Stories by Andrew Birmingham

Frictionless sharing is getting another big run at the moment. You remember frictionless sharing — it’s Facebook’s gift to privacy or perhaps its repudiation of it depending on your perspective.

Not all stories end badly, but this one does. Of all the industries unravelling upon our screens since the advent of the Web almost 20 years ago, traditional news media is dying the hardest.

Check out the Google spider bait in today's headline — Grok is catching on fast. If you see a lawyer smiling this week, blame Apple and Samsung.

Facebook. Privacy. Google. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

Tracking market share on a weekly or monthly basis, as many product managers do in the IT industry, is a guaranteed first class ticket to the Loon Lounge. You need to ride the helicopter occasionally, take a look through the wide angle lens. Breathe in for seven seconds. Hold for five seconds. Breathe out for seven seconds. Much better. Now panic — iPhone 4S sales may be tanking.

Why all the heat in the smartphone market lately? The endless Web pages of copy, the permanent and globally distributed legal jihad between Apple and Samsung.

For the record, and so you can hold him to account in future, long after others have stopped caring, Grok thinks Groupon is a crock.

Batteries are boring...until they stop working, then they are very, very boring. Right now, the most boring battery in the world is the one in Apple's new iPhone 4S. Where's our talk time? Where's all that tasty standby time?

600,000 Facebook accounts were "compromised" yesterday, or thereabouts.

What is it about Health Departments and IT systems, and why is IBM always lurking about in the shadows like Lady Macbeth?

Someone in marketing at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) obviously thought 'Kaching' — you know, the sound of a cash register ringing up a sale — was a clever name for a mobile payment system.

Relentlessly, and from far away it seems effortlessly - Facebook marches on. The future belongs to Mark Zuckerburg, or at least a few fleeting years of it, as it once belonged to the Tom Watsons at IBM, and Bill Gates at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple.

Waves of creative destruction have defined the emergence of digital channels on the Web. So have the struggles of incumbents to adapt. This article is free, but if it were published over at The Australian, sooner or later you would run up against its very permeable pay wall which launched today in response to its failed online advertising model.

So it's that time of the year again.

Telstra received a stunning 99.4 per cent (and rising) vote of approval for its NBN deal with the government. That tells us two things. Firstly, the government is paying too much. That's why they got knocked over in the stampede by TLS shareholders. And secondly, that the shareholder who suggested to Telstra’s board yesterday that the country was becoming increasingly like a third world dictatorship had no idea how ironic his comments really were.