For a company with a billion customers, Facebook can be quite stealthy. Its latest product, Facebook Home, could convert tens of millions of Android-powered phones into Facebook portals constantly connected to its services simply by encouraging users to install a piece of software. By doing so, Facebook has wheeled a
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Getting to grips with mobile interfaces, and serving targeted advertising using them, is key if Facebook is to make nervous shareholders happy. Its latest effort, Facebook Home, is built on top of Google’s Android operating system, a move both fitting and cheeky given Google makes its money in the same way as Facebook
By creating its own interface for Android phones, Facebook is taking the fight to its arch enemy, Google, ironically using search giant’s own cellphone operating system, Android, to do it.
Called Facebook Home, the software is a skin over Android that displays information such as a user’s Facebook feed, along with Facebook applications and messaging
Let’s make a mobile OS that will rival Apple’s iOS, and let’s give it away for free. Clever thinking by Google, at the time. As of early 2013, Google’s Android operating system has come to dominate smartphones worldwide, with Samsung taking the lion’s share of this dominance. The irony is
South by Southwest (SxSw, or “South By” as those in the know refer to it) is now in its 20th year of existence, and more than ever the premier gathering for those who work in the interactive, digital arena. Running from March 8 to 17, it is being held in Austin
Google’s video platform is making celebrities out of regular South Africans and generating income for them, with some making in excess of R100 000/month. Use of YouTube in South Africa is growing exponentially, particularly on mobile devices, which now account for a quarter
Fans of the open-source Firefox Web browser, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, have long enjoyed the “Easter egg” in the software that takes a dig at Microsof t and its browser, Internet Explorer (IE). Typing in “about:mozilla” in the address bar has always brought up some clever
Remember the late 1990s, when everyone was predicting the end of “bricks and mortar” businesses? The Internet was going to make all that tedious infrastructure redundant, according to Web prophets. Pity they didn’t see the dot-com crash coming. And now, in a delicious piece of irony, Google is
As they walked through the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens on a recent balmy evening, Justin and his two friends discussed safety and how they would react to being mugged. It was, after all, getting towards sunset, in a relatively isolated section of a big park that has seen its share of unhappy incidents
Founded in 1998, Canada’s Communitech is the sort of start-up incubator and new business creator any country would dream of. What started as a small group of entrepreneurs looking to support one another and other new businesses, the Communitech network now includes more than