There’s a forgotten secret about Apple: back in 1997, it nearly didn’t make it. Struggling for survival, it received blunt advice from Michael Dell (yes, he of Dell Computers) - shut down and give your money back to your investors. Fast forward to November 2014 and financial results show it topping the $700 billion value market cap, making it not only the most valuable tech company on the planet, but the most valuable public company per se, whatever industry you’re looking at.

The 193-strong Human Rights Committee of the UN General Assembly has approved a landmark resolution demanding internet privacy protection and urging governments to offer redress to people targeted by mass surveillance.

Remember when Google faced a barrage of criticism over its “Search Plus Your World” feature back in 2012? OK, maybe not – the row has died down now. However, the search giant seems to have taken the criticisms to heart (it was roundly accused of promoting its own content in search results ahead of potentially better results). German-based tech journalist Bernd Rubel was the first to spot a new development last week: Google’s Knowledge Graph now links to other social networks besides Google+.

As more and more digital content, from news feeds to video production, makes its way to the mobile channel, it came as little surprise to hear from Bing at the start of this month that it’s launched a new battery of mobile crawlers. They come complete with Bingbot Mobile User Agents, to enhance the support and recognisability of websites that aren’t responsively designed. But what do webmasters need to do to improve their mobile rankings with Bing?

Now here’s a little something to blow your mind: Google has developed new image recognition software that doesn’t just represent an object in the image as text (e.g., a motorcyclist) but actually tells you in a sentence what’s going on in any piece of image content it processes. Actual example: “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road” to describe an image of … you guessed it, a person riding a motorcycle along a dirt road). Its added verbs to the standard (and not especially useful) repertoire of nouns.

Don’t panic. This isn’t about Terminators taking over the world. But it is about a radical new form of computer architecture that has the potential to be a major game player in how we all access our digital content: HP’s (Hewlett-Packard’s) forthcoming new hardware platform, the Machine. And HP’s HP Labs Director, Martin Fink, has just announced that the first prototype could be operating by 2016.

There’s an interesting divide opening up about information privacy. As the UK Home Secretary Theresa May vows to re-introduce the ill-fated Data Communications Bill, pole-axed by her Coalition partners the Liberal Democrats because of its “chilling” reach into citizens’ privacy, the European Union and many ordinary US citizens are calling for greater privacy protections.

From its humble origins in 1994 as a kind of punk print magazine from Montreal, Vice Media is extending its digital repertoire even further via a new partnership with Live Nation which will see the creation of a new digital content platform straddling TV, mobile and the Web.

Could Apple be preparing to square up to Google in the world of search? OK, it seems pretty unlikely - a bit like David trying to get one in Goliath’s eye with a marzipan slingshot and a sprained wrist. That’s not meant to be insulting; it’s just a recognition of how massive the search giants really are out there. But Ghent-based web developer Jan Moesen has nonetheless noticed something interesting: Apple seems to be crawling websites with its very own automated bot.

A recent summit featuring representatives from Storyful (a social curation service owned by News Corporation), Time and Vice News has given an, at times, painfully honest appraisal of just how dramatically social media has changed professional journalistic coverage of conflicts around the world.