Google rolled out a new feature called "Place Search" on Wednesday to make it easier for users to find information about local businesses.Place Search eliminates the need to perform several internet searches by grouping multiple results about a specific location into one entry.A search result for a particular type of restaurant, for example, may list several relevant local eateries and provide an address, a map, a photo, links to reviews from sites such as Yelp.com and other relevant information."It makes ...

Finally, one of the big corporates has stood up and staked its claim to the iceberg that was spotted off Clifton Beach on Monday morning. Speculation has been rife about who was responsible, and now fruit juice giant Liqui-fruit has digitally added pieces of fruit to the iceberg, then added some lines of text which read "The end of global cooling....the start of the Liqui-Fruit summer meltdown.", giving the video a slicker, more commercial treatment and promoting the Summer Meltdown ...

South Africa's premier domestic rugby competition, the Currie Cup, comes to a gripping climax this Saturday afternoon with the final between the Sharks and Western Province in Durban. But even though the game is still days away, the battle is already heating up on micro-blogging platform Twitter.Supporters of both teams are being encouraged to follow their teams on Twitter before the big final in a bid to establish cyber-dominance and gain a psychological edge.Sharks supporters are following just_sharks, while ...

Politicians around the world have woken up to the potential of Facebook and Twitter as unfiltered platforms from which they can deliver their message to a receptive audience. But few have taken it up as effectively and with the same gusto as Nigeria's wonderfully-named President, Goodluck Jonathan.During the 1930's, the US President Roosevelt delivered a weekly radio broadcast to the nation, which consisted of reassuring the nation that it was going to recover and sharing his hopes and plans ...

The Nobel Peace Prize website came under cyber attack from Taiwan, Norwegian telecoms operator Telenor said Tuesday, less than three weeks after jailed Chinese dissent Liu Xiaobo won the award."The site was compromised, or as is more commonly said, hacked," Frank Stien, in charge of computer security at Telenor said, confirming a report in the Aftenposten daily.Visitors to the www.nobelpeaceprize.org website risked infection by a "Trojan horse" virus, a difficult to detect programme that allows hackers to take control of ...

Doesn't it seem that the Facebook Like buttons populating the web have been there forever? In fact they were only introduced in June 2010, and are already being used on over 350 000 websites, according to the Wall Street Journal. Essentially, the Like button is a tool that allows users to show appreciation for what they are viewing without having to say a word.All that is required is a simple click that lets your network know that you have ...

The demise of the old media appears to have slowed but it hasn't gone away as the transition towards a digital business model continues to hold many challenges.We still haven't figured out how to transfer high quality old media to the digital platform. And that's an astounding position to be in. You would think that by now we would have come up with a solution to this problem.Plus, we still haven't figured out how to produce high quality journalism on ...

PayPal unveiled a new micropayments service on Tuesday that makes it easier to buy digital goods and announced an integration with social networking giant Facebook.PayPal said the new micropayments system "lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site."It described the service, which will be available later this year, as the "online equivalent of dropping a quarter in the slot to ...

Google, which has strained relations with publishers worldwide who accuse it of aggregating articles without compensation, says it is to donate $5-million (about R35-million) to encourage innovation in digital journalism.But the donation, a paltry sum in the face of significant losses by traditional publishers worldwide, is unlikely to mollify media owners who accuse Google of spidering content without sufficient compensation and threatening their advertising models via the disruptive (but extremely innovative) Adwords and Adsense programmes."Journalism is fundamental to a functioning ...

Ask web entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski why he moved from London to Cape Town two years ago, and he points to a map that illustrates the technological revolution reshaping Africa.The map shows the 14 undersea fibre-optic cables that will link the continent's internet service providers to the servers of Europe and Asia by mid-2012, increasing the capacity of its cable internet connections almost three-fold from today and nearly 300-fold from 2009.The cables are drawn in different colours and in thicknesses that ...