Take a moment to reflect on what I'm about to tell you. Just 30 minutes after it landed, the Mars Curiosity Rover sent back its first images from the Martian surface. Thirty minutes? That's how long it takes some of us to eat our breakfast cereal in the morning. The NASA mission is designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. The exploratory vehicle today landed inside the Gale Crater and ...

No self-respecting geek doesn't get a little excited when it comes to space. Add in a trip to Mars and the ability to remote control a vehicle on its surface and you're in tech heaven. The latest adventure to the red planet sees NASA's Curiosity Rover land today, having launched in November last year. There's some pretty cool stuff going on when it comes to earthbound technology. Anyone with a fast enough internet connection can watch a live stream of ...

Google's Glass Project made a spectacular debut last month by skydiving from a helicopter and joining the press on stage while documenting the whole event live with their ‘Google headsets’ (no official name has been given to the product.) It does make you wonder though; what would the hype have been without such a dare-devilish stunt? Instead of just dominating the digital realm, the Google Glass Project is one of Google’s next steps into entering the physical realm. Other examples of ...

Sometimes we go about our daily business online, blissfully oblivious to the many services that make our lives easier. Services that make us realise that there are many aspects of our real lives that we don’t have similar innovations to help us with. Here are a few of the things that we take for granted online and that would really enrich our lives offline. Inventors of technology, I hope you’re reading this. We need all of the ideas below implemented ...

It seems Digg isn't the only platform from the early days of the web that decided to add a fresh coat of paint; Last.fm is cleaning up too. According to a blog post by the company, it has been working on the redesign for the last couple of months and after weeks of beta testing, it is ready to release it to the world. Most of the changes can been seen on the artist, album and track pages, where the ...

GustPay, the South African geo-fenced mobile payments startup that recently moved into beta, held a launch party last week and introduced about 400 of Stellenbosch’s university goers to its smartphone payment technology. The event celebrated the launch of GustPay's apps in both the Apple iTunes and Google Play stores. It was held in partnership with TrustFabric and online music discovery service Boom.fm, also part of the Stellenbosch based World of Avatar group, the investment holding company. Joe Botha, one of the founders ...

Award for the geekiest bank in South Africa? That’s easy. FNB. In addition to gadgets by HTC, Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung, FNB clients can now buy Acer laptops and ultrabooks at no interest or charges over a 24 month period. New and existing FNB Gold or Platinum Cheque Account clients as well as FNB Private Clients will be able to get their hands on Acer’s Aspire S3-391 Core i5 Ultrabook, 320GB Acer Timeline Ultra M3 and Aspire V3-571 Core i3 ...

Say what? Apparently Microsoft is about to ditch the name "Metro" for something more commercial reports The Next Web. It seems as the Redmond-based company will get rid of the name that it had given to the Windows 8 interface as the product official commercial release gets closer. According to the software giant, "Metro" was just a code name, and not the official one which will be used after launch. "We have used Metro style as a code name during ...

Moneysmart, the online personal finance manager (PFM) we covered last year, will be exiting beta in the next few days. It sports a new look, iOS and Android apps, and now, direct integration with all but one South African bank. Absa is yet to give Moneysmart its blessing, but CEO Tobie van Zyl is confident that an agreement will be reached by the end of this year. With big name backers and a maturing feature set, Moneysmart is coming out ...

Um. Remember when Facebook said it had grown to 955-million users late last month? As it turns out, it could have around 872-million actual monthly active users (MAUs), because around 83-million Facebook accounts are fake. According to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, 8.7% of Facebook's monthly active users are either wrongly classified as personal accounts, or they're duplicates or spam accounts. In addition, Facebook also admits that its user data could be less than 100% accurate, ...