Professor of journalism and Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade has predicted that 2015 will see a number of regional newspapers moving their content wholly online, as print’s commercial viability continues to wither on the vine.

If you haven’t already started, it’s time to prepare: if your website isn’t mobile friendly by 21^st April, you can expect to be clobbered, even if the content of your articles or video production is top quality and you haven’t used any manipulative backlinking methods. Google’s new mobile friendly algorithm kicks in on that date.

If you needed some compelling evidence that social technology is changing the way we interact with one another, a new poll by Ipsos Mori and King’s College Fund provides it. Over a third of young people aged 18-24, a group notoriously known for deep indifference and even aversion to mainstream politics, say that what they read on social media will likely influence their vote in the upcoming general election.

So now we know, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Google is to build a new augmented reality OS based on Android, and it’s already assembled a team of engineers to do it. The search colossus, it seems, has thrown the gauntlet firmly at the feet of Microsoft, Samsung and Facebook.

In an intriguing development which suggests that tech firms are interested in exploring how suitable wearables will be for accessing digital content, news has broken that Apple has been permitting a select few to come in and test their apps on the Apple Watch ahead of the device’s launch – right inside its top secret Apple Watch lab at the Cupertino HQ

Europe’s planned new data protection law has been “mangled” by the Council of the European Union, according to the IT news source, The Register. Have ministers yielded to pressure from ISPs, big internet companies and security services to water down the original rules, which were designed to safeguard the personal information of EU citizens when in the hands of government and big business?

In the context of another tech boom, Apple has decided to bring the majority of its contract security staff in-house as permanent, full-time employees, according to a recent media report in The San Jose Mercury News (Apple is based in the Cupertino area just west of San Jose).

After two arduous years of restructuring, the Financial Times is advancing its thus far impressively successful transition from print to digital with a significant change in the way it charges for online content.

It’s hard to believe it, but 24^th February 2015 marked the fourth birthday of Google’s Panda algorithm: Panda 1.0 debuted on 24^th February 2011. Yup, it’s been with us that long. And it’s hard to dispute that it represented the most significant content quality algorithm the search giant has ever released, including Penguin.

A new study from UK market research firm BDRC Group suggests that UK brands are failing to make optimal use of Twitter to improve their performance (some of them even dismally so).