If 2011 was the year of the tablet computer, 2012 looks set to be the year of the Ultrabook, chipmaker Intel’s term for next-generation, ultra-thin and portable laptops running Windows. But are these machines a desperate reaction from a PC industry trying
In Douglas Adams’s famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of science-fiction books, interstellar species use Babel fish — “small, yellow, leech-like” creatures that feed on “brain-wave energy” — to translate speech in real time. A team of developers at Google is
Well-known entrepreneur and investor and former Google SA boss Stafford Masie believes near-field communication (NFC) technology will fail as a mainstream transactional platform and local banks’ attempts to implement systems based on it are “farcical” and offer “no value”. NFC is a set of standards that
It was easy to overlook the first report of trouble brewing in Tunisia. According to a Reuters article dated 19 December 2010, “hundreds of youths” were “angered by an incident in which a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, had set fire to himself in protest after police confiscated the fruit and vegetables he was
In a bus jouncing through arid Karoo hills, Prof Justin Jonas patiently tried to explain some of the theories and tenets of our universe — the Big Bang, the expansion of our universe and what we know of other things such as dark energy. “The latest Nobel prize in physics was basically for confirming that there is
The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to simulate the human brain using supercomputers to allow neuroscientists, biologists, physicists and computer scientists to better understand the brain and to provide them with the tools to simulate diseases and, hopefully, come closer to alleviating
And here they are. TechCentral’s top five newsmakers of 2011. Our “Newsmakers of the Year” award is presented to individuals we believe had the biggest impact on SA’s technology sector in the past 12 months. For the most part, they’re also the the people who made the headlines during the
Another tumultuous year is almost at an end for the SA information and communications technology industry. It was a year of falling telecommunications prices, increasing competition, upheaval in politics and drama in the regulatory environment. Our “Newsmakers of the Year”
The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) has begun the process of opening up so-called “high-demand spectrum bands” that will eventually pave the way to the introduction of fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband networks in SA. The authority has decided to tie
The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) has finally moved to open up access to the “high demand” spectrum bands that can be used for next-generation mobile broadband services. The way it’s approaching it could help foster more
