This is big. The way you search for and discover things on Twitter is about to "change forever". That's according to a tweet sent out by Pankaj Gupta, an engineering manager at the social network, who indicated that there would be an announcement about the changes later today: Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw. Team - congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!— Pankaj Gupta (@pankaj) ...

A few weeks ago, speculation hit the media circuit that Draftfcb, a global advertising agency owned by the New York Stock Exchange-listed Interpublic Group (IPG), was in talks to buy a Cape Town-based award-winning digital agency called HelloComputer. It’s true: HelloComputer has been bought! In an exclusive interview with the shareholders of HelloComputer, we learned that this acquisition will see Draftfcb’s current digital arm, Mesh Interactive, be absorbed by HelloComputer. At the helm of HelloComputer is co-founder Mark Tomlinson and ...

South African mobile operator MTN is launching three new low-tier packages aimed at making the BlackBerry service even more affordable. The news comes hot on the heels of RIM’s latest earnings call, during which the BlackBerry smartphone maker singled out South Africa as being one of its strongest and growing markets. For about a quarter of the regular price, the BlackBerry Messaging Plan allows email and BBM use, but no web browsing. Only one email account can be linked to your ...

It's amazing what you can find hidden in a piece of code. The future strategy of the world's largest social network, for instance. The developer who found out that Facebook was working on a "want" button has uncovered a new piece of code that suggests the social giant is working on a new series of actions that would allow people to share what they'd bought, which charities they'd donated money to, and what items they'd bought in games like Farmville. ...

South Africa's primary online tourism portal has repeatedly gone down over the last week because the organisation behind the site failed to pay its web-hosting bills. A source close to Memeburn said that SA Tourism, which owns the Twitter handle @SouthAfrica and is effectively the face of tourism in the country, had failed to pay hosting service provider Rackspace for several months before southafrica.net was taken down. SA Tourism spokesperson William Price confirmed that Rackspace had taken the site down because ...

Whistleblowing site Wikileaks has just published some 2.5-million emails from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names. According to Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, the files are “embarrassing to Syria, but [...] also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. "It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it." The Syria Files, says Wikileaks, "shine a light on the inner workings of the ...

Developers may prefer iOS to Android, but a few of them aren't going to be Apple's biggest fans. Thanks to a technical issue, a number of newly updated apps are apparently crashing as soon as they're downloaded and opened from the app store. Instapaper developer Marco Arment noticed the glitch after his inbox was flooded with customers complaining about issues with the new version of his reading app. Even though his archived version of the app worked well, the version downloaded ...

Sigh. Another day, another Apple suit in China. This time the Cupertino-based giant is being sued by Zhi Zhen Internet Technology over its voice assistant app Siri. According to Nasdaq, the Chinese company is taking action against Apple for infringing on a patent it holds for its Xiao i Robot, a Chinese language, voice automated app similar to Siri. The suit come just three days after Apple paid US$60-million to Chinese company, Proview to settle a spat relating to the ...

All media, online or offline, survive and trade on credibility. Trust is everything and it's possibly more of a factor in a media business than any other type of business. You lose this trust, you close your media business down. Rupert Murdoch closed down one of the largest newspapers in the world when trust was broken. It gets that bad. You lie about your numbers, and it's over. Media companies sell audience to advertisers, and if they are paying money for ...

Mobile is big. Even bigger than you think. No technology in the history of mankind has achieved the reach and penetration globally that rivals that of the mobile phone. According to the International Telecommunications Union, at the end of 2011, there were approximately six billion mobile phone subscriptions. This is equivalent to 87% of the world’s population and a huge increase from 5.4-billion in 2010 and 4.7-billion mobile subscriptions in 2009. Initial excitement about the rise of the mobile phone was ...