Showing results by author "Parmy Olson"

In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault by Anonymous on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Splinter groups then infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia, and an elite team of six people calling themselves LulzSec attacked the FBI, CIA, and Sony. They were flippant and taunting, grabbed headlines, and amassed more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers.

Given how things go in Silicon Valley, Fitbit shouldn’t be around. It started selling wearable activity trackers when other hardware startups struggled for funding. Its founders hadn’t sold a single gadget when they shipped their first product and had no clue how much it would cost. Last year Apple launched a smartwatch that was to blow all other wearables away. Instead, Fitbit remains the biggest device seller by shipments, and its founders, James Park and Eric Friedman, raised $841 million in one of 2015’s most successful IPOs.

Kik Messenger is a huge hit with teens - and a sudden threat to Facebook in the race to create the world’s mobile operating system. The company’s 28-year-old founder thinks his bots give him the edge.

After flat-packed furniture and streamed music, Sweden’s latest big export could be an alternative to your credit card.

Every Friday just after lunch, the videogame developers at Bossa Studios in London’s East End take a break from all the coding to try out their own work.

Under Armour’s Kevin Plank spent almost $1 billion on fitness apps to outdo Silicon Valley. He’s under a lot less pressure than they are. The gadgets are only there to move more apparel.

It was a dry summer’s evening in 2011 when Russian internet investor Yuri Milner sat down for dinner with Richard Liu, the founder of an up-and-coming Chinese e-commerce company called JingDong 360.