It may seem a tad unusual for a commercial giant like Microsoft to acquire an open-source company, but the computer behemoth has just announced precisely that: last week, it acquired open-source analytics firm, Revolution Analytics.

With more and more publishers trying to rely less on revenue from display ads, one UK tech publication is gambling that it can use its consumer tech reviews to direct visitors to e-commerce deals on the products featured in their articles and take a cut of any purchases it’s driven.

Will 2015 be the year that free social media marketing disappears in favour of paid amplification? Social media expert Chris Bishop, founder of digital media agency 7thingsmedia, believes the writing is on the wall for free social media.

This Wednesday, Microsoft will launch its campaign to persuade consumers they need Windows 10; however, according to The Telegraph’s technology boffin, Matt Warman, it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

The annual Las Vegas jamboree for gadget addicts, the Consumer Electronics Show, has come to a close and, a little surprisingly, one little gadget looks set to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of its first model to take the world by storm: the YotaPhone. Well the YotaPhone 2, to be precise – an Android smartphone with a traditional AMOLED screen on one side and a low-power electronic paper display (EPD) on the other.

The world of smartphone-distributed social media nearly tilted on its axis last October when an investment deal between Facebook and China’s stratospherically successful mobile handset maker Xiaomi came close to getting inked.

Mobile chat apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, Kik, Line and WeChat are being taken up by millions of people every day. But do they figure in the labours of traditional publishers in their ongoing efforts to move toward online platforms? Recent developments in the US and UK suggest that they do.

A quiet revolution is underway in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), and at long last it seems that it will favour good quality content writing above those dodgy tactics deployed under “old SEO” to manipulate crumby sites to rank better with search engines.

The start of the New Year is as good a time as any to speculate about what’s going to be big in the world of social media in 2015. And several top pundits (including Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans and venture capitalist Fred Wilson) believe that they know the answer: messaging apps, which they think are set become ‘the new social media’ this year.

One of Apple’s most loyal supporters, programmer, writer and former CTO at Tumblr, Marco Arment, has kicked off something of a Twitterstorm by suggesting that the tech giant’s software is “nosediving” in quality. Maybe he’s got a point.