Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet is bold, competitive and, at US$250, reasonably priced. But is it worth snatching up in a post-Kindle Fire world? Reviews for the Nook Tablet have trickled in and the critics seemingly love this heavily modified Android tablet. MSNBC Wilson Rothman loves the speed of the Nook, calling it "superior to the Kindle Fire" thanks to an overnight power test which saw a 27% improvement in battery life over the Kindle Fire. Rothman enjoyed the "nice big home ...

The Wall Street Journal has published an exposé on technologies being sold to governments to enable them to intercept the publics' digital communications. It describes the expose as "a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since September 11". Mirroring Wikileaks, the Journal has titled the release "The Surveillance Catalogue," and refers to it as a "documents trove". The documents, which comprise highly secret marketing papers from the companies developing these ...

We’re all one step closer to a Star Trek future of sliding doors, teleporters, tricorders and big table-sized computers that you touch and gesture and wave at. We saw the first generation of “Surface” from Microsoft a few years back – now it is ready to go large with a hardware partner, Samsung. The SUR40 will go into full production in December and shipping first thing in 2012. It features the second generation of Microsoft’s “Surface” software platform, built on Windows ...

Is casual gaming, the supposed vampire sucking on the life-blood of the “hard-core” market, heading into a downward spiral? According to a report by analysts Cowen and Company, it is. The report states that 26% of the market is rocking out with the Sony PSP, 3DS or non-3D Nintendo DS, in a slow but steady decline. "Over the last five years, the penetration of dedicated handheld platforms into survey respondents self-identifying as casual gamers has declined by 29 per cent, with ...

It is rare to see multi-billion dollar multinational corporations tease each other in a public forum. On social media though, anything is possible. Yesterday, Vodacom, one of South Africa's big three mobile network operator tweeted Cell C, a fast growing giant in the South African mobile network space, happy birthday. Vodacom's tweet read: Vodacom's tweet reads like the words of a trusty father proudly marveling at his little boy's achievements. Cell C launched in 2001 and piggy-backed off Vodacom's network towers ...

Google launched its Music product this week and the industry’s immediate response was that this launch is aimed at taking on iTunes and that it is eight years too late. Au contraire. Whilst offering a "locker" and a store, it’s the integration with Android and Google+ that holds the key to the broader strategy for Google. The music-in-the-cloud strategy is a no-brainer for Google on the storage front. It’s stored gajillions of emails for Gmail, documents and spreadsheet data for ...

Former South African television presenter Nonhle Thema was revelling the apparent freedom her current state of unemployment gave her on Twitter the other night. "i can tweet whatever i want," she said "NO 1 will FIRE ME or make me say sorry......LOL..FREEDOM....im FREE". Sadly, most of us aren't free, and we can't say what we like. In the era of the personal brand, how do we manage our online activities when a tweet could be a seriously career-limiting move? ...

The Vodafone Webbook is cheap, incredibly cheap (around R1 500 [US$ 184]). As such, criticising it feels a little odd. It’s a bit like taking apart a soup kitchen for not having an internationally renowned wine list or the local corner café for lacking the nuances of haute cuisine in its cooking. Here’s the thing though, the Webbook feels cheap, something designed to throw to an unwashed proletariat desperate for the democratisation of technology. I get that there’s a reason it ...

In a recent article, I pointed out that activist media, such as the posts, tweets, photos, and videos produced by the Occupy Wall Street activists, will become increasingly influential, while the establishment media, such as CNN or New York Times, will decline in influence. The reason is that the business model for establishment media is under siege and that means cutbacks in resources. There are simply fewer journalists, editors, photographers, camera operators, and there will be even fewer in the future ...

Quitting Facebook --- It’s one of those things you think about every time your mother comments on a photo of you, or a high school buddy boasts about a new business venture, or a good friend feels the need to fill your day with his newborn’s bowel movements. The first time I gave it any serious thought was when it was reported that facebook had developed face recognition technology, my initial reaction was. "So who cares? It was bound to ...