Legally blind since age 18, my father missed out on the first digital revolution. “Is it ‘Electra?’” my father asks, leaning in close to the Amazon Echo my mother has just installed. Leaning in close is his trademark maneuver: Dad has been legally blind since age 18, the result of a horrible car crash in […]

Teenagers today have unprecedented access to technology, and yet many report that they’ve never been so bored. There is a notion among older people that teens, with their smartphones and unlimited internet access, never experience boredom. CNN and other media outlets have repeatedly declared that smartphones have killed boredom as we know it. “Today, we […]

When patients connect online, they often share information that reveals how treatments work in the real world. When Allison Ruddick was diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer in October 2014, she turned to the world of hashtags. After her initial diagnosis it wasn’t clear if the cancer had metastasized, so she was in for a […]

If they make it through regulatory approvals and meet financial projections, the new satellites will create new industries A new era of global communications is on the launch pad. Eleven companies have applied to the Federal Communications Commission and other telecom regulators to beam broadband internet from clouds of more than 15,000 new satellites. Not […]

Tim Berners-Lee: ‘What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.’ Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”. The web can […]

On the 29th birthday of the world wide web, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has sounded a fresh warning about threats to the web as a force for good, adding his voice to growing concerns about big tech’s impact on competition and society. The web’s creator argues that the “powerful weight of a few dominant” […]

The launch is expected to also deploy two experimental communications satellites. The two satellites may test aspects of Starlink, a project to bath Earth in high-speed internet access. The Starlink plan calls for nearly 12,000 interlinked satellites — many more than currently orbit Earth — but Musk and SpaceX have been relatively quiet about it.

The UK Government has announced that homes and businesses will have a legal right to high-speed broadband of at least 10 Mbps by 2020. Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, says that 10 Mbps is the minimum speed needed to meet the requirements of an average family. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport has […]

About 45% of US children ages 10 to 12 have a smartphone with a service plan Outside the US and Europe, children tend to get their first mobile phones when they are older

Americans see Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the ultimate consumer spending extravaganzas, but the annual “record breaking ” sales days have nothing on China’s so-called Singles’ Day. As we can see in this chart from Statista, Singles’ Day sales make the US Thanksgiving weekend spending look like chump change.