Tesla Motors has already established its electric cars as fast, well-sized and capable of competing with petrol cars in how far they can go without needing a recharge. Now, the US firm run by South African-born billionaire Elon Musk appears to have countered
The world is fighting a hidden war thanks to a massive shift in the technologies countries can use to attack each other. Much like the Cold War, the conflict is being fought indirectly rather than through open declarations of hostility. It has so far been fought without casualties
If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Physicists
One consequence of the Apple vs FBI drama has been to shine a spotlight on the security of smartphone lock screens. The fact that the FBI managed to hack the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter without Apple’s help raises questions about whether Pin
What a difference two years can make. The herd of private technology start-ups worth over US$1bn – dubbed “unicorns” – is looking decidedly skittish. Funding is drying up and the expected rivers of revenue have not yet begun to flow. On Friday
With the Panama Papers exposé perhaps we can now say the fortress walls of offshore secrecy are finally cracking. Such havens allow corruption and tax avoidance to take place on a massive international scale by some of the richest and most powerful
The recent announcement of the imminent opening of a rival stock exchange to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange caused considerable media excitement. It is indeed a historic development in South Africa’s economic history and is to
As government drags its heels on formulating a policy on so-called high-demand spectrum – the radio frequencies that can be used to deliver next-generation mobile broadband networks
South Africa’s big four retail banks have been steadily cutting the number of (costly) branches in recent years. That’s no surprise, given the shift in transactional banking to electronic channels. Those transactions that still need some form of physical
The launch this week of a smaller iPhone and a new iPad “underlines the extent to which Apple has lost the innovative edge”, according to a senior technology analyst. The new 4-inch iPhone SE, in particular, showed that Apple had lost the innovative
