Despite international and local outcry, the controversial "Protection of State Information Bill", more commonly referred to the "secrecy bill", has taken its first steps to becoming law. Opponents of the proposed law have promised to continue fighting it tooth and nail. That fight was, once again, taken online with the Wikipedia page of the African National Congress (ANC) having been "wikibombed". Wikibombing, as the Urban Dictionary defines it, is "The act of intentionally going on Wikipedia and putting false information ...

I was recently in London for the Tech City UK Entrepreneurs Festival, as part of Britain's Global Entrepreneurship Week with over 300 tech entrepreneurs from around the globe. The experience was educational, to say the least, and gave me some insight into what any initiative aimed at developing entrepreneurship in the tech sector should be doing. Throughout the course of the week long conference, it became evident that emerging market initiatives like Silicon Cape in South Africa and the ...

The face of the music industry was irrevocably altered when the digital age dawned, changing the way people obtained, listened to and interacted with music. In this precarious new world some artists chose not to simply accept the move to a more interactive digital presence -- but have truly immersed themselves in all the facets that digital technology offers them as creative beings. Whether that means hosting fun and thought-provoking online campaigns or even releasing an entire album as an ...

China is set to overtake the US as the world's largest ecommerce market by 2015. That’s according to research from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a firm that specialises in advising on business strategy. The company bases this assertion on the phenomenal levels of growth the Chinese ecommerce sector has seen in the past few years. BCG estimates that around 145-million (30 or so percent) of China’s 500-million strong internet population currently shop online. This is up from less ...

I have a soft spot for HTC. My trusted Desire was my first Android-powered device, and needless to say, I love it. It’s a great piece of kit: well built, still snappy after all these years and the battery life no worse than most new phones. So how does the Desire’s new big brother, the Sensation, shape up? By my reckoning, HTC is the Android manufacturer that places the most emphasis on build quality, and it shows throughout its range of ...

Logitech has long had a place in my heart for good value, quality gear. Its keyboards and mice are hugely popular, but the little active speaker systems. That’s what we like. Partly because they’re inexpensive, but that could be said about a million cheapo speaker sets from Shenzhen – no, it’s because Logitech is Swiss, had shipped more than a billion mice coming into 2009, and actually cares about sound quality and longevity. The US$80-odd Logitech Z323 speakers are a new ...

Google has axed seven more products as it looks to clean up and simplify its offerings. This is the third such clean out in recent months. Products that have previously fallen by the wayside include Aardvark, Fast Flip and Jaiku. In an official blog post, Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Hözle said the products getting the chop were those Google feels "haven't had the impact we'd hoped for". Google Bookmarks Lists This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks ...

Yahoo Inc.'s Southeast Asia division is being sued by Asian media group Singapore Press Holdings for reproducing content from its newspaper without permission. Singapore Press, publisher of the Straits Times newspaper and other dailies, has asked Singapore's High Court to stop Yahoo! from reproducing articles from its newspapers and pay unspecified damages for the copyright infringement. "In our statement of claim, we cited, as examples, 23 articles from our newspapers which Yahoo! had reproduced over a 12-month period without our licence ...

First, get ready with a pinch of salt, as security companies sounding alarms about security can be self-serving. Vested interest, and all. But Bit9, an enterprise security firm specialising in threats from end-point devices, has released a report analysing the security risks of smartphones -- and blames the fact that the ‘Dirty Dozen’ are all Android phones on handset manufacturers being so slow on software updates, and ‘end of lifing’ devices when they’re still current in the market. Together with the obligatory ...

We all know the one hard and fast rule of Hollywood: Within a maximum of six steps anyone in that industry can be connected to the legend that is Kevin Bacon. New research by Facebook has, however, bested that. The world's largest social network has announced that any of its 800-million users can be connected in 4.74 steps or less. In a post on it’s Data blog titled "Anatomy of a Social Network", Facebook released the findings of two studies which ...