Check this out. If you're a hardcore geek, you'll probably think it's the coolest thing you've seen this year. NASA today released a stop motion video of Curiosity's descent onto the Martian surface. It's by no means a state-of-the-art high-definition piece of cinematography. Once you know what it is though you can't help but be awed, especially when it kicks up a cloud of dust on landing. To make the video NASA stitched together 297 thumbnail images taken by the ...

Things could be about to get a lot hairier for Zynga. The game studio is about to face competition from Amazon, after the web giant announced the launch of its new social gaming product. Amazon is on something of a gaming run at the moment, having recently launched its cross-device platform GameCircle and MMO developer service GameConnect. The first title to come from Amazon Game Studios is called Living Classics. According to Amazon, the game is a “moving object game”, involving ...

With today's digital lifestyle, your online reputation is everything and it's important that you manage your image online continuously, aggressively, and actively, without ever being side tracked. This is easier said than done, unless you follow a certain process to effectively manage it. A solid understanding of all the social media channels you are using is vital if you want to be innovative and progressive on the social web. Being active on social media will help you to build your business, ...

In the last post of this series we looked at what the most popular hashtags in conversations around two of the most powerful tweeters in South Africa, Helen Zille and Jacob Zuma, revealed about the way politicians use Twitter. Our next piece of research went one step further by mapping and visualizing a large portion of the actual network of connections the underlies the South African Twittersphere. In our network, people were connected if one person followed another person. The way ...

Unless you've just woken up from a coma, or have been tracking dangerous animals in wild over the past few days, you're probably aware that NASA's Curiosity Rover landed on Mars. Millions watched the live stream, the NASA geeks went wild and people sent out some funny tweets. Standing out above them all though was Bobak, 'mohawked NASA dude' Ferdowski. The flight director, who changes his hairstyle for every new mission, has captured hearts around the world. And of course, once ...

So, you just forked out a ton of money for a new, shiny iPad. If, like me, this was your first introduction to the world of Apple, you’re probably staring at the screen, a little scared even to touch it. Taking it out the box is almost unthinkable! What if you should drop it? What if a seagull flying overhead happens to take aim right above it? The world is a scary, and potentially damaging place for an iPad. The very ...

Most of you are probably enjoying the Olympics, but perhaps in a manner quite different from you did for past Olympic Games. The folks at Google have crunched some numbers about what they call the first multi-screen Olympics, where fans are tuning in not just via television, but using mobile devices to find out what’s happening as well. According to the search giant, at moments during the Games, there were more tablet and smartphone searches than ones run on desktop computers. ...

You might recall that we weren't exactly enamored with Google's doodle on the opening day of the Olympic Games. It wasn't bad or anything, just really boring. Today's effort though is a very definite return to form. The doodle plays out as a fairly straightforward mini-game, with you as a hurdler. The controls are about as basic as you can get: Press the right and left arrow keys in rapid succession to run and space bar to jump. Once ...

Most people know Mark Zuckerberg as founder of Facebook. A lot fewer people know that one of his first projects prior to Facebook was a service called FaceMash. A new generation of Chinese hackers though, are much more interested in copying it than the 955-million strong social network. The site crudely pitted photos of Harvard's female student populace against each other and, just occasionally, farm animals. In order to get at those photos, his hoodiedness had to hack ...

So the web is 21 today, and what's a 21st without something unique to mark the occasion? This year, in celebration of this momentous occasion, a South African startup as created a tribute video to Sir Tim Berners-Lee to thank him for inventing the web. After many proposals to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", on 6 August 1991 Berners-Lee and Belgian computer ...