The most insanely long lens that would amaze pros sitting snapping Wimbledon, but in a convenient and luggable bridge-camera form factor. Crazy long lenses (800mm equiv here!) have become a bit of an arms race to nowhere, but Canon still pulls out some amazing engineering to produce a very versatile daddy camera, good for action photies of the kids in the play park or the kill in the safari park. Just don’t expect flawless image quality. Gearburn takes the Canon ...

Following the latest dump of highly classified diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, the United States and others have expressed concern over risks the release presents to individuals named in the cables.Since November 2010, Wikileaks has been dumping batches of highly classified cables from US diplomatic missions.Answering questions about the cables, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland chose to highlight the danger sensitive sources named in the cables may face as a result of the leaks."In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, ...

China's official state news agency has called on websites in the country to put a stop to the "cancer" of online rumours. The call is believed to be the latest sign of unease over the potential of social networks to subvert the official Communist Party line.The call, from the Xinhua news agency comes days after a senior Communist Party official issued a similar warning to China's largest microblogging platform Sina Weibo."The internet is an important carrier of social ...

There are a multitude of marketing opportunities out there every single day just waiting to be taken advantage of, but does having a clever advert or campaign that mimics real life translate into increased sales?What real life events are there to integrate with? There are literally events happening each and every day that are available to be pounced on by cunning and intelligent marketers. One of the more recent faux pas which presented itself was the botched singing of the ...

Fresh questions have arisen over the regulation and reliability of content on social networks after one of South Africa’s leading newspapers faced embarrassment as it emerged that its dramatic weekend lead story, based on a graphically-racist Facebook profile photo, was in fact a three-year old story -- and had been extensively covered.The abhorrent picture depicts a white male kneeling over the body of an apparently lifeless black child in the manner of a hunting photo. There were also questions over ...

ORM and social CRM have become social media buzzwords. They've started doing the rounds in boardrooms. Given their proliferation, I decided to look at a few free and paid online reputation management tools that are being used by major global brands.BrandsEye Award-winning South African ORM software, BrandsEye currently services about 26 countries. BrandsEye started as a simple ORM tool that has now expanded to include reporting, conversation tracking, automated escalation, reputation scores and data segmentation amongst other in-depth searches. The ...

There was a time when Africa's eCommerce platforms were so few in number as to be negligible. The ever increasing penetration of bandwidth onto the continent has seen that change. Africa now supports a number of viable eCommerce sites, each looking to take hold of a growing market.Here are five of the best:1. KalahariNaspers owned Kalahari.com is the market leader in South African eCommerce. Established in 1999, kalahari.com is South Africa's largest online retailer of millions ...

CouchSurfing International, a startup devoted to connecting travellers with like-minded locals, has received a US$.7.6-million boost from investors Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network.The investment is a part of the company's transition from a non profit to a corporation focussed on doing business in a way which fosters public good.The initial idea behind CouchSurfing was simple. Launched as a social network in 2004, its aim was to match travellers with hosts in locations around the globe.Members looking for ...

The widely predicted Amazon tablet could knock the iPad off its perch, according to researcher team Forrester. There have been no public announcements of the tablet, but Amazon's trademark registrations of "Lab126" points to a development team who will be involved in tablet production.The eCommerce mega-company's tablet will supposedly be based on the Android Honeycomb OS and will leverage Amazon's powerful content distribution network. Applications will be sold from the Android App store, with media being supported by the ...

Amazon's Senior Vice President of operations and customer services Marc Onetto, jetted into Cape Town, South Africa for the official launch of the company's new Customer Service Centre, which is expected employ around 1 400 people by December.The centre is the renowned retailer's second project in South Africa and is meant to complement its South African Development Centre, also based in Cape Town, which does work on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) programme.The support centre had previously been ...