I recently migrated laptops. Alarming how simple that sentence looks. I mean, migrations are long and hard, and things die. They have an alarming inevitability. Everything in their path gets trampled. Being able to express that in a single tiny sentence seems unfair. Unfortunately there's little that can be done about the endless hours and megabytes you will spend on downloading Windows updates, and there's no relief for us Windows XP diehards who now have to come to grips with Windows 7 ...

Generally speaking, in the 90s, Africa's mobile network operators (MNOs) were highly disruptive. In this last decade however, they have continued to decrease in this. Operators are no longer the offensive, attacking force of yesteryear, instead they’re putting up barriers and defensive walls trying to protect what they have and hide. Instead, the disruption comes from the open web. Whenever the operators put up a blocker to what users want, usually in the form of price or access to their infrastructure, ...

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has received a US$500 000 grant Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki have donated US$500 000 to The Silicon Valley power couple -- Wojicki is the co-founder of personal genetics company 23andMe -- made the donation in the name of their own Brin Wojcicki Foundation, as the Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its eighth annual round of fundraising. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is the public face ...

A group of Chinese game developers has announced that it intends suing the country’s search giant Baidu for more than 30-million yuan (US$4.7-million) for copyright infringement. The group, called Content Provider Union (CPU), represents mobile game developers, has accused Baidu of allowing unauthorised downloads of more than 350 games designed by member firms. CPU is largely made up of small, domestic game developers. That’s according to Tian Lifeng, a spokesperson for the group, adding that the case ...

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 ...