Why Apple’s China concessions will hit its rivals hardest
Make no mistake: Apple will end up eating the higher costs that supplier Foxconn will incur to end excessive overtime and improve working conditions at its plants. But, as we suggested earlier this year, it will be Apple’s rivals that will end up suffering most. Read more
Harman’s AKG K495 NC headphones
Noise-cancelling headphones enable consumers to listen to music without the annoyance of background noise such as the drone of traffic on a busy road or the whine of aircraft engines. The three headphones featured here are the latest entrants in an increasingly crowded market for sophisticated noise-cancelling headphones that satisfy audio enthusiasts.
Financial and ad start-ups win funding
For once it was not shopping and e-commerce that dominated that European VC funding rounds.
In March, financial services were the flavour of the month, with eToro and The Currency Cloud attracting investment. Both of them seek to disrupt the financial services sector by using either social networking or cloud computing to jazz up a staid industry.
Advertising solutions are also finding willing backers, including personalised online ads from MyThings and advertising to wrap around Android apps from StartApp .
Google opens East London Campus
London’s Tech City project got a big boost on Thursday when Google officially opened Campus, its first hub offering start-up technology companies desk space and mentoring.
Opened to great fanfare by George Osborne, chancellor, the seven-storey building will house 100 start-up companies and organisations such as Seedcamp, the technology incubator, and TechHub, the original provider of co-working space in the Shoreditch area. Read more
There are many laws that help us to make sense of the world: the laws of physics; the law of averages, write George Osbourne, the UK finance minister, and Eric Schmidt, Google chairman. However, one of the more significant is Moore’s law, which forecasts that the processing power of the latest computer chips doubles every two years. This prediction has proved to be unerringly accurate over the past 50 years, and means that the pace of technological innovation is accelerating, not slowing nor flatlining.
However, it is not just the pace of technology progress that is accelerating. The role that technology plays in driving job creation and economic growth becomes more important each day.
Box OneCloud has silver lining for app developers
While cloud computing promises to simplify our lives by keeping our information in one readily accessible place online, it fails to deliver when clouds are scattered by users relying on too many different apps and services.
You may have photos spread across Picasa, Flickr, Eye-Fi and Facebook and documents held on different services as well. But Box has announced an enterprise-focused solution on Wednesday with its OneCloud, while Quickoffice is tackling the same problem from a different direction with Connect. Read more
I used to think that each new generation of workers was pretty much like the last one, at least in big ways. We all want more money, more praise, more interesting work and colleagues who are pleasant enough to join for a sandwich at lunchtime.
Yet last week I started to wonder if 20-year-olds might be something different altogether. I had a conversation with a young man who, far from sharing sandwiches with his colleagues, has never even met them. He doesn’t talk to them on the phone either. Instead, Jamie Holmes has spent the past two years interacting with his bosses and with the people he recruits and trains entirely by text message and email.
That makes the sudden rise of Pinterest, a website for collecting and sharing images, an intriguing anomaly. The popularity of the site, which first took off in Iowa – a state better known for its corn than its computer code – has grown rapidly in recent months among mainly female users.
Spring cleaning was in the air for Apple this week as the company announced its plan to pay a dividend and institute a share buyback programme. The announcement had many tech commentators putting themselves in the shoes of Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, to ask: what else could Apple have done with its cash? Read more
This week’s launch of Angry Birds Space has propelled the mobile game’s Finnish developer, Rovio, into the stratosphere, instantly topping app store download charts around the world.
But whereas the original Angry Birds was a viral hit, notching up hundreds of millions of downloads with minimal marketing, this latest update landed in a marketing blitz more akin to a Disney blockbuster than a 99 cents mobile phone app.
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Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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