£15,000 ‘Facebook bursary’ for innovative students

t’s not long before the start of the new academic year. A lot of new students – and probably their parents – will be wondering how to fund the next three or four years of relevant, mind-broadening study.
Help for a select few may be at hand from HSBC. It’s launched a search on Facebook [...]

Should we wave goodbye to anonymity and privacy?

man walks into a village shop. “Morning John,” says the shopkeeper. “You’re into old British motorbikes. I’ve just heard somebody in the next village is selling a 1957 BSA A10. It’s supposed to be in great nick as it’s been kept covered in a barn, It just needs a clean.”
“Hmm,” says the man. “Any [...]

Rise of the OAP – Older, Active Protestor

he Scots have long had a reputation for being a slightly awkward bunch. A new survey claims that older Scots in particular deserve that reputation. The over-50s here (along with their counterparts in Wales) are the most avid campaigners for a range of causes.
The research was commissioned by the insurance provider, RIAS. It found that [...]

Status Update: the Facebook Movie

In the risk-averse world of Hollywood, there are two ways to make a surefire hit: aim your film at boys of 12 or under (blue aliens, Transformers, gross-out comedies, and Toy Story/Shrek sequels look to be doing brisk business in 2010), and second, aim your film at girls of 12 or under. (good-looking vampires, apparently, [...]

Is the Queen a closet techie?

nlikely as it may seem, across the pond the Government of Ontario seems to have discovered an until-now unknown side of the British monarch. She has just been presented with a personalised BlackBerry Bold 9700 because she is “rumoured to be a fan of the Canadian smartphone”.
We’d long wondered what she used to keep [...]

Status update on ‘Facebook: The Movie’

In the risk-averse world of Hollywood, there are two ways to make a surefire hit: aim your film at boys of 12 or under (blue aliens, Transformers, gross-out comedies, and Toy Story/Shrek sequels look to be doing brisk business in 2010), and second, aim your film at girls of 12 or under. (Good-looking vampires, apparently, [...]

Tòrr mòr a bharrachd na bha duine againn a’ sùileachadh

n liuthad sgeulachd a chluinneas sinn mu dheidhinn nan cunnartan a tha an lùib teicneòlas ùr. Gu bheil Facebook a’ cur daoine a-mach air a’ chèile, gu bheil cluicheadaran MP3 ag adhbhrachadh tubaistean raithid, is an leithid. Bidh cuimhne aig feadhainn a bhith a’ cluinntinn mar a dhèanadh sianailean telebhisean naidheachdan duine aineolach leis nach [...]

Backlash against Pakistan’s social media ban

Pakistan’s decision last week to block Facebook, YouTube and hundreds of other internet sites because of an online competition to draw Islam’s Prophet Mohammad has prompted a barrage of criticism in Pakistan’s respected Dawn newspaper.
Any representation of the Holy Prophet is deemed blasphemous by Muslims. Publications of cartoons of the Prophet in Danish newspapers [...]

The social media election that wasn’t

Whatever happened to the Facebook/Twitter election?
This was supposed to be the election decided by social media. So what went wrong?
The answer is: Nothing. The concept of a social media election campaign was pretty ludicrous from the start.
Did anybody seriously believe that a largely disillusioned electorate was somehow going to be galvanised into mass political [...]

The revolution may not be televised but Chavez tweets it

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, who fashioned himself on his verbose friend Fidel Castro and enjoys spending hours haranguing his compatriots, extolling the virtues of socialist revolution and reminiscing about his childhood and his grandmother, was all a-Twitter today after posting his first comment on the 140-character microblogging site:
“Epa que tal? Aparecí como lo dije: a [...]

Rangers fans celebrate with a Top Ten hit

It is a chart success which will have left all those millions of music fans who don’t follow Scottish football scratching their heads in curiosity, writes Allan Laing. Why did an old hit from the Eighties suddenly break into the UK’s official Top Ten yesterday even though it’s rarely played on the radio?
The answer [...]

How a friendly chit-chat has replaced the hard sell

Human beings have been “networking” since rival tribes sat down around the camp fire in African savannah. So why is it that some people seem able to make quite a successful living teaching us how to network?
The answer may well lie in a book about networking called … and Death Came Third!. The [...]

Google’s row with China might suit both sides

Google’s decision to stop censoring searches in China sounds as if the company’s just got fed up with the government and pulled the plug. But it’s far from being that straightforward. There was something which felt rather theatrical about the action which suggests it might all have been part of a quiet deal which is [...]

Facebook topples Google as king of the web … kinda

Is Facebook the new Google?
For the whole of last week Facebook overtook Google to become the most visited website in America according to online intelligence specialist Experian Hitwise. It does illustrate the meteoric rise of the social networking website and also, perhaps, the hype surrounding it.
The figures show Facebook’s market share has risen by 185 [...]

Head of IoD in Scotland tells executives to wake to social media

Until about 18 months ago, a significant number of senior executives were at best indifferent, if not actively hostile, to the use of many new technologies. Social media in particular were dismissed as “time wasting”.
And yet, the Chairman of the Institute of Directors in Scotland will stand up at a meeting in Aberdeen tomorrow [...]

New law threatens pirates but also free speech

The difficulty of reconciling the interests of copyright owners and the rights of internet users has been revealed again in a successful Lib Dem and Tory amendment in the House of Lords to the Digital Economy Bill which would force internet service providers to block access to “online locations” where a “substantial proportion of the [...]

Do you really need a smartphone to join the modern world?

echnology pundits are often quite good at predicting the future, but terrible at timing. They get so excited about the latest advances that they forget that it’s going to take a while before the world catches up with their enthusiasm.
Their current “next big thing” is “location-based services”. Of course this is nothing new, 20 years [...]

Hints for the would-be smartphone buyer

ith falling prices and an increasing number of services taking advantage of smartphone technology, plenty of us are going to be splashing out over the coming months. And not a few people will make expensive mistakes.
If you are tempted by a new smartphone it really is worth doing some homework before you take on a [...]

1985 is back – and this time it’s mobile

here’s a strange feeling of déjà vu about 2010. In a large part of the technology business it could be 1985 all over again. Once more consumers and businesses are confronted by a bewildering array of devices that seem to do much the same thing, but not quite.
In the mid-1980s it was personal computers. Magazines [...]

Despite the hype Google Buzz won’t be killing anything much

Google is like Apple. Whenever it announces anything the world goes mad. Or at least the world’s media goes mad. It must be so galling for other technology companies.
Every launch attracts similar headlines. A few weeks ago the Nexus One smartphone was the potential “iPhone killer”. Google Talk was the “Skype killer”. Google Docs was [...]

Why ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ has come back to life

It wasn’t the most auspicious entry in UK chart history.
Californian rockers Journey,a ragbag of jazzers and Carlos Santana’s old band, limped into our charts at 62 with a track from their sixth album in February 1982. Exactly 28 years to the month later, the same song, Don’t Stop Believin’ has become a [...]