Is the PC market set for a comeback or is it a case of a dead cat bouncing? New research from International Data Corp (IDC) suggests that PC sales in the Middle East and Africa (including Turkey) will end a “dismal run” of seven consecutive quarters of year-on-year declines in the second quarter of 2014. According to IDC, PC sales
Spare a thought for Google. In the wake of a ruling by the European court of justice, the Internet search giant has to set up extensive new machinery to deal with requests to take down embarrassing material. It all began when a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, tried to force the website of the newspaper
Researchers at Ford and Heinz are collaborating to develop a bioplastic using … tomatoes. They’re investigating the use of tomato fibres in developing sustainable, composite materials for use in vehicle manufacturing. Specifically, dried tomato skins could become the wiring brackets
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated how fines that are set too low create the wrong behaviour. Only if they are set right does the required modification occur. I suspect we have a case of this here in South Africa, with the recent universal service obligations imposed on our leading national telecommunications
Consumer electronics companies holding out for a “killer application” to drive the sale of smart watches are likely to be disappointed. That’s the view of Jonas Olsson, who heads the experience and design team for mobile accessories at Sony, where he focuses on wearable computing
Savannah Fund, a seed capital fund specialising in US$25 000 to $500 000 investments in sub-Saharan Africa, has made its first move into South Africa, buying into two Cape Town-based start-ups. The fund, which already has investments in East Africa and West Africa, has invested in e-commerce site
Someone may be reading all your e-mail. At both security agencies and cybercrime enterprises, thousands of geeks are busily sifting through e-mails that they have intercepted. This is happening every second of every day, around the world. Of course it’s highly unlikely that anyone at America’s National
In the mid-1990s, there were fewer telephone connections in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa than there were in Manhattan. What a difference two decades has made: by the end of this year, there will be more than 635m active telephone subscriptions on the sub-continent. That number is twice the population of
SpectraLink Wireless, with help from Facebook and Microsoft, has rolled out broadband coverage using television white spaces (TVWS) across campuses at All Nations University College and Koforidua Polytechnic in Koforidua, Ghana. The spectrum being used has been
Welcome to the 100th episode of TalkCentral. Join Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg for this landmark edition of TechCentral’s long-running podcast. In the show this week, Duncan and Regardt chat about the startling revelations from Vodafone this week about the ability of governments in many
