Pretoria and Cape Town are home to two of the most advanced forensic laboratories in the world, but the biggest limitation to their efficacy is the lack of a national and standardised DNA database. Major-general Adeline Shezi of the South African Police Service’s forensic services division says the country has
It’s been a good year for most technology stocks listed on the JSE. One notable exception is Gijima, whose share price has tumbled by more than two-thirds in the past 12 months as investors fret about the company’s future. It’s lost nearly half its value since it published its annual results in
In an ordinary-looking house at 18 Dennesig Street in Stellenbosch in the Western Cape, a company called HealthQ Technologies has built a “metabolic chamber” — a device used for recording oxygen consumption and carbon-dioxide production for measuring human metabolic activity
Technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie spent two-and-a-half years working on the Payment Pebble smartphone payment device before it was unveiled last week by retail banking giant Absa. The device was engineered and built by Masie’s Centurion-based company Thumbzup, which he wants
If you play music outside of your home or car and there are other people around to hear it, technically you owe the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) money. And it doesn’t matter if the music is recorded or from the radio. The same holds true if you run
I used to be one of those people. You know the type. Every time people mentioned how great their digital reader was, I would go on some long rambling explanation about how I don’t get e-readers and prefer the tangible experience of holding a book in my hands. I am no longer that person
Under ordinary circumstances, Wilmot Prusent only speaks about Eskom to complain. The electricity bill for his five-bedroom home in Summerset Estate, Midrand, has escalated to R2 500 in the average month. “All they ever do is raise our rates, raise our rates,” he grumbled. Recently
The divide between emerging and developed markets in terms of smartphone penetration is set to grow wider, new research suggests. Telecommunications equipment company Ericsson expects that by 2018, almost all handsets in Western Europe and North America will be smartphones
Attila Vitai, the newly appointed MD of Telkom’s mobile division, has arguably one of the toughest jobs in South Africa’s telecommunications industry. It’s his task to turn the country’s fourth mobile entrant into a viable and, eventually, a profitable enterprise in what has become a highly competitive
MTN and Pick n Pay are poised to launch a mobile bank. Called Tyme, which stands for “take your money everywhere”, the venture will piggyback on the banking licence held by Bank of Athens. Tyme hopes to make mobile money transfers and mobile banking commonplace in South Africa, where consumers
