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  • Find out what’s ahead: “Mobile Trends Africa 2020”. >>>

  • African countries are trying to “cheat history,” as one senior UN official I met put it. Barely literate people in the poorest villages, places where there are no schools and the life expectancy is under 50 due to lack of health infrastructure, use mobile phones to listen to the radio, send money, buy and sell >>>

  • With help from Facebook and Google, David Cameron wants east London to take on Silicon Valley. But his top-down approach misses the point, says Joe White, CEO of London-based web design service Moonfruit: "If we need more grass roots, then large tech corporate sponsors are not the answer. Supporting local entrepreneurs who can inspire and >>>

  • Africa’s mobile phone kiosks: tech hubs set to rival Silicon Valley? In the West, there’s an app for everything. In Africa, so goes the latest business/development mantra, there’s the mobile phone kiosk. The noise around Africa’s diy mobile phone culture sometimes sounds like a faint repeat of the dotcom hype from 1990s San Francisco. However, >>>

  • Your privacy online? Who cares about it? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that’s who: Those concerns are real – I’m not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you’re online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this >>>

  • With the arrival of broadband, sub-Saharan Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are on the verge of take off. Question is: to where? In Buea, southern Cameroon, the tech boys are pulling an all-nighter. Mambe Nanje Churchill’s fingers go hurtling across the keyboard. With his 20-year-old junior looking on, the 24-year-old self-taught veteran of the local cyber café >>>

  • Zap those economic blues. Seven shiny tech tips from CeBIT 09 The global economic crash getting you down? Take the talking cure. The population of Hanover in northern Germany pretty much doubles once a year when around 500,000 computer and IT industry movers and shakers from all over the world click over to CeBIT, the >>>

  • Linz, a sleepy provincial Austrian town? Cuckoo clocks and the sound of music? Where Hitler went to school with Wittgenstein ? Never mind the cobblestones. As the venue for Ars Electronica , one of the biggest digital arts festivals in the world, Linz is heaven for geeks right now, is overclocking with tech-driven spectacle. Back >>>

  • When in Rome, do as the New York Times tells you. A recent travel feature about Rome at Night comes attached with not only the usual multimedia map but an MP3 walking tour as well. Great. Unless you happen to depend on the tourist dollar… Riffing off a recent Wired item enthusing about a crowdsourced >>>

  • Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plan to return to TV on 7 January while their writers stay out on strike. Off air for two months, the latte-drinking (probably), liberal-leaning (certainly) presenters, funny men, princes of political satire etc say they would much rather return with their comrade writers — beyond this, words (as >>>