Clickatell, a world player in the Online SMS mobile messaging gateway game, has scooped the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal Idea and Innovation award for Social/Economic Impact for providing a service that improves people’s daily lives. The event, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, featured winners from the biotech, software, hardware and consumer products industries. "The goal of the Idea and Innovation Awards was to recognise some of the most innovative products and people here in Silicon ...

The sound of birds chirping in a video of a man picking a wild salad and has apparently been identified as copyrighted material after being uploaded to YouTube. The company that YouTube's software thinks the apparently natural sound of birds chirping belongs to is music and soundtrack licensing firm Rumblefish. The user who uploaded the video posted a complaint about the incident on the YouTube forums, asking if it was a common occurrence: I posted a video which is basically ...

Mozilla’s pretty big on open source. The existence of a number of its products depends on it. Hardly surprising then, that it’s betting that the open Web will soon be coming to a device near you. The company claims that its goal is to “further the cause of promoting an open, people-centric Web for consumers and developers across all devices and platforms”. Today it announced a couple of partnerships which it claims are critical to achieving this. The first will ...

No matter what your thoughts on Android might be, you can’t deny that it’s done a pretty good job in a couple of very important metrics when it comes to gauging a mobile OS’ success: getting onto devices and having a big app store. The latest figures, announced at Mobile World Congress today, only underscore how quickly the OS has grown. According to Android founder and Google SVP, Mobile and Digital Content Andy Rubin, there are now some 300-million devices ...

According to Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, the size of our transistors will need to have shrunk to a single atom by 2020. In a massive leap into the future, researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne have created a controllable transistor engineered from a single phosphorus atom. This is not only important for the future ...

Much has been said about the recent online spat between Standard Bank and First National Bank (FNB). If it really can be called a spat, since FNB hardly reacted to the attack. Both the official FNB account @rbjacobs and the FNB CEO @michaeljordaan chose to "remain above it all". In truth, the actions of Standard Bank seemed to mobilise an army of avid FNB fans who condemned the actions of the bank. The allegations were rebuked with seeming religious fervour and ...

YouTube abounds with information, some useful, some completely useless, and some that defies all reason to exist. You can find videos on how to pour beer, shower and tie your shoes in the correct way. Who knew that you’d been doing it wrong all this time? There are also hints on how to take apart an ATM, cheat on a test and stalk your ex-girlfriend. None of which is advisable, but you can still learn how to do ...

Throughout the world, and particularly in emerging market countries, the entrepreneurial landscape remains notoriously difficult to navigate, with an estimated 80% of small businesses failing to sustain themselves for a period of longer than five years. However, with an increasing percentage of jobs now being directly attributable to small business ventures, financial backers in both private and public sectors are slowly starting to acknowledge the substantial impact of entrepreneurial activity on a nation’s economy. Yet, in spite the rising global trend ...

The Toshiba Portégé R380-10R is the first “Ultrabook” (I use inverted commas because the term sickens me) I’ve managed to lay my hands on. It’s thin, dangerously fast and exceedingly powerful. The benchmarks, which I’ll discuss later, paint the picture of laptop ahead of the curve. Let’s find out how I fell in love with the Portégé R380-10R. Overall design For a GPB£1 599 (approximately R19 200) laptop, the crazy price seems unjustified by the flimsy design. The screen, and the hinges attached ...

Adobe’s photo editing program, Photoshop Touch, is now available for iPad 2. The app was only scheduled to be released today, but reports say it was briefly available in the Australian and New Zealand app stores over the weekend, before being removed ahead of the worldwide release. Photoshop Touch, which was previously only available for Android tablets, is a touch-optimised version of the photo editing program with support for many of the basic tools that users accustomed to the desktop version ...