Google South Africa will announce on Friday the launch of a local child safety initiative. The search giant says that it and its partners will create a safe cyberspace for children to engage with technology as well as empower parents and guardians with tools to help them choose what content their children see online. Partners include the South African Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities (DWCPD), the Department of Communications, the Film and Publications Board (FPB), youth-based social network ...

Facebook has opened up operations at its new Dubai offices, aimed specifically at expanding its operations in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena). In a statement made at a press conference in the Gulf emirate, the social network said that its Mena team "will work with brands across the region to help them harness the power of the world's largest social network". Joanna Shields, Facebook's vice president and managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the network has some ...

We called it. After Google bought out restaurant review site Zagat in 2011, we said that it signalled the company had "good taste" and that Google+ would become "a repository for your Google user data". The company's announcement that it would be scuppering Google Places and replacing it with Google+ local, which it calls "a simple way to discover and share local information featuring Zagat scores and recommendations from people you trust in Google+", shows just how far we've come ...

As a technology Near Field Communication (NFC) has been kicking around for a while now -- Nokia's 6131 was the first NFC-enabled phone and launched all the way back in 2006 -- but mass adoption has been slow. All that's about to change. According to a new report from tech analysis company Juniper Research, more than one in four mobile users in Western Europe and the US will make in-store payments using NFC by 2017. That's massive growth, considering that ...

It was inevitable. Google is now letting Orkut users link to their Google+ profiles. This effectively means that people will be sharing their posts on both social networks. Except, the integration goes a little deeper than that. In an official blog post, the internet giant says: After you link your profiles, your Orkut profile photo and name will be the same as your Google+ photo and name. In addition, you will be able to share all your public Google+ posts ...

You may have heard that popular link-shortening service Bit.ly has had a bit of a redesign. Or maybe you were just made aware of that fact when you logged in to your account and everything was all over the place. Ok, so the old Bit.ly wasn't on my list of the top 10 most beautifully designed sites on the web, but it was functional. There was a nice big bar at the top where you pasted your link, it shrunk before ...

Everyone is suing everyone. Everyone is upset with everyone. Everyone is blaming everyone. Get over it. It’s history. The biggest IPO since Google has happened. Some made millions. Others lost even more. Someone got it wrong, and they’re to blame, right? It’s doubtful that this was some deep-rooted, intricate, secret conspiracy by investment banks to overprice Facebook stock. But the mispricing cost it. Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters (and the others) spent billions propping up the stock price to ensure that ...

Trust. The word gets bandied about a lot when talking about the web today. We want people to trust our systems. Companies are supposedly building “trusted computing” and “designing for trust”. But, as sociologist Coye Cheshire, Professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley will tell you, trust is a thing that happens between people not things. When we talk about trust in systems, we’re actually often talking about the related concepts of reliability or credibility. Designing for trustworthiness Take trustworthiness, for ...

For decades, the realm of science fiction has portrayed inconceivable concepts and technologies as innovations just within our grasp. From Jules Verne’s musings on lunar travel, a century prior to Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, to Arthur C. Clarke’s orbital satellites in 1945; fanciful and fantastic literature has helped to prepare us for the technological revolutions we are currently experiencing. Today, this notion has particular relevance to the consumerisation of technology. For years, we imagined a world in ...

No purchase decision happens by chance. Every thought leading up to why you need the product -- from the rational versus emotional arguments about what the product will offer to the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits -- are all weighed up and part of a very complicated decision-making process. It's all about questions Things like: "Do I need it? Why do I need it? Can I afford it? Can I get it cheaper? What will my friends think? What will my mom ...