For the better part of a decade, the US has been in a slump. Its unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, its growth rate even more stubbornly low. Its government is deadlocked, its debt is rising quickly and its populace is largely gloomy about the future. And yet, at least in one city, the optimism is palpable
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The share price of BlackBerry, the long-suffering smartphone manufacturer until recently known as Research in Motion, leapt higher on Monday on renewed speculation that China’s biggest PC maker, Lenovo, could make a play for the company. BlackBerry’s share price shot
South by Southwest (SxSw, or “South By” as those in the know refer to it) is now in its 20th year of existence, and more than ever the premier gathering for those who work in the interactive, digital arena. Running from March 8 to 17, it is being held in Austin
The proposed tightening of the VAT net on digital goods could lead to a price increase for consumers and an administrative burden for the foreign suppliers of such goods. Foreign businesses and providers of digital goods in South Africa will be required
The rocket is 10 storeys tall. As we watch, it ignites and rises slowly skyward on a tongue of flame. A few hundred metres into the air it stops and slowly descends again, landing gracefully on the same launchpad it just left. Elon Musk smiles ecstatically at his audience, like a proud father at the birth of a
Ladies and gentleman, we have a price war. South Africa’s mobile operators are competing more aggressively with one another on price than at any other time in the industry’s 20-year history. Prepaid rates, in particular, have tumbled. And, whatever telecommunications industry bosses argue
When major corporate brands start bashing each other over the head in public, you know that commercial rivalry between them has reached an intense level. This is exactly what’s happening in South Africa’s mobile industry, where Vodacom, MTN and Cell C have taken to sniping at each other at every
It reads like a bad spy novel: a secret unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is accused of spending the last seven years covertly infiltrating – or hacking – over a hundred large US corporations and stealing terabytes of sensitive data from their computer systems. Unit 61398 of the
Fans of the open-source Firefox Web browser, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, have long enjoyed the “Easter egg” in the software that takes a dig at Microsof t and its browser, Internet Explorer (IE). Typing in “about:mozilla” in the address bar has always brought up some clever
Remember the late 1990s, when everyone was predicting the end of “bricks and mortar” businesses? The Internet was going to make all that tedious infrastructure redundant, according to Web prophets. Pity they didn’t see the dot-com crash coming. And now, in a delicious piece of irony, Google is