It’s time to head for a night out. Let’s begin with an app. If you are in London, Paris, New York or Berlin you could make use of CityMapper, which draws on public data to plot the best route between A and B, even offering a rain-safe route. And there are no shortage of information… Read more »
Posts By: David Firth
The Australian company unlocking parking in city centres
Divvy Parking has a free app that allows motorists to search for and book a parking space in commercial buildings owned or run by dozens of property groups, including Mirvac, Dexus, Knight Frank and TFE Hotels. These firms also make money from this digital marketplace for parking, which is akin to a subterranean Airbnb. Source: BBC… Read more »
How we started the Arab world’s biggest music service
At the turn of the century, as mobile phones were taking off, there was a fad for novelty ringtones. People were paying small sums for their new Nokia phones to play a simple version of popular tunes as a call alert. “It was a silly trend at the time,” says Eddy Maroun, co-founder of Anghami,… Read more »
Can a ‘superpower force field’ protect us from hackers?
In the Disney Pixar animation The Incredibles, the daughter in the family of superheroes, Violet, has a particular superpower. She can create a protective force field around herself – an impenetrable bubble. She can also make herself invisible. Businesses trying to ward off millions of dangerous cyber-attacks in an increasingly connected world probably wish they… Read more »
‘I’ve been driving for two days’: Travel ban stokes fear, worry in Canada’s tech community
When Ali Kashani heard rumours that that U.S. President Donald Trump was preparing to sign an executive order Friday afternoon banning Iranian citizens — amongst others — from entering the country, his only thought was: drive. Kashani, a Vancouver-based entrepreneur who has dual Iranian-Canadian citizenship, had accepted a job with the venture capital firm Pear… Read more »
How the internet is turning us all into ‘mean girls’
Without realizing it, we’ve all become “mean girls,” excluding those who don’t fit in with the online communities we design for ourselves, one click at a time. Sure, at first we humoured them — those outliers who posted polarizing political views on our timelines for everyone else to see. But then we slowly started minimizing… Read more »
The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding
WHEN I ASK people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.” But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only… Read more »
Trump Can’t Stop the Globalization of Work—the Internet Will See to That
DONALD TRUMP IS promising to make America great again by keeping others out. That approach is already undermining the smidgen of tentative good will he had enjoyed from the tech industry. As a strategy for keeping jobs in the US, it’s also fatally flawed. Turns out that in a world connected by the internet, isolationism… Read more »
Why has the country of Cameroon blocked the internet?
Three weeks after reports that Cameroon had blocked the internet in English-speaking parts of the country, residents say services have yet to be restored. So what is going on? Cameroonians have little doubt that pulling the plug on internet services for about 20% of the population is an intentional act by the government. Source: BBC Technology… Read more »
Smile, you’re on camera, and it knows who you are
Facial recognition technology has evolved at breakneck speed, with consequences that could be benign or altogether more sinister, depending on your point of view. High-definition cameras combined with clever software capable of measuring the scores of “nodal points” on our faces – the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose, for… Read more »
Leading Titles
Introduction to Information Systems, 3rd Canadian Binder Ready Version Update Edition
R. Kelly Rainer, Casey G. Cegielski, Ingrid Splettstoesser-Hogeterp, Cristobal Sanchez-Rodriguez
ISBN: 978-1-119-13385-8
August 2015, © 2016
CDN $98.95; CDN $114.95