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/ 15 October 2007

Return of the business brat pack

When British dotcom entrepreneur Calum Brannan had his first meeting with potential investors last year, he immediately encountered a problem. My uncle had driven me down to Cambridge from Coventry for the meeting, and came to sit in on it with me," he said. "But they thought he ran the website and started talking to him instead of me."

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/ 17 August 2007

Caught out on Wikipedia

Editing your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities, but a new website has uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order to improve their public image. The Wikipedia Scanner has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the British Labour party.

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/ 4 June 2007

Big gun bags VoIP start-up

Deutsche Telekom is investing $20-million in hotly tipped internet telephony start-up Jajah.com as the online communications industry continues its rapid growth. Jajah has already been backed by venture groups such as Sequoia Capital — the Silicon Valley company that was instrumental in the rise of Google, YouTube and PayPal — and Intel.

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/ 16 March 2007

What is Twitter, and why should I care?

It’s a kind of social networking site, and it is generating huge amounts of buzz among the web’s early adopters thanks to a simple conceit. All <i>Twitter.com</i> does is ask: "What are you doing?" The idea is that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and contacts.

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/ 25 October 2005

Casting from the broad to the pod

In the heyday of radio, the wireless was the centre of people’s lives. The image of families gathered around their radio set is a familiar one — listening to a broadcast was a group activity. "When they say ‘the radio’, they don’t mean … a man in a studio," wrote EB White, author of children’s classic <i>Charlotte’s Web</i>, in the 1940s.

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/ 26 November 2004

Retro all the rage in handsets

First it was vintage heavy metal T-shirts, then came leg warmers and Lycra. Now old cellphones have become the retro fashion accessory to be seen with. Twenty years after Britain’s first cellphone call was made technology has leapt forward, but hipsters and homebodies alike are rejecting flashy new models in favour of tried-and-trusted phone favourites.