Ina Fried

Incarcerated people often have limited access to technology and pay exorbitant rates for even basic communication tools, like phones. The Last Mile, a nonprofit organization established more than a decade ago to teach entrepreneurial skills to those in correctional facilities, pivoted to web development classes in 2014 because it found those skills were most effective in helping people find jobs after their release.

How Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft make their revenue today shapes the battles they will fight tomorrow. For years, the largest tech companies each had their own fiefdom where they garnered the lion's share of revenue and profits. While tech companies competed at the edges, the market was big enough that each had plenty of green fields to expand into. They might step on each other's toes, but they took pains — and sometimes struck deals — to steer clear of the others' core businesses.

For nearly a decade, veteran technologist Steve Perlman has been

Global standards ensure that things like smartphones and laptops — and even the internet itself — work across borders. "Standard bodies are essential to ensure interoperability which is critical to achieving 'economies of scale' and technology reach the masses," wireless consultant Chetan Sharma told Axios.  "Geopolitical tensions have a real prospect of splintering the Internet and the wireless industry and the emergence of completely decoupled supply chains and ecosystems around the world," Sharma said.

Much of Africa has gotten a taste of the internet thanks to cellular technology, but high-speed access remains scarce on the continent thanks to a lack of consumer spending power and a fractured, unreliable power grid. Cassava Technologies, a spinout of an African telecommunications firm, aims to change that equation. Africa is home to 54 countries and 1.3 billion people and covers an area larger than India, China and Western Europe combined. That's too big a chunk of the planet to be stuck with spotty, expensive internet access. Much of the continent now has cellular access.

Former White House National Security Council official Gen Robert Spalding wrote a 

A coalition of nonprofits debuted HowToStopFacebook.org, a fresh push to encourage greater government regulation of the social networking giant aimed at forcing the company to change its business model.

Thanks to a multipart Wall Street Journal series this week, we have learned about a number of the company's challenges based on internal reports and documents written by Facebook employees sounding alarms. Facebook has argued that the Journal's information is ou

Nations and regions with wildly differing political systems and cultures have converged on a shared set of responses to the power of big tech firms: rein in the companies, avoid dependencies and subsidize critical networks and technologies. China, which has long been accused of protecting domestic companies, has recently been 

The smartphone became what it is by combining the functions of a host of other devices—telephone, camera, web browser, handheld games, music player—into one package. Now that process is moving in reverse.