SpaceX reveals interplanetary rocket, spaceship

If you think your smartphone is a statement of your unique individuality, you'd best hope it isn't running Android or iOS. Some 85% of smartphones now either rock Google or Apple's mobile operating systems. According to tech analysis company IDC, this is a record new combined high for the two companies. Unsurprisingly their dominance comes at the cost of two pioneers in the smartphone world: Symbian and BlackBerry. Each now accounts for less five percent of the global market. "Android continues to fire on all cylinders," said Ramon Llamas, a senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and...

Another fantastic time-wasting Olympic-themed doodle? Aww Google, you shouldn't have. After the search giant made up for all those static Olympic doodles by launching a hurdles game yesterday, we thought it would be back to the standard, non-interactive Olympic doodles this morning. But today, Google's logo is nestled in the stands at a basketball court, and you can take aim and shoot a stack of balls through the hoop. Tap the spacebar once to build up momentum, and twice to release (or just press, hold briefly and let go if you're a real pro). But don't hold on too...

They're colourful puffballs, and their cutesy name is spelt with a 'z': they're called the Friendzies, and they're characters in the world's first real cash Facebook game that went live on the social network today. Bingo Friendzy is a new Facebook game from online gambling operator Gamesys, which gives users the opportunity to play with and win real money in 90 ball bingo games. No, not Facebook credits. Actual money. The game was developed by the London-based online gaming company which also runs the UK's biggest bingo and slots website (Jackpotjoy) and two related Facebook games which work...

If you know anything about the Chinese social media space it's probably that Tencent and Sina rule the microblogging space. If things had turned out a little differently though, there could well have been a third big player. In a recent earnings call, Sohu CEO Charles Zhang admitted that his company had lost out in the microblogging space over the past two years. The company, which also offers advertising, a search engine, and on-line multiplayer gaming, launched its microblogging or weibo platform in early 2010. It's unclear how far behind Sohu is given that it doesn't release its numbers....

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, improve revenues, increase your customer base, have more satisfied clients, and be the “go to business” over your competitors,...

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 in which we collected our data ensured that it was biased towards collecting people with many connections rather than...

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 he came to the internet's attention, he became a meme. Memeburn picked out nine of our favourite images from...

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. During the first week of the Olympics, search queries spiked more than 10% as people hit Google to find...

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 you've run the track, Google will give you a time that you can share on Google+, or just carry...

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 into the university student database -- an important part of what would become Facebook. According to Chinese site TechRice...