Newly licensed pay-television operator Siyaya TV, which hopes to offer consumers a low-cost bouquet using digital terrestrial television transmission, has reportedly secured a R1bn broadcast deal for the rights to broadcast Bafana Bafana football games. According to the City Press newspaper, the deal gives Siyaya the rights

Based on a relatively obscure crew of characters in the Marvel comic book universe and made for a reputed budget of US$170m, Guardians of the Galaxy qualifies as a brave bet in today’s world of blockbuster film-making. It’s an exuberant B-movie with A-scale production values; a goofy cosmic adventure that disarms cynicism through

Walk into a mobile retailer today and you’ll be greeted by a wall of phones, many of them black, almost all of them drab slabs of plastic with large touch screens. Before Steve Jobs got onto a stage in San Francisco seven years ago and unveiled Apple’s first iPhone, cellphones came in all sorts of nifty shapes. There were candy bars, sliders

Crowdfunding has come a long way in its short history. Today, it is even changing the way we consume. What was once a way to give a largely ready product a helping hand on its final push to market has become a means for consumers to get involved with something still on the drawing board, or simply to buy innovative new products before they’re

There’s a revolution under way, and this one’s not being agitated by the working class, although they certainly have their part to play. It is being waged by banks, cellphone providers and entrepreneurs hoping to capitalise on a mobile commercial market that is estimated will be worth more than US$800bn by 2016 and have more than 400m users

It’s been a busy news week on the technology front. Your hosts Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg tackle some of the bigger developments in this week’s episode of TalkCentral. Items on the agenda this week include Vodacom’s relaunch of

Telecommunications and postal services minister Siyabonga Cwele has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish government’s final policy on digital terrestrial television migration. Cwele said in parliament in mid-July that he would publish the final policy within two weeks. There is no reference to the digital TV policy in this week’s

Rwanda has become the second country in sub-Saharan Africa, after Tanzania, to complete migration from analogue to digital terrestrial television. The nation switched off analogue broadcasts on Thursday night, while South Africa hasn’t even started commercial digital services. The New Times, a Rwandan daily newspaper, reported on Thursday that the

The City of Johannesburg has terminated the contract of CitiConnect Communications, the company tasked with running and commercialising its broadband project. The company managed BWired, the telecommunications operator set up by the city, with Ericsson, to run the project when it was launched. “It is unfortunate that we have had to

Motorola has not been a contender in the smartphone wars, at least not in South Africa, for the past two years now. Although the company has produced a few talked-about products for the international market, these phones have not reached our shores. But Motorola is a company with an impressive track record and its latest midrange smartphone