Author: Navneet Alang

Quick: how many tabs do you have open right now? FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE?! You have sixty articles you wanted to read and another nine million links you wanted to check from Twitter and Facebook? Oh my. You, my friend, have a problem. But fear not! You are not alone! It’s a problem we all have. Despite the internet’s myriad benefits when it comes to informing and entertaining us, this limitless medium also has a downside. Too. Much. Information. Yep, from email inboxes that gush so uncontrollably it’s like they were designed by BP, to browsers flooded with things you’re ‘going to get to one day’,…

The web is littered with tales of angry designers, coders and bloggers who just can’t get their due. Slaving in front of their screens, alone and unappreciated in their apartments, those heroes of the internet make the web as we know it run while getting almost no recognition for their tireless efforts. Oh, also: Those people are wimps and have it easy. Because we now have some insight into what must surely be not only one of the most difficult internet-related jobs around, but also one of the worst jobs period: an Internet Content Reviewer. The job is exactly what it sounds like: you get paid to review…

Microsoft’s mobile division is in a pickle. And not one of those really tasty pickles, all crisp and the perfect mix of sour, sharp and savory. No, this is a pretty crappy pickle to be in. See, Apple, Google and RIM are all established in the smartphone space. They need to be, given that mobile search revenue is soaring, app sales are booming and hardware makers are raking in cash hand over fist. These people make pickles your Polish grandmother would be jealous of. So Microsoft cannot afford to sit mobile out. On the flip side, coming in to compete against those three and others like Nokia (who, I hear,…

Every comment thread on the internet that mentions Netflix abides by one simple rule: it must have that one Canadian guy or girl stating “oh man, you Americans are so lucky” or “WHEN IS THIS COMING TO CANADA???!!!??!!111″. This is one of those simple, unchanging facts about the web. Well now, annoying Canadian guy or girl, you can finally shut up – and rejoice! Netflix is now heading North where, one imagines, those pot-smoking, outdoorsy heathens will now gorge themselves on hours-long marathons of bad 90s TV episodes and offbeat movies. Details are scarce at the moment. There has been no word…

Since the release of iPhone 4 and iOS4, the tech world has been caught up either praising the new device to death or parsing Antennagate into oblivion. But while so many have been focusing on the glory and flaws of Apple’s newest product, my attention has been squarely on an old one: my trusty iPhone 3G, which is now 2 years old – and is signficantly crappier, thanks to the iOS4 update. After the initial update, my 3G was so slow as to be almost completely unusable. Basic tasks like checking email or opening a browser could take well over a minute to complete – unless, of course, they crashed first. Using…

So often in the contemporary era, we talk about how the web is changing the world around us: of how media industries are having to adapt, or how the practices and concepts of doing business are being affected. Less often discussed, however, is how the internet is changing us. Sure, there’s a lot of chatter about how the internet might be making us stupid or destroying our capacity to focus on things. But there’s a lot less talk about how it might change – or have already changed – what you might call ‘our experiences of ourselves’. To wit: how is the web changing our identities? What’s an identity? Well,…

In your cell phone – which you may be reading this on right now – are four things that could be contributing to the deadliest war since World War II: gold, tungsten, tin and tanalum. All of those minerals are found in The Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of a brutal, deadly war over the nation’s massive natural resources. A large part of the violence stems from attempts to control the illicit trade in minerals, and in a mafia-like arrangement with mines and smuggling runs, the minerals are shipped out of Congo, into eastern Asia. There, they are smelted and refined, where they then find their way…

Say what you will about the evils of the free market – you commie pig – but competition in the world of smartphones is definitely having a good effect. Case in point: the latest look we’ve gotten at Blackberry’s forthcoming new OS6 looks pretty impressive – good enough, even, to make Blackberry a compelling alternative to the aesthetic niceties of iOS or Android. Among the many features shown in the short clip are: An updated web browser that features multitouch gestures The ability to post to multiple social networks at once, in addition to social feeds An improved media player (finally!) Universal…

For all the chatter regarding the great democratizing power of the internet – its capacity to enable a generation of thinkers of creators to produce amazing things – a simple problem has kept the creation of applications limited to small number of people. To make computer-y things, you need to, like, know stuff. Well no more, internet! No more! Today, Google announced public invitations to its App Inventor for Android, an application that will allow those with almost no programming knowledge to create their own apps for the Android market. Using a simple graphical interface, users can choose…

Ever since broadband internet hit the mainstream around the turn of the millennium, we have been hearing how the web would spell the end of traditional TV. Rather than the ‘mere’ 500-channel universe offered by cable or satellite, the web was going to be a never-ending smorgasbord of programming. The future of television was supposed to be the web and it was going to be glorious. It would all stream in stunning high-definition. You would never watch an ad again. And unicorns would come pouring out of your screen in full 3-D. Or not. As it turned out, people were still pretty committed to their TVs,…