As 2014 closed, Uber stood at a crossroads: the negativity is unlikely to thwart Uber¡¯s popularity, rather - if GroupOn taught us anything - it¡¯s this: that Uber will be forced to grow up. An embarrassing internal memo indicated where the firm had been, stressing ¡°superpumpdness¡± as one of the qualities sought in staff.Reports also emerged how the ride-sharing firm had actively lobbied politicians and pressuring bureaucrats to relax or kill legislation on that would have affected driver background checks or stopped it operating.With the investment going south, Uber¡¯s backers stumped up another $1.2bn - cash that CEO Travis Kalanick said would go on Uber¡¯s ¡°internal growth and change.He said Uber would learn from others who¡¯ve gone through ¡°similar challenges. Kalanick promised a smarter and more humble company would be the result.2014 saw different fates unfold for social-network darlings Twitter and Facebook. The latter raked in billons in of dollars in ads-flingers¡¯ cash while the former shocked Wall St with falling revenue and warning of future misses ¨C all that as the anniversary of its 2013 IPO approached. Why so different? Facebook marked its 10th anniversary this year with 1.32bn users, yet it seemed to have cracked the mobile market and in so doing put behind it recent years¡¯ fears that the service had peaked.

For the smaller Twitter, revenue was up along with new user numbers ¨C but not enough. Also timeline views ¨C a measurement of ¡°engagement¡± and thus people¡¯s stickneyness for cash-happy advertisers ¨C was falling. All told this contributed to Twitter¡¯s continued losses and by October investors were dumping the stock they¡¯d clamored for 12 months before and by November even Twitter¡¯s top management was cashing out, selling $50m in personal holdings.Twitter has been trying to change: notice the upsurge of ads and sponsored links and suggestions over who to follow and alerts about who was Tweeting what?Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel offered his theory for Twitter¡¯s problems: Management smoking pot.To people like Thiel, Twitter¡¯s potential is the millions of users whose free-loading status entitles them to being exposed to the full glare of advertisers. Same goes for Facebook. Interestingly, both firms arrived at the same point in 2014 to try and find new ways to synthesise more money from their free assets: a buy button.

Twitter and Facebook began testing the addition of a button on admen¡¯s Tweets and Facebook posts, letting you carry out one-click purchase without the inconvenience of leaving that Tweet or Facebook post. Their interest came as the payments market itself got stirred up with the entry of Apple with its Apple Pay product, a contactless payment system for iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch.But the bounds of what¡¯s possible and what¡¯s permitted were tested by Facebook who it emerged had conducted an experiment on 700,000 users over a period of one week in 2012 without their knowledge or consent. Facebook, along with two US universities, had manipulated users¡¯ news feeds to control the emotional experiences and gauge how their posting behavior changed as a result. Facebook countered by painting it as a data-privacy issue, saying no unnecessary data had been collected ¨C but users were still furious. The experiment left British and Irish data watchdogs investigating the US giant ¡­ yet the guinea pigs continued to use their free Facebook.

• Acer Aspire 5755zg Battery


• Acer Aspire 5820 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5820g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5910g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5920 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5920g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5930 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5930g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5935 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5935g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5940g Battery


• Acer Aspire 5942 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5951 Battery


• Acer Aspire 5951g-9816 Battery


• Acer Aspire 6530 Battery


• Acer Aspire 6530g Battery


• Acer Aspire 6920-6864 Battery

13 years after BT spun out its mobile phone venture O2, BT wanted back into the game. The telco hosted a reverse auction to buy back O2 or take EE. Eventually, BT brushed off O2 to enter exclusive talks to take EE. EE is Britain's largest mobile network with 24.5 million customers and brings a ready-made 4G network infrastructure to the table, but that comes at a price: EE is a bigger firm and will be harder to integrate into BT than O2, while it's also more expensive; the deal is priced ¡ê12.5bn.BT was a mobile pioneer: it launched O2 in 1985 as a joint venture with Securicor. The new network was then called Cellnet, back when mobile phones were bricks owned only by YUPPIEs. BT bought out Securicor and rebranded BT Cellnet but then spun out the firm against a backdrop of collapsing profits, with Spanish carrier Telefonica buying O2 for ¡ê17.7bn in 2006.O2 went on to leapfrog BT to become the UK¡¯s biggest carrier ¨C 21 million mobile users versus 19.4 million on landlines for BT. It was a source of pain and regret for BT but what¡¯s changed and why would BT now want to go back? The answer, apart from profits: O2¡¯s subscriber base, as BT tries to expand out of its core business of phone and into content, hence all those Premier League football deals in recent years.

