When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. More
Amid the 286-page judgment, issued after nearly four years of trial proceedings and petabytes of evidence, four words stand out. “Google is a monopolist,” wrote Amit Mehta, the judge of a district court in America, adding that “it has acted as one.” His ruling, handed down on August 5th, could lead to big changes for the multi-billion-dollar search market—and for the wider tech industry. More
Andrew Odlyzko, a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota, has a side hustle: he has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of speculative bubbles. Part of his time is spent at the Bank of England, where he photographs pages from thousands of handwritten ledgers which he later scours for clues about earlier episodes of excess. He hopes that generative artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take the drudgery out of the task. It is not lost on him that the latest speculative mania revolves around the technology itself. More
THE MARKET reaction was brutal. On August 1st Intel released a dismal set of results. The semiconductor giant’s sales were down by 1%, year on year, and the company declared a net loss of $1.6bn, compared with a profit of $1.5bn in the same period in 2023. “Our costs are too high, our margins are too low,” wrote Pat Gelsinger, its chief executive, in a note to employees. As a consequence, Intel plans to slash 15,000 jobs and to suspend dividends, which it has paid since 1992. Since the results were published its share price has plunged by nearly 30%. More
Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s most valuable company, is the archetype of vertical integration. The smartphones and other consumer electronics it is best known for accounted for about half of its revenue and a quarter of its operating profit in the period from April to June. The rest came from the components that go into such devices—including the semiconductors that run them. More
It is hard to imagine life without a smartphone these days. Leave yours at home and you may find yourself lost, moneyless and severed from social contact. Nine in ten American adults own one, according to Pew Research Centre. They spend 3 hours and 45 minutes on them a day, on average, reckons GWI, a firm of analysts. New versions souped up with artificial intelligence may be even harder to put down. More
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Two-wheeled vehicles are an integral part of life in India. They whizz over the country’s broken, clogged roads, carrying families and loads that would fill a small lorry. India manufactures about 20m of them each year, making it one of the world’s leading producers. It is fitting, then, that the country’s largest initial public offering (IPO) so far this year is for an electric-scooter company. On August 2nd Ola Electric plans to sell around $730m of shares at a price that will value the firm at roughly $4bn. More
