Mike Wheatley
Latest from Mike Wheatley
FAA’s tough drone rules hold back potentially life-saving applications
Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shot down any hope of drones being used for commercial purposes in the forseeable future, in a move that threatens to stifle drone innovation and could even have potentially fatal consequences. Under its proposed ‘guidelines’ for commercial drone use, the FAA has excluded the vast majority of the ...
Uber controversy highlights dangers of operating in the cloud
Uber Inc. has been a poster child for disruption in the tech industry since its rise, but recent controversy over its lack of regulation and privacy policies highlight how it’s moving into largely uncharted territory. Last week, the controversial cab service was forced to suspend its services in Nevada after a judge issued a preliminary ...
Lazada raises $250M to fuel Southeast Asia’s online shopping spree
Southeast Asian e-commerce store Lazada.com has just raised a massive $250 million in a funding round that should help to secure its status as the “Amazon of Asia”. The fresh round means Lazada has now raised about $736 million since its inception, while its value is pegged at around $1.25 billion. Lazada, which claims to ...
Can BlackBerry revive its fortunes in enterprise mobility management?
BlackBerry last week unveiled its mobile enterprise platform BlackBerry Enterprise Server 12, which allows IT departments to manage Android and iOS devices plus BlackBerry’s own smartphones. It also announced it will integrate Samsung’s Know enterprise security system with the platform, which is due for release in January. BES 12 represents a significant opportunity for BlackBerry. ...
Euro MPs vote to break up Google in totally meaningless gesture
European MPs have had Google in their sights for some time now, and have just upped the ante by voting to “unbundle search engines from commercial services”, which would effectively mean breaking up the company. It should be noted yesterday’s vote at the European Parliament is completely unenforceable – it doesn’t have the power to ...
EU demands “right to be forgotten” goes international
Europe’s “right to be forgotten” has generated a lot of controversy since Google was forced to start deleting some links from its search engine. But so far the ruling has only been applied to Google’s European domains – like Google.co.uk and Google.fr for instance – which means that smarter netizens can easily sidestep any censorship. ...
Investors ready to fill Uber’s war chest with $1.2B funding round
Alternative cab booking service Uber Inc. is said to be close to raising a new round of funding that would bring its valuation to a whopping $40 billion, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday. The company is hoping to bring in at least $1 billion from the fresh round, the report said. Among the investors ...
Amazon’s Cloudfront DNS goes cold turkey on eve of Thanksgiving
It was only a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft’s Azure was hit by an extended global outage that took its cloud services offline for several hours. Now, just before Thanksgiving, Amazon Web Services Inc. has suffered a similar fate. The problem hit Amazon’s Cloudfront DNS service late yesterday afternoon, causing a major slow down ...
‘Charted’ makes beautiful data visualizations in seconds
Web publishing startup Medium has unveiled a handy new data visualization tool called Charted that allows anyone to make beautiful charts in seconds. Medium says Charted was initially built by its Product Science team as a means of analyzing data and communicating their findings with the rest of the team. To create a data visualization, ...
IDC: Tablet sales set to slow dramatically
International Data Corporation says it’s looking gloomy on the horizon for tablet vendors. The market watcher believes that growth in sales of tablets and ‘hybrid’ tablet/computers is set to slow dramatically next year. “The worldwide tablet market is expected to see a massive deceleration in 2014 with year-over-year growth slowing to 7.2%, down from 52.5% ...