Mobile means growth in content delivery. For all the pros of EE, it's O2 that's been growing fastest, though: O2's number of mobile subscribers grew in 2014 by one million while Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3 collectively added just 400,000. Getting dibs on Apple¡¯s iPhone had helped O2.Lenovo recently launched the new Yoga 3 Pro, but the non-Pro Yoga 2 models are still widely available and this 13-inch model looks pretty tempting at ¡ê700. The full-HD touchscreen display is one of the best we¡¯ve seen at this price, with an IPS panel that produces a really bright, colourful image with wide viewing angles.This panel will work a treat for streaming video or doing a spot of photo-editing and, like all the other Yoga models, you can flip the screen over so that it acts as a stand while you¡¯re watching video, or fold it right back so that you can hold it like a tablet.The Haswell Core i5-4200U processor runs at 1.6GHz, and is backed up by 4GB of memory and a 500GB hybrid drive. You won¡¯t find an optical drive on this baby, unless it¡¯s hanging off a USB cable. While on paper the Yoga 2 has a fairly modest specification, but it produced scores of 2288 and 2624 when running the Home and Work suites in PCMark 8, which are more than adequate for routine tasks such as web browsing or running MS Office.

• Acer Aspire 6920g Battery


• Acer Aspire 6930 Battery


• Acer Aspire 6930g Battery


• Acer Aspire 6935g Battery


• Acer Aspire 7100 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7110 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7220 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7230 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7250 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7250g Battery


• Acer Aspire 7251 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7251g Battery


• Acer Aspire 7315 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7330 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7520 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7520g Battery


• Acer Aspire 7530 Battery


• Acer Aspire 7530g Battery


• Acer Aspire 7535 Battery

Certainly one of the most smartly designed laptops in this group, it measures up at just 17.5mm thick and weighing a very portable 1.7kg. It also clocked in at 5hours 32mins when running the PCMark battery test benchmark, so you should be able to get close to a full day¡¯s work out of it for less demanding tasks.We were tempted to include Toshiba¡¯s Kira laptop here, as that impressively manages to combine a Retina-esque 2560x1440 display with the lightweight portability of the MacBook Air. But when it comes to sheer High-DPI the P50T-B outguns all its competition with a 4K display that packs 3840x2160 pixels into its 15.6¡± screen.Not surprisingly, the screen is a dazzler ¨C bright and colourful as you¡¯d expect, but it¡¯s the sheer detail and clarity of the image that really stands out. Photographers will love it, especially now that Adobe has announced High-DPI support for Photoshop.
Screen real estate on the Tosh (click to enlarge)
It¡¯s got the horsepower to handle high-def editing work too, with a quad-core Haswell i7 processor running at 2.5GHz (3.5GHz with Turboboost), 16GB of memory, 1TB hybrid drive, and both integrated HD 4600 and Radeon R9 M265X graphics processors.

Even more impressive is the fact that all this comes to a total price of just ¡ê1,299.00, which makes the P50T-B a bit of a bargain when compared to most of its High-DPI rivals. It even includes a Blu-ray drive so that you can watch your favourite films remastered in 4K.The only fly in that particular ointment is the limited battery life. Toshiba only quotes three hours and 15 minutes, and running PCMark 8 continuously drained the battery in just two hours and 45 minutes, which suggests that the P50T-B is primarily suitable for use as a desktop replacement laptop rather than a truly mobile workhorse.IT giants Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, SAP and IBM made billions of dollars in revenue in 2014. Their biggest headache this year, though, is how to ensure they keep on making billions into the future as growth is coming in new areas ¨C online services and tablets, and outside the traditional PC and server markets.After a year in the job Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made his big pitch - ¡°cloud first, mobile first.¡± Apps are now expendable ¨C so Office came to iOS and Android - with the platform now the crown jewels - the platform being Windows and Azure. Using apps and end points Microsoft now hopes to hoover up users¡¯ data. The big plan? Run data through machine learning and do a lot of data science to make money from that data while, also, selling those online services ¨C Azure, Office 365.