“Why am I still being defined by my fridge?” Dion Chang, a designer turned corporate analyst, asks the audience at the Flux Trends Review -- a one-day trend conference. He’s talking about LSMs, but it’s an unexpectedly apt description given the Icelandic conditions inside the auditorium (I half expected Bjork to appear on the beautifully decorated stage). LSMs (Living Standards Measures) have been used to categorise people since the 1980s, and they’ve become outdated. As it turns out, the gadgets ...

Before a few months ago, search engine optimisation seemed rather cut and dry. Google, for the most part, used a combination of factors to determine where a website should rank. One such factor was links. Each link to a website carried a value and this value added value to the website being linked to. One might say that the more links to a website, the higher the website would rank. For the most part this was accurate, assuming that the ...

Motribe is best known for building mobile social networks, but the company is seems to be getting into another niche: building photo-based apps for Mxit. The South African-based company recently launched JudgeMe, an app that helps people meet each other by uploading and browsing photos. Today meanwhile saw it officially announce the launch MxPix -- an app that makes photo sharing and filtering possible for people with feature phones. JudgeMe was well received, gaining over 400 000 users less than ...

When Rocket Internet launched its Nigerian Amazon clone, it was always just going to be a matter of time before it launched another site in the country. The German-based startup incubator's latest ecommerce property is called Sabunta -- a shoe and fashion site that runs along the same model as Zando in South Africa, Zalando in Germany and the UK, Locondo in Japan, The Iconic in Australia, and Zalora in Singapore. Perhaps conscious of the fact that a large portion ...

Facebook's App Centre has officially gone live, with around 600 apps available on the web as well through its iOS and Android apps. In an official blog post, the social network revealed more details about the app centre, after announcing it a few weeks back. First off, Facebook seems to be punting personalisation, saying that the centre "lets you browse the apps your friends use". It also claims that it "only lists high-quality apps, based on feedback from people ...

Ever get annoyed with people who share the same updates on Facebook and Twitter? Or maybe you've set up your tweets to go out as status updates and you just wish it worked a little more seamlessly. Well now it looks like Twitter just got a little closer to the big F. According to The Next Web tweets that appear as Facebook status updates will now carry links to hashtags and user handles. Neither company has made any official announcements ...

East Africa has a new tech startup accelerator fund and it’s getting international attention. The Savannah Fund is a partnership between Mbwana Alliy, Paul Bragiel and iHub founder Erik Hersman and is “focused on finding and investing in East Africa’s highest potential pre-revenue startups”. According to Hersman, the “idea is to bring the Silicon Valley-style accelerator model to Africa, seeing what needs to be tweaked to make it work for our region”. At present the fund has about US$10-million at ...

Google and the SEO industry seem to be in a constant state of battle. Algorithm changes like Panda, along with updates like Penguin have made it increasingly difficult to manipulate Google's search results. Livelihoods are at stake on either side of the fence, and if there's a middle ground somewhere, we should probably look for it. A leading group of SEO experts will be debating these issues and also discussing a proven formula to ensure one has the best possible ...

If you haven't changed your LinkedIn password yet, it's time to do so. And for all of you who like to use the same password across all of the sites that you visit, you have a lot of password changing ahead of you. This week, a hacker in a Russian forum claimed to have hacked LinkedIn and to have obtained the password hashes for 6.5-million accounts. The hashes were posted online on a variety of sites, but have been released ...

Google Research earlier shared some breakthrough research to come out of MIT. This time, the research does not just influence the world of social or search — it is research that has the potential to break boundaries in medicine, the military and even law enforcement. The new video technique, called Eulerian Video Magnification, is designed to magnify subtle changes in the world. The system basically works by taking a video (or even still images) and comparing the changes that happen on ...