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

Microsoft brings Skype for Business for Mac in Preview along with a slew of other updates

Microsoft just announced a flurry of new investments for Office 365, including an upcoming, and according to Microsoft “much anticipated” Skype for Business Mac Preview to run OS X El Capitan. The preview is now available to IT professionals upon request. Microsoft said that the roll-out will be in three stages, eventually leading to public ...

Madness at Microsoft: Flagship Lumia phones are now FREE

Microsoft’s flagship Lumia phones, the 950 and 950XL, were the focus of countless leaks and rumors for almost the entirety of 2015 – one of them has now been reduced to a giveaway. The phones have barely been out for six months and now Microsoft is saying that if you buy the larger Lumia 950 XL ...

Facebook news feed updates could mean less clickbait but less informed readers

Facebook Inc. has made yet another change to what you see in your news feed, this time predicting what you want to read after ascertaining how much time you spend reading certain types of stories. The update is part of the ‘Feed Quality Program’. One of the reasons for this, says Facebook, is that many users ...

Is Microsoft on the verge of upgrading the Xbox One, or what?

On the heels of the recent rumor that Sony Corp. will be upgrading the PlayStation 4 in October to the PlayStation 4.5, rumors have surfaced that suggest Microsoft has plans to upgrade the Xbox One. There’s a twist, though. Earlier in April Microsoft’s Xbox chief Phil Spencer put an end to the rumor that Redmond might ...

Looks like Facebook users might soon get paid for their posts?

Getting paid for your posts on Facebook would sure come as a relief to avid users of the social network whose large number of followers creates fantastic revenue, that goes one way only. A recent survey that has been circulating points to the possibility of this coming true – the survey was found by The ...

An Apple Original Series: Tech giant secretly schmoozing A-list celebs to drum up talent for slew of shows

Is Apple Inc. secretly turning up at big movie events, sidling up to A-list Hollywood actors in a bid to get them onside before the tech giant launches a handful of series designed to match or outrun the magnificence of Netflix, Inc. and Amazon.com, Inc.? It seems so, according to a recent detailed report by ...

New York, 5 minutes in the future: AR for creating virtual bed partners, according to new film Creative Control

Director (also co-writer) Benjamin Dickinson’s recently released film, Creative Control, is one of few movies over the past several years to take recent technological advances seriously, inasmuch as the technology isn’t far from what we already have. The filmmakers have said that the setting is New York, “5 minutes in the future”. In Creative Control’s case the technology ...

Microsoft and Facebook say they have ended the gender pay gap

The issue of the gender pay gap, in the tech industry, and many other industries, is still a huge issue – and one that won’e be solved for a long time. The American Association of University Women says equally qualified women earn 78 percent of what equally qualified men earn, although it looks like some parts of the tech ...

Trust a (digitized) woman to do all the hard work

“Siri, you know that being a woman makes you subservient, don’t you?” “Hey Cortana, can you wear that sexy skirt to the office tomorrow?” This is not how you should speak to your secretary, but is it what tech companies have in mind when choosing a female voice (and name) for their digital assistant? You ...

Inside the Exclusion Zone: Experience the Chernobyl disaster through virtual reality

Almost 30 years to the day, one of the world’s worst disasters took place at the Chernobyl (Ukrainian spelling is Chornobyl) Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine when an explosion sent radioactive particles across much of the former western USSR and parts of Europe. Thirty-one people died shortly after the initial explosion, but soon people living within ...