Browsing: In-depth

Microsoft, fresh from concluding its acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services business, has announced it will discontinue the handset maker’s Asha and S40 feature phones, as well as, perhaps less surprisingly, the Nokia X Android phones, over the next 18 months. Feature phones and particularly the Nokia

A Japanese messaging app called Line has filed for an initial public offering valued at nearly US$10bn. For an app almost unknown outside Japan it’s an audacious move. However, messaging is there simply to suck you into Line’s mobile world, where the real profits are made. Unlike its rivals, it is already

The saga of Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s appointment as the permanent chief operating officer of the SABC, after an unacceptably long and controversial tenure acting in the same position, has united South African political parties — including the ANC — in ways no issue has in recent times. A broad range of the public and organisations

The pain, it seems, is not over for former Nokia workers as their new employer, Microsoft, prepares to cut its workforce by a massive 18 000. Microsoft has not announced where all of these cuts will come from, but

Pretoria-based Desert Wolf made international headlines last month after it emerged that it had developed a drone capable of showering pepper spray on rioting crowds and claiming the technology could be used in “preventing another Marikana”, in reference to the violent protest in August 2012 where 34

The current debate over the right to be forgotten, spurred by a European Union ruling that allows people to stop certain Web pages from appearing in search results, is proof – if further proof was required – of the distinct form of public life that is being created by the Internet. Our digital identities are shaped by how

Mobile phones have become such an important part of our daily lives that they’ve started adopting our microorganisms, according to research published recently in PeerJ. James Meadow and colleagues from University of Oregon used DNA sequencing to compare bacteria living on

The magnitude of Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s power was revealed this week when cabinet was apparently told that his permanent appointment as SABC chief operating officer was not up for discussion. The Mail & Guardian was reliably told – by sources in government and the tripartite alliance – that a minister

Zapper, a locally developed smartphone application that facilitates secure smartphone payments, has been launched in South Africa after the company behind it decided to explore international markets first. The app has already been launched in the UK, Australia, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands

Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent, announced this week that it has developed a prototype technology, called XG-Fast, which it used to transmit speeds of up to 10Gbit/s over traditional copper phone lines. The technology, which is expected to be launched commercially