Well-known entrepreneur and investor and former Google SA boss Stafford Masie believes near-field communication (NFC) technology will fail as a mainstream transactional platform and local banks’ attempts to implement systems based on it are “farcical” and offer “no value”. NFC is a set of standards that
The ZA Tech Show holiday crew of Andy Hadfield, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard and Simon Dingle run through TechCentral’s International Newsmakers of the Year list. They pick their top technology products and news stories from 2011
Super 5 Media, formerly known as Telkom Media, still wants to offer pay-TV services to South Africans, more than three years after first being licensed, and has requested yet another extension from the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to launch its products. In a notice published in the Government Gazette
MTN has awarded its group president and CEO Sifiso Dabengwa 111 600 shares worth R15,9m. The shares vest in three years in accordance with the group’s share plan in terms of which certain performance targets must be met. The options were awarded at a share price of R142,12. At the same time, the group
Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin does exactly what it promises to on the tin. It’s a rollicking, world-spanning adventure that does a respectable job of bringing Hergé’s beloved boy reporter to the big screen. The Belgian comic writer and artist’s
It was easy to overlook the first report of trouble brewing in Tunisia. According to a Reuters article dated 19 December 2010, “hundreds of youths” were “angered by an incident in which a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, had set fire to himself in protest after police confiscated the fruit and vegetables he was
There was a time when projectors were the almost exclusive domain of big companies and those with money to burn, as a decent model cost as much as a small car. With prices falling, however, they’re becoming increasingly popular as a television alternative or an addition to the travelling salesman’s wheelie-bag
In a bus jouncing through arid Karoo hills, Prof Justin Jonas patiently tried to explain some of the theories and tenets of our universe — the Big Bang, the expansion of our universe and what we know of other things such as dark energy. “The latest Nobel prize in physics was basically for confirming that there is
It is a perversion of SA’s broadband sector that wireless players punch above their weight. More than 21m South Africans use a wireless connection to access the Internet — with a tablet, smartphone or dongle — whereas fewer than 800 000 subscribe to an ADSL broadband connection. This is according to the Organisation for Economic
It has been a lively year for technology, despite the bad state of the world’s economy. Technology is now so intrinsic to both business and personal life that it might appear recession-proof. But this high-level view masks the Darwinian ferocity of the battles raging between the tech titans. The year 2011 will be remembered as