Google's new appointment of a 33-year-old Kenyan to manage its Africa policy has been described as a "coup" by authoritative US technology magazine FastCompany.Google recently appointed Ory Okolloh, an online activist and co-founder of Ushahidi, as Policy Manager for Africa. Ushahidi is a famed crowd sourcing site dedicated to information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping.Google’s appointment shows its confidence in Africa's digital growth and recognises the continent as a future tech giant.Okolloh is a TED fellow, ...

South African, Kjell Bismeyer’s clip entitled ,'Elephants swimming by moonlight', will be included in the film Life In A Day, a cinematic experiment which aims to capture life around the world in a single day.Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) recently completed work on the movie, drawing on 4,500 hours of footage sent in from 192 countries. The film was produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free UK in partnership with ...

In 2008 we saw the scales begin to tip with imports of data enabled phones being larger than that of non-data enabled phones. In 2009 we saw the undersea cables hit East and Southern Africa in a big way. In 2010 we saw the mobile operators get serious about data availability and cost packaging for everyday Africans.2011 is upon us, and with it brings a new type of data-enabled mobile user in Africa. It also brings the mobile web to ...

Global gadget sales may top one trillion dollars this year for the first time ever.Organisers at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in Las Vegas says that worldwide annual spending on mobile phones, computers, television sets and other items is expected to rise 10 percent in 2011 to 964 billion dollars."We may very well hit the trillion mark," said Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis for CEA, organiser of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES)."I'm bullish," Koenig told reporters. "That number ...

Chinese computer colossus Lenovo has unveiled an IdeaPad computer that serves as a laptop for work tasks then converts to a touch-screen tablet for play time.The IdeaPad U1 hybrid, with a "LePad" slate that serves as a laptop screen but unplugs to become a tablet computer, made its debut on the cusp of the Thursday opening of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas."It is one device to balance life and work," said Lenovo product manager Leo Li."A keyboard is ...

Smarter devices, homes and cars for the "always-connected lifestyle" are taking centre stage as the annual Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show (CES).Slick new smartphones, ultra-thin laptops, tablet computers to rival Apple's iPad and Web-connected and 3D television sets are expected to grab the most attention during the four-day event at the Las Vegas Convention Center.But the show floor will also feature more smart home appliances such as ovens which can download recipes and vehicles which give drivers hands-free voice control ...

Microsoft sold more than eight million gesture-sensing Kinect controllers for Xbox 360 game consoles in just two months, says the company's chief executive Steve Ballmer.Ballmer used much of his time on stage for a keynote presentation on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to tout the booming popularity of Xbox 360 devices and the Live online community linked to the consoles.More than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide, and Live membership has topped 30 million, ...

Over the past three years WordPress has evolved from being predominantly blog-centric into a full, hands-on content management system (CMS) with more than 15-million blogs being hosted on WordPress.com.While it’s impossible to count the number of standalone sites that are powered by WordPress.org, the self-installed version of Wordpress, we can expect that the number is growing exponentially as the open source software has distinguished itself as the world’s most popular CMS and blogging engine.With thousands of widgets, plugins ...

When we think of Facebook most of us think of it as the domain of the English-speaking world. But the reality is that over 375-million of Facebook’s 585-million users are non-English speakers, which is more than half of all users. One of Facebook's fastest growing regions is South America.The region already has six countries that number in Facebook’s 25 biggest markets - Argentina, Columbia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Peru -- and it contributes more than 56-million users. What’s scary is ...

The iPad may not be all it is cut out to be for magazine publishers. According to Engadget, iPad magazine numbers have dropped. It indicates that iPad magazines benefited from a novelty factor but that the novelty soon wore off.What's puzzling is that iPad sales have been soaring all year; you would expect a rise in magazine subscriptions just based on the percentage of rising iPad sales. Yet we don't see this at all.As Laura June at Engadget reports:"According to ...