Amazon's Senior Vice President of operations and customer services Marc Onetto, jetted into Cape Town, South Africa for the official launch of the company's new Customer Service Centre, which is expected employ around 1 400 people by December.The centre is the renowned retailer's second project in South Africa and is meant to complement its South African Development Centre, also based in Cape Town, which does work on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) programme.The support centre had previously been ...

Nokia, the global leader in phone production, has announced that its developer forum database was hacked. Member information including emails and dates of birth had also been accessed by the hackers. The breach was made due to "security flaws" in the system, according to Nokia spokesperson Doug Dawson. The hack made use of a SQL injection attack, a viral-like code which uploads to a SQL database for future attacks.Dawson is quick to point out that no fiscal information was ...

I've been hacking together bits of code for years now. I'm not entirely sure how it all started, but it was probably way back when I built my first FreeBSD box and started playing around with a bit of simple shell-scripting.Back then, if you wanted to run any Unix variant, or even Linux, getting things like X-Windows to work properly was a real chore so you usually ended up spending a lot of time on the command line, which ...

Samsung has its Galaxy S II at the top of the smartphone pile, and a bunch of entry level smartphone cheapies, including the Galaxy Ace, Fit, mini and Gio. That's a lot of phones.Confused much? Don’t be, the B-list Galaxy phones are basically variations on the same entry level touch-screen smartphone phone, nipped and tucked to match different demographics in the orgy of product niching that makes the marketing folks think they're earning their salaries.Read more on Gearburn.com

I used to meet with Steve jobs in the 1980s, when he was lauded as a visionary. To be honest I wasn't that impressed with him.Sure, he deserved credit for the Apple I and then Lisa, which turned into the Macintosh but it was too early to tell what he was capable of doing. Lots of people are successful in Silicon Valley and he was among them but you never know how much luck is involved.In the case of ...

After five months of running its online deals program, Facebook is now shutting it down for good. Facebook Deals, which supplied users with online coupons in line with similar deal sites like Groupon, will now be shut down in the US, according to a statement by the social networking giant. The service was also available in the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and was recently launched in South Africa. "After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end ...

How could you get paid to add to the crowdsourcing debate? It's simple, according to Daniel Neville, Brand Co-ordinator at Idea Bounty. Just do it.Idea Bounty is a global crowdsourcing platform connecting clients with thousands of creatives around the world in order to help "solve marketing and communications briefs and challenges", says the company. Clients pay for only the ideas they use and creatives receive a "bounty" for winning submissions.It's an idea clearly seeking to cash in on the ...

True remakes in games. Why so few? Hollywood loves remaking the same stuff ad nauseum, whereas game studios just rewarm or port over. While I was contemplating the metaphysical implications of rehashes, it occurred to me that this is something you don’t often see in videogames: The straightforward remake. Not a reboot or port to a handheld. Taking an existing game and making it all over again using the latest technology, but keeping the same plot and gameplay elements and ...

China's largest microblogging service has contacted millions of its users warning them to ignore any false reports spread over the network. The move is being viewed by some as a sign of growing unease over the rise of social networking sites in the country.Sina sent at least two messages to its Weibo (pronounced Wei-bohr) users refuting rumours which had spread through the network. One such rumour stated that the suspected murderer of a 19 year old woman had ...

Addressing the annual Edinburgh International Television Festival, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, lambasted the United Kingdom for allowing itself to throw "away your great computing heritage".Organisers billed Schmidt's speech as a "first in history", as it was the first time in the festival's 35 year history that that the MacTaggart keynote speech was delivered "by someone not directly involved in the TV industry".Schmidt was invited to discuss the impact of the internet revolution on the television industry with statements ...