From your to-do list to your company's back-up servers, things that were once physical pieces of equipment are now deployed to you ‘as a service’ by service providers.  For example traditional phone systems have now been replaced by VoIP telephony and unified communications solutions offered as a service. But it isn’t just equipment that has gone the way of the cloud. There is now something called everything as a service, and it is delivered by IFTTT.

In last weekend’s Sunday Times, style guru Toby Wiseman was asked by a male reader if it was ever acceptable to wear a smartwatch with a suit.  The answer was: not three years ago, but these days, yes. What surprised me wasn’t the answer, but range of available smartwatches that would actually look good with a suit. Around our offices, techy-looking smartwatches are cool, but clearly that is not the case everywhere. 

You probably already know what the iPhone X can do.  It can unlock with facial recognition and charge wirelessly.  It has a super retina screen that spans from edge to edge and no home button. It has animated emojis called Animogis, that mimic your current facial expression. But what you probably don’t know is that the best feature of the new iPhone X is its A11 AI neural network brain.

Google’s Chrome browser is our favourite, and not only because we have a plug-in for it that allows you to click-to-call straight from your browser screen. It is reliable, efficient and works beautifully on PCs as well as Macs.  Plus it has a huge ecosystem of extensions that make it even more powerful. The following are 10 of our favourite Chrome extensions—all of which are free.

Imagine waking up and putting an earbud in everyday, as routinely as you put on your watch. Then imagine going throughout the day, attending various meetings across the city, with your little earbud reminding you of what was said last time you were in that particular spot. It is still in concept stages, but we are excited about a new headphone technology that will create a “sound version of Google Maps”, with people able to replay conversations, music and ambient noise from their past.

A reminder to all businesses with a traditional phone system: by 2025 BT will be switching off their PSTN and ISDN networks, migrating them to a single IP core network. The ‘phone line’ as we know it, will be dead. But what does this actually mean for your organisation? 

Technology cannot replace real experiences, but it can provide a window into experiences that we wouldn’t otherwise have glimpsed. Our favourite new technology has nothing to do with office phones or VoIP business phone systems, but rather… earth!  Google Earth relaunched this week, with features that will help us all to explore new parts of our planet in an exciting amount of detail. And needless to say, we have spent hours exploring it and still aren’t bored.

How the internet sends information, data and messages simultaneously to billions of people across the globe is mind boggling to most. And few understand how it actually works—what is underground, over ground, in the seabed; what PoPs are, IXPs, dark fibre, etc.

Some people take great pride in their EQ, i.e. their ability to recognise emotions and discern between different feelings, both in themselves and others.  It is a powerful quality to have, and one that embodies to the very essence of being human. But is it possible that a device can detect human emotion better than humans themselves? Possibly, at least for some of us. New wearable tech developed by researchers at MIT can tell you how someone is feeling from the sound of their voice. 

Houseparty.