The role and importance of social media in world politics are growing and will continue to do so, says Alec Ross, senior advisor on innovation and technology at the US department of state in the office of secretary of state Hilary Clinton. Ross was

Altron subsidiary Bytes Technology Group is acquiring Unisys Africa, which is owned by Unisys of the US and local black empowerment company CyberKnowledge Systems Investments. The deal remains subject to competition authority approval in SA, Botswana and Namibia

With rumours swirling that Apple is on the verge of introducing its first flat-panel television product, possibly within weeks, Samsung Electronics used the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Tuesday to up the ante in the rapidly escalating war for the

Ikenna “Ike” Ouizo is the founder and CEO of TruSpot, a service he describes as the “Spotify for Africa”. Truspot, which offers Africa-specific content, is run out of Texas, but will move to its conceptual birthplace, Nigeria, later this month. The groundwork for TruSpot came in the

Korea’s LG Electronics kicked off the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas by unveiling a prototype of the world’s biggest television to use next-generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Though the technology remains prohibitively

Eskom has warned of a “very high” risk of rolling blackouts around the country, but was doing everything it could to avert it. “We are working very closely with our large customers to see if they can reduce their load, but the risk is very high. We are doing our

It’s the stuff of corporate legend. The Googleplex in Mountain View, California, about 40 minutes drive along Route 101 south of San Francisco, is the home of Internet search giant Google and more than 10 000 of its employees. Last Friday, TechCentral had the opportunity

Consumers can look forward to even cheaper broadband prices, with many new undersea cables set to come online within the next 18 months. It is unclear how much of a decrease is likely, but talk in the industry is of a 10% to 20% drop in local prices

In Douglas Adams’s famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of science-fiction books, interstellar species use Babel fish — “small, yellow, leech-like” creatures that feed on “brain-wave energy” — to translate speech in real time. A team of developers at Google is

Just as every hardware manufacturer has leapt onto the tablet computer bandwagon with varying degrees of success, so, too, they’re racing to get ultraportable laptop computers to market. Toshiba’s latest offering, the Portégé R830, offers great competition in terms of price and features, even