More wrap-around specs than Rolex, Microsoft¡¯s black band also collects your workout data while being able to tell the time and is reckoned to have 48-hours battery life. Like the Apple Watch, Band needs a phone to get online but unlike the Apple Watch it connects to phones other than the one from its maker - so it works with iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.Unperturbed the fate of Glass, Google released Android Wear - a version of Android smart watches and fitness trackers but the company¡¯s vision was bigger.Hoping to put cars on the internet of things, Google also officially came out with its idea for the driverless car. Google has been working on this since 2010 but it was in 2014 when the firm revealed electric automobiles lacking a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal and featuring instead a screen showing the passengers¡¯ chosen route. Google said it¡¯s building a fleet of 100 prototypes.Pressure to realize IoT came as the engine for most recent paradigm shift - tablets - seemed to be running out steam those in IT searched for new growth. Tablet sales in 2014 slowed substantially - 7.2 per cent versus 52.5 per cent in 2013.Tablets reached saturation point: those who¡¯d already bought a tablet weren¡¯t about to buy a second. Smartphones were the thing - taking over the role of the touchy device - while there was a return of the laptop form factor: Chromebook shipments jumped 67 per cent with people flirting once more with PCs.

Blonde Wikileaker Julian Assange played ringmaster to a bizarre media circus in August, when he told the world¡¯s press his two-years¡¯ sofa surfing at the Ecuadorian embassy in London was coming to an end. According to Assange, he¡¯d be leaving the embassy ¡°soon¡± but declined to say when. He¡¯s been there dodging extradition to Sweden to face questions over two cases of sexual assault.After two years in the Embassy, Sky News reckoned he was suffering problems that included ¡°a heart condition, a chronic lung complain, bad eye sight and high blood pressure.¡± Assange reckoned he wouldn¡¯t be leaving the embassy for these reasons. As November rolled into town a court in Sweden rejected his appeal to have the detention order set aside and with Christmas on the horizon Assange, it transpired, wouldn¡¯t be leaving the embassy for any reason.In the meantime, those not among the Ecuadorian embassy staff in London may get to see Assange in statue form: Italian sculptor Davide Dormino started crowd-funding a work called Anything to Say, comprised of statues of Assange and fellow leakers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning standing on chairs.

The work is ¡°not a simple homage to individuals but to the importance of freedom of speech,¡± according to the Kickstarter campaign. Organisers need ¡ê100,000 to cast the trio in brass with the project receiving Saint Assange¡¯s blessing.A year of ballooning growth and profits in Google¡¯s core business almost distracted our attention from Glass, Google¡¯s Android-powered eye ware.Mountain View¡¯s wearable tech project struggled in the wider world. Glassholes retained their status as social outcasts, sticking out like a sore thumb in a crowd, prompting physical abuse and threats from fellow humans, and earning the ire of film studios, cinema chains and officials.Developers, the canaries in the coal mine, starting abandoning Glass but the tongues really started to wag tongues when uber Hole Sergy Brin was snapped at a Silicon-Valley red-carpet event minus his Android googles - the first time in two years he¡¯d not flaunted a pair.Now, it seems, Texas Instruments is even giving up on Glass. Step up Intel, desperate for growth in mobile computing, and now reported as the chipmaker for Google¡¯s next generation of Glass.Built by a 28-year-old in Hanoi and released in May 2013 to Apple¡¯s app store, Flappy Bird by February 2014 was topping international games charts and had been downloaded more than 50m times. The game¡¯s creator Dong Nguyen gave Flappy Bird away for free yet reported to be making $50,000 a day. Its combination of Mario-like simplicity and infuriating difficulty saw Flappy Bird earn it the status of his year¡¯s Candy Crush, Farmville and Angry Birds as the year¡¯s most successful smart phone/social-network game for addicted millions.

