Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a gargantuan clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10 000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation
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
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
Online retailer Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire isn’t really a Kindle at all. It’s a 7-inch tablet designed to be a media consumption tool and little else. Arguably, this is what most people use any tablet for and it’s why, in the US at least, the fact that it also costs less than most
There’s a wave coming. Its first eddies were felt almost a decade ago, and by now it has already engulfed some outlying regions. But the general public has been largely unaware of its approach. Until now. I’m talking about the arrival of fully
With the announcement of the Kindle Fire on Wednesday, Amazon.com hasn’t just entered the tablet market aggressively: it may be about to change it fundamentally. The product is groundbreaking because it deftly addresses the two most pressing issues for
On Wednesday, US online retail giant Amazon will launch its first tablet computer, the Google Android-powered device that technology site TechCrunch reckons will be called the Kindle Fire. With dozens of tablets in the market already, the obvious question is
The rules airlines impose on the use of electronic gadgetry on their aircraft are incoherent and in many cases downright silly. It is time the industry applied consistent guidelines on the use of cellphones, e-readers and tablets on their flights. I’ve been travelling extensively around
US online retailer Amazon.com has opened a new customer service and development centre in Cape Town. The centre will support its customers in North America, the UK and Germany. It will also be home to the development team working
University of Cape Town alumnus Chris Pinkham has a long and illustrious career in the technology industry. He helped launch SA’s first Internet service provider, Internet Africa; he helped develop Amazon.com’s popular Elastic Compute
