With the world’s highest rates of HIV and TB, health care provision has to be at the top of most African countries’ agendas -- and innovative use of mobile technologies may be just the salve they are looking for.Misha Kay, who examines cellphone technology for the World Health Organisation (WHO), recently told the Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town that there was a "fairly healthy groudswell of activity" in mobile-health initiatives.There are more than 5-billion mobile phone subscribers in the ...

When auction giant eBay announced this week that it was buying out the well-known ecommerce platform Magento, reaction was varied.In announcing the buyout eBay President and CEO John Donahoe stated that Magento would merge with the company’s own open source, online retailing platform X.Commerce. Precisely how X.Commerce will work, and what part Magento has to play in it will only be revealed in October during eBay’s X.Commerce Innovate Conference.Here’s what some of the web’s commentators had to say:Mashable: ...

Social media sites have spent the better part of the last year drastically focusing on how their users can turn fellow users into customers.Using digital advertising platforms are critical. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed recently that U.S. online advertising grew by 13.9% in 2010, reaching a record US$25.8 billion, as Fox Business reports. Globally 10.2% of the US$79-billion invested in online advertising next year will be in the social media space. Perhaps the most interesting of ...

Apple has done it again – it has an amazing knack of taking technology that’s been on the market for years, packaging it, integrating it, and presenting it to the world as a revolution.While Jobs-haters have a point that Apple has done very little in the way of actual innovation (name almost any Apple technology and you’ll find a non-Apple variant that predates it significantly), the company has the magical ability to make it work. Seamlessly, easily, intuitively – and ...

This week I take a look at Moneybook, a simple yet powerful personal finance app that looks great and is unrivalled in ease of use. Pay day: the long-awaited day of the month that sees your bank account being credited for all the hard work that you’ve put in over the last four weeks. For me, the week leading up to this pivotal day is a bit of a weird time, kind of bittersweet, actually. On the one hand I’m ...

The proposed iMaverick iPad app. Looks very much like a magazine.For the past week, readers of South African upstart news and analysis site, Daily Maverick, have been teased with ads promising: "A tablet to improve your mental health" and the launch of "something to make the news a pleasure to digest". Now the news is out. Launched from the ashes of the failed Maverick Magazines, the Daily Maverick is looking to shake-up the local digital-journalism scene with the launch of ...

The Freedom On The Net 2011: A Global Assessment of internet and Digital Media is a study that highlights threats to internet freedom such as cyber attacks, politically-motivated censorship, and government control over internet infrastructure, but also highlights countries that are pro-internet freedom. For the report's methodology and more detail check out Freedom House's full analysis.Here follows an overview of countries that pose the biggest threat to internet freedom:BurmaIn a country with a population of 48-million, a paltry 40 ...

Pop quiz: As an internet user, what is the world's worst country to live in? China with its Great Firewall comes to mind. Or perhaps Cuba, a country that until the end of Fidel Castro's reign in 2008 outlawed laptop computers and mobile phones. But it is in fact the Islamic Republic of Iran -- a country that is the biggest hellhole of internet censorship on the planet.How bad can it be? Well, in the wake of protests following the ...

Last week Google added to a busy period of big product releases with the launch of Google Offers. The Google Offers launch followed hot on the heels of the launch of Google Wallet.Added to this, PayPal is suing former employees for giving away trade secrets to Google which allegedly fueled the development of Google Wallet.So what exactly is Google Wallet?Google Wallet is a new point-of-sale ecosystem that will allow users to use their smartphone as their wallet. This does however ...

The ever increasing allure of mobile advertising was reflected when BuzzCity, a global mobile advertising network, announced on Monday that it had served about 10.5-billion adverts across its mobile advertising network in May alone this year.The company attributes this increase in adverts served to greater consumer demand for mobile content and being able to meet that demand with its own white-label content services, leading to record numbers in ads served on its mobile advertising network.The company's CEO, Dr ...