Last week, the Lancashire Post carried a feelgood yarn about a great British success story. “It’s plane sailing for BAE Systems – with a little help from Carol Vorderman”, ran the headline, accompanied by a picture of the smiling former Countdown maths whizz sitting in the cockpit of a plane. Lancashire’s biggest private sector employer…
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When Josh Borden arrived for work at the Google offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday morning, it felt like arriving in a “ghost town”. The parking lot was deserted, there was no breakfast being served in the cafeteria, and the nap rooms were tagged with signs announcing their closure “as a precaution given the Covid-19…
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There’s still something magical about the idea of browsing a world of goods online, choosing what you want and having it delivered to your door, sometimes within hours. You may give a fleeting thought to the environmental impact when you are drowning in excess packaging (nearly a third of solid waste in the US comes…
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A decade ago a ride-hailing service called UberCab launched in Silicon Valley. Since then the rebranded Uber has burned through $10bn. It has never made a profit. The business model relies on shareholders to subsidise cheap rides so that the company can squeeze out rivals and establish a monopoly. Uber’s success is that 90 million…
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What goes up must come down, and in 2019, gravity reasserted itself for the tech industry. After years of relatively unchecked growth, the tech industry found itself on the receiving end of increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the public and attacks from its own employees. “The whole year has been brutal for tech companies,” said…
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Fatima, from Guinea-Bissau, wakes up in the early hours of the morning to be in with a chance of being able to use the bathroom at her small house in Stratford, east London, which she shares with nine strangers – some are Italian, she thinks, and some might be eastern European, but nobody socialises as…
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