Today’s Tech Sightings: Google’s Internet Balloons Will Provide Connectivity to All of Sri Lanka Google’s Project Loon and the government of Sri Lanka have just signed an agreement to provide connectivity to the entire country. The island’s IT Minister, Mangala Samaraweera, said the project — using helium balloons to provide Internet access — will connect […]
Google Takes on Sri Lanka; Home Robots; Windows 10; Hammertoss
Posted July 29th, 2015 at 1:07 pm (UTC-5)
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Lighting Rural Africa; AI; IoT; Windows 10; App Store Vulnerability
Posted July 28th, 2015 at 3:02 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: A Laptop-Sized Solar Panel Is Lighting Rural Africa M-Kopa, a Nairobi-based provider of solar-lighting systems, is making affordable solar panels to power homes that have no access to Kenya’s electrical grid. The panel is the size of a laptop, with a battery that generates about 8 watts of energy. Hawking, Musk, Wozniak Call […]
Can Digital Knowledge Be Preserved?
Posted July 24th, 2015 at 3:01 pm (UTC-5)
Two hundred years into the future, descendants of a humanity struck by an unknown catastrophe scavenge for scraps of knowledge that could hold the key to restoring their ancestors’ lost digital past. This is the story of Jonesbridge: Echoes of Hinterland – the first in a fictional trilogy that offers a “portrait of a society […]
Three-D Printing; App Fraud; Asia Eyes US Gaming Market
Posted July 23rd, 2015 at 3:00 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: India Needs China’s 3-D Printing Construction Technology Now Building a house in India takes about six months, on average. But recently, a Chinese company put together a 3-D-printed house in a matter of three hours. Writer Abhimanyu Ghoshal argues that India could use this technology to pare down the time it needs […]
Bionic Eyes; Schooling Vietnam; Android Malware; Google Maps
Posted July 22nd, 2015 at 3:04 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: World First Bionic Eye Gives Hope to Millions A British pensioner suffering from macular degeneration has become the world’s first person to be fitted with a bionic eye. The ground-breaking operation gave Ray Flynn, an electronic implant that works with a camera attached to his glasses to send video feeds to healthy […]
Asia Mobile Growth; Toshiba Crisis; Twitter, Digital Attack Map
Posted July 21st, 2015 at 3:50 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: APAC to Reach Two Billion Unique Smartphone Users by 2019 A new Forrester report said the Asia-Pacific region will have two billion unique smartphone users by 2019, accounting for 83 percent of the total unique mobile subscriber base. The number of smartphones in the region passed one billion last year. Toshiba CEO […]
Biometrics Have Promise, But Raise Privacy, Security Questions
Posted July 17th, 2015 at 4:02 pm (UTC-5)
More companies are slowly adopting biometrics, a technology sometimes seen as “the” answer to a crumbling cybersecurity regime that has fallen prey to hackers. But the collection of biometric data is raising all kinds of questions about privacy and security. MasterCard, the latest firm to dip its toes into the waters of biometrics, is developing […]
Poverty & the Internet; Adobe Flash; Hacking Team Domino Effect
Posted July 15th, 2015 at 3:10 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: Poverty, More Than Geography, Determines Who Gets Online in America A new map of the digital divide in the United States, released by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, reveals that 80 percent to 90 percent of households in the most affluent sectors are connected to the Internet, while the percentage […]
Mozilla Blocks Flash; Nadella’s Microsoft; Google’s Photo Mishaps
Posted July 14th, 2015 at 3:09 pm (UTC-5)
Today’s Tech Sightings: Mozilla Blocks Flash Player on Firefox Mozilla has blocked all versions of Adobe Flash Player in its Firefox browser due to its vulnerability to attack. Last week’s breach of the Italian company Hacking Team was made possible by a Flash Player bug that hackers exploited. While Adobe issued a patch, there appear […]