Backyard industrialisation has been tried; it was a miserable failure. During the so-called Great Leap Forward in China under Mao Zedong, peasants were encouraged to erect steel furnaces in their back yards. Predictably, most people had no idea how to build a mini steel plant much less make steel, and there was no market for their wares. The result was ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc generated less than half of its total quarterly revenue from sales of the iPhone for the first time since 2012 — a sign the company is entering life beyond its flagship product. While Apple reported a record $11.5 billion in sales of services in the fiscal third quarter, and demonstrated strong performances from wearables such as the ...

Bloomberg A voice software tech developer is suing Amazon.com, saying the e-commerce giant infringed on patents when developing software for the Alexa digital assistant. VB Assets LLC, which owns the rights to some of the technology developed by voice software pioneer VoiceBox Technologies, said in a lawsuit filed in Delaware federal court that Amazon infringed on six of its patents ...