this part of the emerging market world. "We are seeing huge activity in Latin America," he says. "In Latin America we have a special sauce in the people... we love electronics and electronic chips." The stats, presented at the LeWeb conference in Paris, back up what Madeira is saying. There are 90-million broadband connections alone ...

So the "new, new Twitter" has rolled out and there are the lovers and haters. But what does Twitter say about the rollout? Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform for Twitter, said the new Twitter was informed by a philosophy of "simplicity", a strategy to keep it differentiated from the two other major social networks in the Western World, Facebook and Google+. "In a world where Facebook and Google are competing on features -- Twitter wants to focus on being simple. We want ...

Daniel Ek, CEO of online music service Spotify took the stage at LeWeb in Paris to announce 'Spotify Radio' a new app for the service. Ek's announcement so caught the attention of LeWeb attendees that it resulted in an immediate Twitter trending topic. The new radio app will allow users to create their own custom radio stations with the option to skip through an unlimited number of songs. This feature is not yet available on Pandora, Spotify's leading competitor in ...

The web will die says George Colony, the rather insightful boss of Forrester Research -- and here is why. He says that fundamentally the web is a waste and inefficient. It fails to take advantage of the incredible processing power and storage abilities of the powerful gadgets and computers we use. It makes no sense to leave these out of the equation. Rather the best use of the technology at our disposal today is to use both the internet and the ...

Governments are often seen as a nuisance in business, but this is a jaded view. Responsible and engaged governments are able to do amazing things for a country's startup scene. Most countries outside the US want to mirror the success of Silicon Valley, the undisputed king of tech innovation. Nicolas Princen is French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "digital man". He has spoken about the ways the French government is stimulating its local startup scene and "helping startups grow". The internet economy contributes ...