Self-tracking, body hacking, life-logging, wearables, the quantified self — you may have heard these terms being thrown around a lot in the past year thanks to companies such as Fitbit, Nike+ and Jawbone. It was these three companies that were largely
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the phrase that’s launched a thousand editorials, most of them decrying the manifest evils of the insatiable 1%. But a large part of this increased inequality is driven not by greed or manipulation, but by technology
There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
Cameroon’s government is hanging on to its monopoly state telecommunications provider, Camtel, and the result is that the country now has some of the highest international and national wholesale fibre rates on the continent. The country refused World Bank funding because it
The year has not started well for advocates of net neutrality, the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, without discrimination. A US federal court struck down a key part of the Open Internet Order, a set of Federal Communications Commission regulations
We are living through a privacy tipping point. Technology is changing dramatically what is possible in terms of surveillance, monitoring, persistence, analysis. We are cracking open the lid of Pandora’s Box. We still don’t really know what’s in the box. Maybe the benefits of the
Biological viruses are among the most rapidly evolving organisms on our planet. The same is true of computer viruses, except that malevolent human organisations are driving this evolution, not natural selection. The most recent strains of these digital pathogens are evidence that virus
In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate to meet a range of really smart South African entrepreneurs who are doing incredibly exciting stuff in the technology space, often with relatively few resources. Despite all the doom and gloom that is our politics, and despite the poor state of
Given the upcoming Protection of Personal Information (Popi) Act, retailers have to be prepared to deal with customers’ questions about the type and amount of personal information that they are collecting, why they are collecting it and how they intend to protect it against abuse
Last year proved to be a little quiet on the technology front. Internationally, there were few major developments, at least in consumer electronics. Manufacturers continued to refine their televisions, smartphones, notebooks and tablets rather than cracking
