A hundred years after being popularised, the humble wristwatch is being reinvented for the smartphone era. Several exciting initiatives, including Pebble, a crowd-funded project that has raised more than US$10m, are set to emerge this year. Imagine lounging on
Communications department director-general Rosey Sekese has been placed on “special leave” by minister Dina Pule, apparently after having misled parliament’s portfolio committee on communications about her performance contract on two separate occasions last year. While there has been
What if I told you that modern life as we know it relies on a vast army of thinking machines? There are at least 50m of them on the planet, yet relatively few people would recognise one in a picture. I’m talking about servers – the powerful computers that underpin the Internet, accelerate scientific research
South Africa’s seemingly neverending migration from analogue to digital terrestrial television has been so beset by problems for so long that it would be almost comical if the repercussions for the country’s economy weren’t so serious. It’s been more than a year since South Africa
While titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google are grappling for global dominance, ordinary people around the world have begun tinkering with gadgets again. Just look at the Raspberry Pi. It’s barely bigger than a credit card and costs less than R250, but the Pi is a fully fledged computer. Hook it up to your TV and a
This year will be a pivotal one for the South African SMS industry as the issue of interconnection fees is resolved, and mobile networks charge each other for terminating application-to-person (A2P) SMS messages doing away with the vagaries of the gentlemen’s agreement between the operators that maintain
Speculation has been mounting in recent weeks that Apple is preparing a cheaper iPhone to help it expand more aggressively in emerging markets. The rumours had reached such a point that senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, this week moved to play them down. The
The new year in technology starts off with a bang with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. As in 2012, a lot of focus at CES this year is on innovation in television as manufacturers push to enormous screens with much higher resolutions. There’s almost a sense of urgency
Our economy and its industrial base is power intensive and South Africa has one of the highest power consumption-to-unit of gross domestic product ratios anywhere. Cheap and abundant energy has, for a long time, represented our comparative advantages and shaped our economy. It has allowed South Africa to avoid
From Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy S3 to Nokia’s Windows Phone-powered Lumia 920, it’s been a banner year for technology innovation and a real treat for gadget junkies. What, then, were the best tech toys of 2012? I’m fortunate enough in my job to
