Experts from around the world will come together in January for ScaleConf, a conference aimed at addressing the "challenges and future of building and running online sites and services”. Conference organisers claim the event, taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, will “cover the culture and methodologies used to architect and develop the strong foundations that enable large-scale web companies to function smoothly, and smaller ones to grow gracefully”. It aims to do this with a speaker line-up that includes the ...

The release of WordPress 3.3, dubbed “Sonny” in honour of renowned Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, has generated so much online buzz that it has become a global trending topic on Twitter. According to the blogging platform’s founder Matt Mullenweg, "WordPress has had over 65-million downloads since version 3.0 was released". He claims that in the newest iteration, his organisation has "added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports". Among the new features which WordPress claims are ...

Love the Old Spice Guy? Love seeing things blow up? Well now there’s a site just for you. The site, devastatingexplosions.com, is part of Old Spice’s Manta Claus campaign, which sees Isaiah Mustafa gifting different groups of people. The "devastating explosions" site is intended as a gift for "all the people outnumbered by murderous predatory cats in their countries and also continents which start in a vowel". The website allows you to click on a large, ...

Share prices are the barometer of market sentiment about companies, but when investors complain that the market is being "unfair", one needs to look beneath the numbers. That’s one argument where in Research in Motion(RIM), Apple and Microsoft would agree. When the share price of RIM recently reached a new seven-year-low, dipping below $17 for the first time since 2004, it represented not only a massive 75% fall from its high for 2010, but also a 30% drop from the day ...

Mark Zuckerberg is everywhere: interviews on prime time US and foreign TV, features in leading newspapers and magazines -- it's one almighty PR push: Facebook is prepping for an IPO. The reason for the publicity blitz is that once Facebook files for an IPO, it enters a quiet period during which it can't make any public statements that could be construed as marketing the company's stock. But why now? That's also carefully managed. Facebook doesn't want to leave too much money on ...

Google recently launched its redesigned search app for the iPad. It features a smart, innovative design and could, with just a few extra features like bookmarks, easily become the best browser alternative to Safari on iOS. The reality, though, is that while Apple allows browser apps like the Dolphin Browser that use iOS’s built-in WebKit framework or Opera, which renders all the content on its own servers to get around Apple’s rules, none of these can be used as the ...

The mobile landscape of 2012 is ripe with possibility. Globally, it’s estimated that 5.3-billion people have mobile phones. This means that there are more people picking up a mobile phone every morning than lifting a newspaper. Increasingly, it's not only to make calls and send texts either -- mobile data traffic is trebling every year. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones became the highest-selling consumer electronic device category in 2011, amounting to 115-million units in Q3 alone -- according ...

Hollywood bad boy, Charlie Sheen, has joined the league of celebrities who commit Twitter faux pas. Sheen accidentally tweeted his mobile phone number to his more than 5-million followers. Sheen who was in the eye of a controversial storm with his network due to outburst that resulted in his axing from popular television show Two and half men was attempting to DM Justin Bieber. The actor was apparently dinning at Guy Savoy in Las Vegas when he sent a message ...

Most of us need a digital photo frame like we need a hole in the head. In the era of flat panel TVs that we can effortlessly beam images to, or that we can stuff with USB cards filled with an endless supply of inane holiday snaps, or crossing-the-harrassment-line staff party pics, minute details of bloody baby showers and simpering soft-focus wedding pictures, digital photo frames -- even cheap photo frames such as this one from Gobii matter no more ...

Despite being a late entry into this years book market, the 630 page authorised biography of Steve Jobs has emerged as Amazon’s most bought book of 2011. Taking into account both sales of traditional hard-copies of the book and downloads onto Amazon’s Kindle e-readers, Walter Isaacson’s comprehensive and candid telling of the life of the iconic co-founder of the world’s most successful tech company has shot to the top of the list, Amazon announced. Though initially slated for a Christmas release, following ...