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But in February, Nguyen called it quits, suddenly yanking the game from app stores while tweeting its unexpected success was ¡°ruining his life.¡± There were reports legal problems, but Nguyen denied his decision stemmed from these.It was testament to the attraction of Flappy Bird that Nguyen¡¯s kill tweet was retweeted 135,000 times, that in the 22 hours between tweeting and killing Flappy Bird 10m people downloaded the game, and that after its death cyber crooks launched mal-ware rich counterfeit versions in the Apple and Google stores to dupe desperate rubes. Nguyen did resurrect Flappy Bird, as Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV.Year of encryption - tech firms self protect against NSA
Tech giants were last year caught sans pants after Edward Snowden said the NSA and GCHQ were schlurping huge gulps of personal data from the wires and data centers that make up the internet without the knowledge of those who own and operate them.

The reputational damage to the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google has been massive, feeding into an impact on business, as corporate customers outside the US started sourcing non-American firms based in non-US jurisdictions to host and run their data center and internet operations.A year on and 2014 saw a concerted tech-sector fight back. Many browsers, web sites and social networks had already gone HTTPS by default and this year saw an extension of the practice: Google made all Gmail connections HTTPS in March and mid-year began dishing out favourable search rankings to web sites that use HTTPS to transmit pages and exchange data. Yahoo! celebrated completion of encrypting traffic between its data centers saying it would provide end-to-end encryption for its email users.

Microsoft converted its OneDrive and Outlook.com servers to TLS encryption. Elsewhere Microsoft let itself be held in contempt of court after the firm refused to hand over emails held on one of its servers outside the US, in Ireland - the emails had been sought under a US warrant as part of an investigation and Microsoft contested, to establish a legal principle. Microsoft lost the case in July and planned to appeal but, in the meantime, refused to surrender the data.Google announced Android L in September that will automatically encrypt user data and Apple updated iOS to make it impossible to decrypt an iPhone or iPad even if ordered. Apple¡¯s update came wrapped in a updated new privacy policy and letter from CEO Tim Cook. ¡°We have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products and services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will,¡± he wrote.

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Spooks and law enforcement objected to tech firms making handsets harder to crack but it was social networks¡¯ that came under the greatest pressure in 2014.A power vacuum in Iraq and Syria was filled by the violent and well-equipped jihadist Islamic State, that - mid year ¨C seemed poised to snatch Baghdad.
No media simpletons IS, the figure Jihad John¡¯s beheading of captive westerns became a web video staple - his image and actions posted online and tweeted. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram became suspected as serving as means by which IS recruiters contacted western yoofs, who were duly groomed and disappeared from their lives in the west to re-emerge months later in Iraq or Syria married to IS jihadists or brandishing an AK-47 or going up in a suicide vest.The social networks¡¯ were coming under pressure to act - to censor posts and messages, to report emails and other communications to the authorities.

Traditionally, the networks¡¯ policy has been one of none-to-little intervention - they see themselves in the vein as the phone network or the post office, in that they cannot be held responsible for the messages and content of their members or users. Embodying this was the November 2014 British government report into the murder of off-duty British solider Lee Rigby by Muslim extremists in London the year before. The Intelligence and Security Committee report largely exonerated M15 for not acting to stop Rigby¡¯s attackers while squarely blaming ¡°major US communications services providers¡± saying the only organization that could have prevented the attack was one such internet-media giant. The report didn¡¯t say who, but Facebook got fingered within hours of the report.Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am in a long, slow-moving queue of anxious passengers trudging through airport security like chained natives thrown into the lava pit by Ursula Andress giving a ¡°lesson in obedience¡±. I remove all items from my trouser pockets and put them in my coat pockets. I take off my coat and put it in a plastic tray. My laptop goes in another plastic tray. I reach for a third, nearly severing three fingers between trays that have been flung viciously down the rollers by a chuckling security woman.My contact lens liquids go in a self-seal plastic bag that won¡¯t seal. Off comes my watch. Off comes my wedding ring. Off come my glasses. Off comes my belt. Off come my shoes.