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With Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, director David Lowery set out to create a film that would make the audience “feel like they’ve just heard an old folk song that they’d never heard before”. The notes of his ballad of doomed love are as stirringly familiar as he had hoped — yet they’re arranged and performed in a way that makes them feel utterly
As South Africa inches slowly towards migrating from analogue to digital terrestrial television, communications regulator Icasa has provisionally granted licences to five new pay-TV operators following an exhaustive hearings process that took place in 2013. The companies and consortia that have bid for the licences
A fortnight after rival MTN announced it was cutting its prepaid rates to 79c/minute, Cell C has introduced four new prepaid vouchers – on a promotional basis – to its product line-up. To be launched on 1 May and available until 31 July, the new Supacharge vouchers give consumers “free” rand value and flexibility
South Africans have been doing it for generations. Social lending, familiar to many in the form of groups like stokvels, has been a hallmark of how many people make do, outside of formal financial networks. Thanks to the Web however, social lending, also known as peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, has begun to take off in developed countries
Most people outside of technology circles have never heard of Vic Gundotra. The charming, bespectacled 45-year-old with the flawless Californian accent might be mistaken for a professor or a paediatrician. Yet many of us have used one or more of the products he championed during his eight years at Google. On 24 April, Gundotra
Should we be worried about Cell C? Despite a recent high court ruling that was at least partly in the mobile operator’s favour, noises coming out of the company aren’t exactly painting a rosy picture. There are several reasons for concern, chief among them the ability of the company to engage in a protracted price war while ensuring it
A solar-powered lamp, which doubles as a cellphone charger and as a fully fledged Wi-Fi hotspot, could soon bring safe lighting to poor users in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. The next model, also due for release soon, will offer wireless broadband. The “solar jar” project is the
One day, everything will be data. Voice will not exist as a separate service needing different technology. The transition in developed countries has been relatively slow. However, at the international level, large amounts of calls now move through Internet protocol and multiprotocol label switching-based networks. Every year, consumer software
If you listened only to social development minister Bathabile Dlamini and the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa), you might believe that last week’s constitutional court judgment vindicated the agency. Rather, Sassa should be seriously embarrassed, and the judgment should give rise to grave concern about how the agency is