We all know cellphones are vital to Africa. They’ve allowed large sections of the continent to entirely skip wired communication. This means that Africa has been able to leap-frog the West in a number of key areas of mobile use.This kind of traction means that mobile phones are used not only to connect people but also to facilitate financial transactions, help make sure people are taking medication vital to keeping them alive and provide a convenient way of accessing ...

Like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the shootings in Oslo earlier this year, footage of the recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake which devastated parts of Eastern Turkey has found its way onto YouTube. As many as 264 people are feared dead with more than 1 000 injured.The city worst affected by the quake is the mostly Kurdish settlement of Van, which is on the Iranian border, about 1 200km away from the Turkish capital Ankara. The ...

South Africans are once again proving the amplification of their Twitter reach. This time it's with Democratic Alliance leader, Helen Zille, who has inadvertently inspired a humourous Twitter trending topic after she asked members of the public to tweet her their questions.Zille is famous for responding to questions on Twitter and has been quoted as encouraging users to tweet their questions to her. The questions being asked today, however, probably aren't what she was expecting when she made the ...

With hindsight huge issues, such as the recent BlackBerry service outage, may not have been as critical as they seemed at the time. If asked we would not, or could not, imagine life without our various devices, especially our key communicator -- the mobile phone.Imagine going back to the time that we only placed a call, or on the odd occasion sent a text message on your phone. That time was not all that long ago, when we could all ...

DNS is one of those core technologies on which the internet runs. For most end users, DNS is pretty much invisible until they want to register their first domain for their own websites. At that point, the concept of a domain registrar suddenly pops into view.But at the heart of it all is the body that controls all of the top-level domains, and that is responsible for resolving domain name disputes and many other domain related decisions. That body ...

Convergence is the combination of similar devices into a single platform. Digital cameras, books and GPS devices are products which now generally exist on smartphones like the Nokia N9 and the iPhone 4. The GPS in particular is at home on the touchscreen display and long battery life of the modern smartphone.So why then bother with a non-converged device? Why should I spend money on a GPS which only does one thing? You do it because the TomTom GoLive 1000 ...

Excerpts from Steve Jobs' biography have revealed a long-standing vendetta with internet giant Google. The conflict stemmed from the emergence of Google's Android operating system, which Jobs claimed was blatant rip-off of Apple's iOS."I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product," Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson quoted him as saying early last year."I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this," he said. "I don't want your money. If you offer me US$5-billion, I won't want it. I've got ...

On Friday, daily deals site, Groupon, said it hopes to raise US$621-million from its initial public offering, significantly less than its initial amount of more than one billion.In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Chicago-based Groupon said it plans to offer between 30-million and 34.5-million shares priced between US$16 and US$18.This new figure values the company, which turned down a US$6-billion takeover offer from Google last year, at around US$11.4-billion, significantly lower than previous ...

Google, is "mulling" a bid for its search rival, Yahoo! the Wall Street Journal reports.This the latest news to surface from the "who's looking to buy Yahoo!" rumour mill.According to people who are familiar with the matter but declined to be named, Google has entered into discussions with a number of private equity firms regarding how such a deal would be structured. They also stressed, however, that nothing had been finalised as of yet."Google and prospective partners have held ...

An Egyptian man landed in jail after his inflammatory postings on Facebook. A court in Cairo sentenced the man to three years with hard labour after finding that "he intentionally insulted the dignity of the Islamic religion and attacked it with insults and ridicule on Facebook".The documents of the court described the attack in further detail: "His insults were aimed at the Noble Koran, the true Islamic religion, the Prophet of Islam and his family and Muslims, in a scurrilous ...