Facebook in talks to buy stake in Jio

Facebook has been in talks to buy a stake in Mukesh Ambani’s digital operation Reliance Jio to try to expand its presence in the Indian digital market with a preliminary deal for a 10 per cent share. Google also has been engaging in talks with Reliance Jio, after Microsoft last year announced plans to work…

Way forward for 5G networks

A couple of months ago, the heads from 18 small British telecoms companies met at a London bank to discuss investment, strategy, and mergers. In the meeting, they were asked if they thought the Chinese could eavesdrop through back doors in Huawei equipment all 18 hands went up. One of the bankers then asked, if…

Face scans mandatory for new mobile phone users in China

  A regulation announced in September 2019, was due to come into effect on Sunday when all people in China are required to have their faces scanned when registering new mobile phone services, as the authorities seek to verify the identities of hundreds of millions of internet users. China has for years been trying to…

Social-media influencers income soars

The Average price of a sponsored photo on Instagram has leaped from £104 ($134) t0 £1, 276 ($1, 6742 in 2019. Brands are willing to pay more to sponsor posts, videos, stories and blogs too. “Digital marketing is the equivalent of word of mouth but there will always be a mix between that and traditional…

Google makes fundamental changes by introducing Bert

Google, the world’s most popular search engine,  is adopting artificial intelligence in its ranking algorithm. The change which Google explains as the most significant revision in at least five year, uses a new form of language analysis to understand users’ queries better and will affect its responses to one in `10 searches , according to…

Will Super-intelligent robots enslave humanity?

Alarms already sounded by Bill Gates, late Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk,  about artificial intelligence and how one day super-intelligent robots  will one day wipe out or enslave humanity. Superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just human relationships and jobs but civilisation itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as…

Are you one of the two million people who uses emoji every hour

  Gretchen McCulloch, a Canadian linguist, making sense of  the ways we communicate online “ how internet is making us  more nuanced and inventive writers”,  in her latest book she writes “ because of internet, through a revolutionary period in linguistic history, where writing quickly, within character limits and deploying ever-changing internet slang, is enriching…

Our extreme behavior with social media

Twitter and Instagram was used to hurl racist abuse at Paul Pogba, the Manchester United midfielder. Team-mates rallied to his defence, criticised social media companies who inturn gave their usual excuses that they were monitoring the situation banning those who participated in the abuse, investing in new tools to avoid such situations. The Twittering Machine…

Battle of the tech titans: Apple and Facebook over data privacy

Facebook is shutting down an app that paid $20 a month to people aged between 13 and 35 for allowing it to collect data on their iPhones, which according to Apple breached its privacy policies. The “ Facebook Research” app enabled the social network to monitor a user’s web and phone activity, including how they…