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
First National Bank on Monday said that non-FNB customers can now make use of its smartphone banking application to perform transactions through the inclusion of an e-wallet. Users of the bank’s “eWallet” can perform transactions such as buying prepaid airtime, data and prepaid electricity. They can also
A US computer salesman who supplied sensitive equipment to MTN’s mobile network in Iran has been jailed for violating US economic sanctions. The conviction is damning for the South African mobile giant, as it provides judicial corroboration that the company used sanctions-busting
Stellenbosch-based Mxit has said it will debut what it’s calling the first full-length feature film to premiere on a social network when it begins showing A Lucky Man, a film about former gang boss Ernie “Lastig” Solomon, this week. Mxit users can download the movie
An Irish media company has sold off its newspaper group in South Africa, including Johannesburg’s The Star, for US$227m (about R2bn) to a local firm. In a statement issued late on Sunday night, Dublin-based Independent News & Media said it sold its South African subsidiary to Sekunjalo Holdings
Telecommunications regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), has been dragged to court for not disclosing the status of a service provider accused of operating without a licence. Having been sent
Director Kathryn Bigelow did it with The Hurt Locker and she has done it again with Zero Dark Thirty: crafted an awards season-favourite film about the war on terror that has enraged both the American right and the left almost equally. In partisan times, studied neutrality is the most revolutionary
The SABC has been left red-faced over the loss of its planned 24-hour news channel on DStv after the well-connected Gupta family seized the gap. Few at the SABC appear to have been aware that the Gupta channel was even in the offing, although the broadcaster must have been in regular contact
In case you missed his first two contributions, Jerm (also known as Jeremy Nell) has joined the TechCentral editorial team. Jerm, whose current affairs cartoons are widely talked about, is contributing an exclusive tech-focused weekly cartoon, called Backspace. Jerm is a
BlackBerry 10 (BB10) certainly delivered on one of maker BlackBerry’s promises: the new operating system is startlingly different, not only to its predecessor BlackBerry 7, but also to anything else out there. Vivek Bhardwaj, head of BlackBerry’s software portfolio, tells TechCentral that there
