A week in retrospect…
The global association of mobile operators (GSMA) announced on Wednesday that it is cancelling this year’s edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s largest mobile trade show. The decision was taken after several industry giants like Amazon, Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom pulled out for fear of the newly baptised COVID-19 virus.
The announcement comes as a huge financial blow for the city of Barcelona and for many smaller consumer electronics companies that rely on the show to debut their new devices and make most of the year’s deals.
Interestingly, it’s business as usual for other global trade shows of similar scale being held right now, like Amsterdam’s ISE. Multiple companies that cancelled their attendance to MWC are currently exhibiting their products and solutions at ISE, suggesting fear of the virus is not the only factor at play here.
Good and bad news fo ther UK’s tech sector. First the bad ones.
We learned this week that British tech firms ended 2019 with the worst quarterly results since 2012. The bump in the road seems to have been motivated by the political uncertainty surrounding the country’s geopolitcal future.
Don’t panic, though. The UK’s tech industry is doing great. In fact, it registered the tech world’s biggest salary raises in 2019. Even ahead of San Francisco and New York.
Meantime, in Switzerland…
What’s the easiest way to crack a country’s encrypted communications? Well, of course — to secretly buy the company selling them encryption services in the first place.
At least that’s what the CIA and the West German government did with the Swiss company Crypto AG. In what the CIA itself describes as “the intelligence coup of the century,” the U.S. intercepted other countries’ communications for decades.
The whole thing started with mechanical encryption devices and ended in 2018, when ubiquitous cyber-encryption services brought the Swiss firm to bankruptcy.
Lastly, if you’re working on apps for Windows, here’s a friendly reminder that Microsoft released this week a new dev toolkit for its dual-screen OS, Windows 10X.
Dual and foldable screens are the latest fad. Will they last?