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  • Table Magic: Africa’s bold answer to OpenTable

    By on 6 July, 2012

    With all the affection bestowed upon restaurant services like Zagat and OpenTable, it’s high time that a standout name starts crescendoing in Africa. Cape Town-based Table Magic is stepping forward to lend its voice. Last year, Google paid US$151 million to acquire restaurant ratings service Zagat, after its US$500 million bid to acquire Yelp fell through, and restaurant reservations service, OpenTable, is currently valued just over a billion US dollars. Whether one agrees with the jaw dropping price tags or

  • Reviewed: Quantum Conundrum

    By on 6 July, 2012

    It’s been a frustrating week. Kate and Tom are getting divorced, Prometheus was only so-so, and my car broke down. But none of those experiences even came close to the frustration of playing Quantum Conundrum (QC), and I love Kate and Tom. It's not that QC is a bad game, quite the contrary: it's a good game -- ‘good’: that pesky word that wishes it was ‘great’or ‘brilliant’ but lacks punch and syllables. Hell, perhaps QC would even settle for ‘bad’ -- surely it’s better to be remembered as terrible rather than just plain old boring ‘good’?var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

  • What would you ask your 12yr old self? [Video]

    By on 6 July, 2012

    Ever wanted to give your future self advance warning about something you're about to do? Do you remember what you were doing when you were 12 years old? Wouldn't it be cool if scientists stopped obsessing with the meaning of life and particles that will always be there and just did something useful like invent a time machine? These (and I am sure many more) are the kind of questions that kept filmmaker and actor Jeremiah McDonald awake at night. But he was smart and knew how to solve the problem. Twenty years ago McDonald decided that he...

  • Twitter overhauls search, makes it simpler, smarter and more personal

    By on 6 July, 2012

    Ah ha! So this is what that exec who said that Twitter search and discovery was set to "change forever" was talking about. The social network just announced an update that will make searching for users and topics on the platform easier and even more personalised. Ever tweeted about a topic only to realise you're using the wrong hashtag? Now Twitter will offer you suggestions via an autocomplete function to let you know what terms most people are using in their tweets. Not interested in what the rest of the world is nattering on about, but more concerned with...

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  • Apple becomes second biggest brand in Asia, but Samsung is number 1

    By on 6 July, 2012

    Campaign Asia-Pacific and Nielsen have just published the 2012 Asia’s Top Brands report -- a list of the most popular brands in Asia based on a survey of 4 800 consumers across the continent. This year’s report has seen Apple climb to the number two spot for the first time -- although it is still behind competitor Samsung, which has taken the top spot from Sony. Sony has now dropped down to third place, followed by Nestlé in fourth and Panasonic in fifth. Apart from Nestlé, the top five spots are all held by electronics firms. This is the third...

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  • Hundreds of thousands face web blackout because of old malware

    By on 6 July, 2012

    If you suddenly find yourself cut off from the internet in the near future, your ISP, or a break in an internet cable might not be to blame. Nope, the real culprit could be year old malware. According to online security firms, the threat comes from a piece of malicious software called DNS Changer, which effectively showed people a different version of the internet, altering user searches, and promoting fake and dangerous products. Until now US authorities have been able to protect people from the threat after obtaining a court order that allowed them to operate replacement servers and...

  • Twitter exec promises social network is about to ‘change forever’

    By on 6 July, 2012

    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) July 6, 2012 At this stage it's unclear exactly what those changes will entail, although we can get a few...

  • NYSE-listed company snaps up Cape Town digital agency HelloComputer

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 Managing Director David Moffatt, who have been in the digital space for more than a decade. Moffatt, who also...

  • MTN introduces cut price BlackBerry service plans

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 BlackBerry and it needs to be a web-based one -- think Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and so on. The BlackBerry...

  • Facebook set for big social commerce push

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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. According to Mashable, Tom Waddington, a web developer for the site Cut Out + Keep, reached out to it...

  • SA Tourism confirms site outages due to unpaid hosting bills, blames ‘red tape’

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 of non-payment but blamed it on an "error with the financing". Tourism is an important part of the South...

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  • Wikileaks releases 2.5m Syrian emails

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 Syrian government and economy", also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another. The range...

  • Angry Birds, Instapaper hit by Apple app store bug

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 from the app store crashed immediately, even after being deleted and reinstalled. This led him to conclude that Apple...

  • Siri gets Apple sued in China

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 ownership of the iPad trademark. Apple recently announced that it would be rolling out Mandarin and Cantonese versions of Siri...

  • The great internet radio swindle

    By on 5 July, 2012

    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 a phantom audience, it's fraud. That's why I guess there has been such a fuss (because some have been wondering:...

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