Before reading this article, may we suggest you do the following experiment: take out your smartphone and if you still haven’t installed WhatsApp (one of the most popular instant messaging applications), go to the app store and download it. Now check who is online. We bet more than 50% of your contacts (including your boss, your

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom netted US$400m for selling his two-year-old startup to Facebook for $1bn. That’s according to a report by Wired, which cites sources indicating that Systrom holds 40% of the company he founded — an impressively large chunk for any entrepreneur at the time of exit, let alone one on his first company

Iran plans to disconnect itself from the Internet and replace popular services such as Google, Yahoo and Hotmail with homegrown, Iranian services, according to a report in the International Business Times. The IBT writes that Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for information and communications

The world’s largest social network has snatched up the Internet’s most buzzed about mobile app for photo-sharing for US$1bn, and the question on everyone’s mind is: why? The answer is obvious — it’s all about the photos — and it has been hidden in plain sight for weeks. On Monday, Facebook announced that it would acquire

Communications minister Dina Pule will host a national information and communications technology (ICT) policy colloquium later this month to review all of government’s policies governing the sector since 1994. It is being billed as the first comprehensive review of government ICT policy since the ANC took office in 1994

The way the world ends in Take Shelter is not in a flash of nuclear light or with the moon turning scarlet, but with lost jobs, mortgage foreclosures and medical insurance co-payments. It’s an apocalyptic thriller for our times, a film about the terrors of a life where there are no more financial certainties. Directed by Jeff Nichols and starring

While the rest of the world was waiting with bated breath for the release of the new iPad, my company was focusing its efforts a very different direction: building a version of our app for Windows 8’s Consumer Preview. We were cautious about this, as we’d built for the Windows 7 Phone, and initial adoption was undoubtedly disappointing. However, it looks

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced Facebook is acquiring Instagram in a deal worth US$1bn. The photo-sharing start-up recently passed 30m members. Particularly since picking up a slew of new users with its Android app launch, Instagram has become one of the most important for taking and sharing photos on mobile devices, so it makes perfect sense that Facebook would want the

SA is the third most capable African country when it comes to leveraging the benefits of technology to improve the lives of its citizens and grow its economy, behind Mauritius and Tunisia. Worldwide, SA is in an unimpressive 72nd place. This is according to the 2012 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Information and Technology Report

“Ideas so simple,” reads a cartoon on an elevator door, “that they feel like the completion of a thought,” continues its twin. Similar doodles adorn the walls of HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan, near Taipei, and business cards carried by the smartphone-maker’s staff. John Wang, the chief marketing officer, lays out a set of four: concentric