Stealthy death-dealer Ezio Auditore takes his noble crusade to the 16th Century Ottoman Empire with the release of Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed game -- his last appearance as the trilogy comes to an end. In a blend of historical truth and narrative fiction, Assassin's Creed: Revelations traces Auditore’s exploits in thwarting an age-old grab for global domination reaching into modern times. "Revelations" is the fourth instalment in a franchise that has sold more than 31-million copies since it launched four years ...

There was a time where it made sense to have a separate mobile site, running in parallel with your old faithful desktop website. We put these mobile-only sites under domains like "m.myveryspecialsite.com" or "myveryspecialsite.mobi". The argument was that because our online offering was being accessed via a different medium with different capabilities, we therefore needed clearly distinct sites. Mobile phones then were simple beasts, because they were mainly just phones with a bit of web browsing thrown in. These phones ...

Despite a drop in market share, Nokia continued to be the worldwide leader in mobile device sales, accounting for about 24% of all global sales. The second quarter of 2011 was a low point for Nokia, although the third quarter brought signs of improvement. This is according to research from Gartner. Dual-SIM phones in particular, and feature phones generally, maintained Nokia's momentum in emerging markets. Gartner reckons that "heavy marketing from both Nokia and Microsoft" to push the new Lumia devices ...

Can a brick-and-mortar retail business use the internet to grow its customer base, increase sales and improve repeat business? I believe that it can -- and I'd like to show you how. Have you ever wondered what the hardest part is of running a business? For most business owners, it's finding clients. In a world deeply mired by a recession more and more people are turning to self-employment to put food on the table. The problem is that most engineers, accountants, lawyers, ...

Banking is an area that, sadly, none of us can really get away from. It touches all of us at least twice a month -- the day your salary goes in, and then the day all the debit orders go off. But how are banks in an emerging market like South Africa trying to integrate with people's daily lives, and how are they using the available tools to interact with their customers and learn from them on a daily ...

With over 800 million users worldwide, Facebook has all but annihilated its oldest, closest rival Myspace, and left cyberspace littered with the remnants of social networking start-ups that tried to match its success. But how? What made Facebook so much better, and how did it manage to topple a company like Myspace which was expected to generate over US$1-billion in 2007? Overall, Facebook had a number of key successes which helped to elevate its status from young upstart to ...

Renowned US billionaire Warren Buffett announced that his Berkshire Hathaway investment firm has been quietly buying up shares in technology giant IBM to the tune of US$10.7-billion since March this year. Speaking to television network CNBC, Buffet said that his company's investment in IBM amounts to about 64-million shares, or a 5.5% stake. If accurate, the investment would see Berkshire Hathaway become IBM's second biggest shareholder, behind investment advisory group State Street. The 81-year-old Buffett, sometimes called the "Sage ...

American multinational internet publisher Yahoo has been quietly approaching South African publishers and advertisers over the past four months in preparation for re-entering the country. The site had a visible presence in South Africa in the late 90s but pulled out of the country for unknown reasons. Now the company wishes to make another play for South African audiences. Yahoo has a presence in key emerging market BRIC countries, including Brazil, Russia, India and China. It does not have a dedicated presence ...

If you thought that being the winner of a Man Booker Prize or having one of the highest profiles in the world of literature would exempt you from Facebook’s real name policy, as Salman Rushdie learnt, think again. Rushdie, whose full name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie, has won a tussle with Facebook over his profile page on the social network. The ruckus began when Facebook -- believing it was a hoax -- deactivated Rushdie's Facebook account. Rushdie then submitted a copy ...

I have cognitive dissonance over the term "Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D)". This term, “ICT4D,” is confusing, hypocritical, and has a whiff of condescension that makes me cringe. As I understand it, it’s what NGOs do in places like Africa and Asia, but if the same things are done in poor communities in the US or Europe, it's not called ICT4D, it’s called "civil society innovation" or a "disruptive product". I'll be the first to say that I think more ...