Samsung’s PlanetFirst initiative announced that it had reached "key milestones" in its eco-friendly scheme. The tech giant claims it has "achieved comprehensive sustainability goals", including:Reduced sales-normalised greenhouse emissions from its manufacturing facilities by 38% during the first half of 2011, when compared against emission levels at the end of 2008 Attained global eco-labels for 2210 product models as of the end of 2010, making the company number one in the world for environmentally friendly products for the fifth straight year Invested an ...

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. Ritchie is most famous for developing C and influencing other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix.Ritchie's creation of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing.News of Ritchie's death was first made public by Canadian software ...

While Research In Motion (RIM) continues to attempt to reconnect users cut from BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), news is filtering in that users of the smartphone in North America have also been hit with service failures.The failure of BIS, which bar a relatively short period when it was back up, has persisted for the past three days.Without BIS, which many BlackBerry users cite as the most attractive feature of the smartphones, users are unable to connect to email, ...

Chinese web giant Tencent has launched an English version of its Twitter-like microblogging service.According Chinese newspaper, China Daily, the English version of Tencent Weibo is the first of its kind in China.The platform offers features familiar to most social network users, including posting, topic discussions, private messaging, photo and video uploading, and online chatting.According to the paper, Xing Hongyu, general manager of the Tencent Weibo business unit, claims the English version of Tencent Weibo will enhance the ...

Naspers is an oddity. Who would have bet that a one-time newspaper company would have become an emerging-market internet giant? After all “Naspers” means “National Press”.Naspers is one impressive company. It owns eCommerce and social networking properties all over the world, including China, Brazil, Russia, Africa and eastern Europe. The company has stakes in two of the world’s biggest social networks, the Chinese TenCent and a small, indirect stake in Facebook.It's a successful strategy that has seen Naspers ...

Sometimes you stumble on the most interesting projects, and you get all inspired to start making stuff yourself. The other day, I came across a really cool DIY attempt at building a voice activated robotic arm.Okay, to be fair, the robotic arm is already built, but the good news is that it only costs around US$55. You can buy it directly from OWI if you're based in the US, or you can buy it from Maplin if you're in ...

This might be the most polarising review of a gadget I have ever written. The Nokia N9 is a beautiful phone, cool to the touch and deeply gorgeous, akin to the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is also a disgustingly obtuse phone, stuck with both feet in the past and unable to accept its fate. Let me explain.The Dark Crystal The screen is deep, richly black and instantly responsive. At the Nokia N9 launch, Marko Ahtisaari (head of Nokia ...

How often do you consider your business relationships in the social realm? Did you ever realise how powerful its influence can be in developing your company? Social startup Ziliot.com wants to harness the power of social networking, to "bridge the business trust and information gap between developed countries and developing countries".Memeburn spoke to Aniekan Okono, the 30 year-old Founder of Ziliot. Okono runs the company from Finland with his business partner, Tuan Vu, a software engineering graduate with a "distinguished ...

Global payments giant Western Union has revealed that the United States is South Africa’s "best friend" online.The announcement comes in the form a league table which was created using data from Western Union’s Your World Facebook Application. The app visualises each user’s Facebook connections around the globe and gives them a score for how globally connected they are. Your World claims it has received more than 250 000 hits worldwide since its launch in July this year, as individual users ...

A combined study from the University of Cape Town and Harvard has revealed that three-quarters of South African "young people" have regular conversations with strangers on social network cum instant messaging service MXit.Over 26 000 MXit users took part in the study. Close to a third of survey respondents said that their after school activity consisted of chatting on Mxit, with 42% stating that they chat to strangers on a daily basis.The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has dubbed Africa ...