innovation

A Question and Answer session at Johannesburg's first Tech4Africa conference featured developers from some of the world’s best known tech companies, and revealed insights on everything from startups vs corporations, San Francisco’s tech community, mobile/web development to making browser upgrades a global warming issue. The panel was chaired by Andy Budd, UI guru and MD of Clearleft, who posed questions to Dustin Diaz, a Twitter user interface engineer, Joe Stump, the SimpleGEO founder and former Digg lead architect, John Resig, who ...

California seems to be on a constant roller-coaster of events – technological, economic and social. Strangely enough, the state keeps moving on as the American epicentre of high-tech industry. To technological entrepreneurs, California is synonymous with Silicon Valley, a place where brain-rich can become money-rich. To movie lovers, California is synonymous with Hollywood, where real life can become fantasy. In the 1980s, Silicon Valley defined California’s economy in particular and America in general. It was the first time in the history ...

An old World War II bomb shelter under a cathedral in Helsinki, combined with some brilliant thinking, will soon lead to the greenest databank on the planet and an innovative way to keep a city warm. Or at least that's what Juha Sipila, the project manager for Helsingin Energia, based in the Finnish capital seems to think. Server farms are so energy-intensive that some, like Google's, are reported to use as much electricity as a small city. Many ideas have been ...

While we carry on in our Anglophone world, assuming that English is the general lingua franca of the world wide web, it’s worth pointing out that English accounts for just under 28% in terms of usage in the web as of December 2009. Search interest in “translate” related keywords continues to grow and Google wants to break the language barrier. This is how they are doing it. Google Translate: Now on 57 languages as of this month and counting, Google Translate seeks ...

As we gradually approach the end of the first half of 2010, we are expecting to see more web 2.0 innovations and mobile-based platforms developed by Nigerian tech entrepreneurs. At this year's Barcamp Nigeria, coming up on 22 May at the University of Lagos, we also anticipate many new product launches. There is no doubt that Nigeria's startup scene is heating up. It deserves attention from the global webspace. Already, there are indications that an Android-powered tablet could be coming from ...

It sounds crazy, but it's true. There's a famous philosophical phrase that goes along the lines of "The more I know, the more I realise I don't know". I first came across it in my Philosophy II class as a freshed-faced student at Rhodes University. It speaks to the realisation that the more we discover about a subject, the more we uncover seemingly endless complexity and depth around that subject. So apply this to the web. In many ways it shows how ...

When it comes to news about internet startups, web trends and innovations, blogs are a way better source than traditional media. If you want to know what’s happening on the web, there are some key blogs that should form part of your daily reading. Most serious online fundis use at least 2 or 3 of the blogs below on a regular basis. They are a great indication of online trends and a good source for ideas: ReadWriteWeb: It’s an intellectual ...

Just noticed this latest widget from Digg, called the Arc. It's a graphic representation, like their swarm, stack and BigSpy, of who is selecting what stories on Digg. Stories arrange themselves around a circle as users digg them. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs. They also offer the Arc as a screensaver (clever). These kind of graphic representations can be put to good use by sites that have big volumes of traffic and content -- and, if done ...