Mashable's prolific editor-at-large, Ben Parr, has parted ways with the leading tech site under circumstances that apparently were less than amicable, reports technology news site AllThingsD."Ben Parr is a technology journalist, web entrepreneur and aspiring world changer. He is best-known as the former editor-at-large of Mashable where he focused on technology trends, the companies behind them, and the intersection of technology, media and society. Ben's 3+ year career with Mashable began when he joined as a writer in August ...

Incubeta Holdings, a holding company for global search specialists Clicks2Customers has purchased Interface Holdings, a South African online media company in a deal worth R100-million. The company believes the acquisition will give it a foothold in the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector.According to Incubeta Holdings, the move is part of the company’s bid to increase its global footprint. This global footprint, it says, includes “clients and offices in the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Brazil”.Interface Holdings ...

Ruth Sawyer, author of The Way of the Story Teller once said: "I believe it is the easiest thing in the world to tell a story -- and the hardest to find a fine story teller."The art of storytelling has, over millennia, been a pivotal part of the human experience. It ensured the survival of cultural practices all over the globe and of course slight embellishment of said stories also allowed some societies to totally rewrite history, however that’s ...

The Motorola dev people have spent a lot of time on the new Razr. It shows. It oozes loving attention. And not in the old Motorola "WTF did they spend all that time on this arb feature for?" No, the new Razr XT910 simply exudes the scent of hard work, clear thinking, clever features, slick hardware crafted from premium materials – Gorilla Glass, Kevlar weave and machined aluminium. Is this the phone that returns Motorola to the top of the ...

I recently migrated laptops.Alarming how simple that sentence looks. I mean, migrations are long and hard, and things die. They have an alarming inevitability. Everything in their path gets trampled. Being able to express that in a single tiny sentence seems unfair.Unfortunately there's little that can be done about the endless hours and megabytes you will spend on downloading Windows updates, and there's no relief for us Windows XP diehards who now have to come to grips with Windows 7 ...

Generally speaking, in the 90s, Africa's mobile network operators (MNOs) were highly disruptive. In this last decade however, they have continued to decrease in this.Operators are no longer the offensive, attacking force of yesteryear, instead they’re putting up barriers and defensive walls trying to protect what they have and hide.Instead, the disruption comes from the open web. Whenever the operators put up a blocker to what users want, usually in the form of price or access to their infrastructure, ...

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has received a US$500 000 grant Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki have donated US$500 000 toThe Silicon Valley power couple -- Wojicki is the co-founder of personal genetics company 23andMe -- made the donation in the name of their own Brin Wojcicki Foundation, as the Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its eighth annual round of fundraising.Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is the public face ...

A group of Chinese game developers has announced that it intends suing the country’s search giant Baidu for more than 30-million yuan (US$4.7-million) for copyright infringement.The group, called Content Provider Union (CPU), represents mobile game developers, has accused Baidu of allowing unauthorised downloads of more than 350 games designed by member firms.CPU is largely made up of small, domestic game developers.That’s according to Tian Lifeng, a spokesperson for the group, adding that the case ...

Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet is bold, competitive and, at US$250, reasonably priced. But is it worth snatching up in a post-Kindle Fire world? Reviews for the Nook Tablet have trickled in and the critics seemingly love this heavily modified Android tablet.MSNBCWilson Rothman loves the speed of the Nook, calling it "superior to the Kindle Fire" thanks to an overnight power test which saw a 27% improvement in battery life over the Kindle Fire. Rothman enjoyed the "nice big home ...

The Wall Street Journal has published an exposé on technologies being sold to governments to enable them to intercept the publics' digital communications. It describes the expose as "a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since September 11".Mirroring Wikileaks, the Journal has titled the release "The Surveillance Catalogue," and refers to it as a "documents trove".The documents, which comprise highly secret marketing papers from the companies developing these ...