A Sandton hotel played host to a conference last week on “white-spaces spectrum”. For nontechnical people, it was a fairly arcane discussion. But what was being talked about could usher in the biggest revolution in telecoms since the mobile phone
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Ten years ago, world-renowned academic and activist Manuel Castells came to SA. It was not long after the publication of his seminal trilogy on the rise of the network society. From Silicon Valley to Yokohama, he had tracked the ways states can
Shortly after 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, a pall was cast over the technology industry. Internet companies ran out of funding and hit the wall, the Nasdaq crashed and is still valued at a fraction of what it was at the height of the
One look at the wild speculation that preceded Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of the iPhone 4S and the latest incarnation of its mobile operating system, iOS 5, is enough to tell you that everyone was expecting more. And with Apple’s share
Telkom did something last week no one thought it ever would: its Internet service provider, TelkomInternet, jumped onto the uncapped broadband bandwagon, adopting a market trend started 18 months ago by its rival, MWeb. The news came as a
There’s a wave coming. Its first eddies were felt almost a decade ago, and by now it has already engulfed some outlying regions. But the general public has been largely unaware of its approach. Until now. I’m talking about the arrival of fully
Have you ever considered how hard it is to actually do things? Build a bridge? How hard can that be? Write the Google algorithm? It’s just a string of words, piece of cake! Connect to the Internet? What could be easier? As an accountant, I tend to oversimplify and
More than 17 years after SA’s first democratic elections, politicians are still indecisive over how to extend connectivity into rural areas and bridge the so-called “digital divide”. Government continues to concoct ideologically confused plans. Instead, it should just get
Alan Knott-Craig Jr is looking for attention. He wants so much of it, in fact, that he’s just bought the attention of 40m people in 120 countries. Yes, I’m talking about the MXit acquisition. Last week, in a completely unexpected move, Knott-Craig swooped in and bought Africa’s biggest social
On Wednesday, US online retail giant Amazon will launch its first tablet computer, the Google Android-powered device that technology site TechCrunch reckons will be called the Kindle Fire. With dozens of tablets in the market already, the obvious question is