The Mars One programme is offering civilians, including South Africans, the opportunity to create a human colony on Mars. Is this a revival of the golden age of discovery, when explorers left their homes to begin new civilisations? Or is it a “suicide mission” in which people die in space while we watch from
Communications regulator Icasa looks set to lose four of its councillors in the next few months. William Currie and Joseph Lebooa are set to leave when their contracts come to an end on the 30 September, while William Stucke
President Jacob Zuma’s daughter, Thuthukile, may have made history as South Africa’s youngest head of a minister’s office. From a lowly public liaison officer to the powerful position of chief of staff within two months at the age of 25, she now earns almost a million rand a year. Her dramatic rise to the position, which
The Gauteng provincial government has revealed more details about its plans to wire up the province to broadband. It is starting the project by connecting its core sites to a 1 600km fibre network. The province has also announced plans
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
