James Farrell

James Farrell is the former editor-in-chief of Chiang Mai CityNews, where he wrote and managed daily news, features, op-eds and blogs on a diverse range of topics. Prior to this, in the same city of Northern Thailand where he lives, he was the longstanding deputy editor of the monthly magazine Citylife. He has written on culture, politics, travel, tech, business, human rights, for local, national, and international news services and magazines. He has a keen interest in the role technology is playing in the transformation of society, culture and politics, especially in developing nations. This is reflected in his not-so-successful first novel.

Latest from James Farrell

Experience floating in space from your living room with world’s first virtual reality satellite

Imagine drifting through space and not having to leave the cloisters of your familiar armchair. That could soon be a reality following a deal struck up between SpaceVR and NanoRacks LLC – a company that develops products and offers services for the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceVR, whose mission is to bring space tourism to ...

Pokémon Go won the West, but will struggle with world domination

If we look at the stupendous rise of Pokémon Go in the U.S., we might have thought the mobile game would experience a similar meteoric ascent in the rest of the world. Nothing that good could surely not catch on, right? Nonetheless, the numbers right now are telling us Pokémon Go is pretty much a U.S. ...

The scariest thing right now about AI is the slasher movie it’s writing

A naked, bloody body in a bathtub, a large knife and a kid singing a nursery rhyme in creepy cadences not exactly as it should be sung. Sound like a cliché? Of course, and in this particular film for good reason as the script was partly written by a computer … and the computer basically ...

The Microsoft beat-down of Google Chrome continues

Microsoft doesn’t want you to use Google Chrome because apparently it’s bad for your battery, and in turn your well-being; Microsoft wants you to use its own browser, Edge. Edge is good, says Microsoft. Chrome is bad, says Microsoft. Google Chrome is quite notorious for sucking your device battery juice, in spite of Google’s promise ...

Microsoft is finally letting HoloLens loose on the public with a view to the enterprise sector

Let’s face it, if you’ve not been living under a rock for the last year then you’ve probably heard about Microsoft’s augmented reality headset HoloLens. Much of the world might be entranced right now with a little AR game called Pokémon Go, but it was Microsoft’s demos of its own AR reality headset that really blew ...

New York Governor says sex offenders could be luring their prey by playing Pokémon Go

Registered New York sex offenders will not be able to join the madding masses and play the augmented reality game, now a global phenomenon in terms of online gaming, Pokémon Go. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has asked the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to ban sex offenders from playing the game ...

This could catch on: Microsoft sued again for sneaky Windows 10 upgrade tactics

It’s happening again, not once, but twice! Microsoft is being sued for its highly questionable tactics in persuading people to upgrade to Windows 10. This follows a similar case in which a Californian business woman was awarded $10,000 earlier this year after she said her business lost money due to an upgrade to the new OS that she claimed ...

Netflix announces the arrival of the latest season of arguably the best dark-side-of-tech series ever made

Firstly, if you haven’t seen the first two seasons of Black Mirror, you should do that immediately. The previous seasons of the show, dubbed “the Twilight Zone for the digital age”, have garnered widespread acclaim from critics and the public, are available on Netflix. The streaming service just announced the U.S. version of the show will arrive October ...

Preliminary report reveals Tesla auto-pilot fan was speeding before he died

On May 7th this year an accident occurred on a Florida highway that resulted in the death of Joshua Brown, a 40-year old Ohio man. Brown’s Tesla Model S had been on auto-pilot, with initial reports stating that the collision with a Freightliner Cascadia truck-tractor was due to the automated driving systems not applying the brakes. ...

Twitter explains why it’s more relevant than people might think

You don’t have to tweet every day to use Twitter, says Twitter Inc. in a fresh marketing push designed to let us know the myriad uses of the platform. One of those uses, says Twitter, according to research the company has been conducting over the last few months, is simply to see what’s going on ...