If you've ever wondered why so many retail outlets are willing to do trade-ins on your old smartphone for the newest, latest model then you should probably know that there's a fairly substantial market for refurbishing and reselling unwanted phones. And when you think about it, that actually makes sense. Unless you're particularly hard on your phone, chances are you're upgrading not so much because you need to but because you want to. If that weren't the case then mobile carriers wouldn't ...

WorldRemit, an online money transfer service, is making a vigorous entry into the African mobile money service market. The service has completed a funding round and has raised US$100-million to drive its global growth. With the fund WorldRemit plans to extend to 50 send countries and 117 receive countries, and expand partnerships with Mobile Money wallets operated by telecoms companies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A few weeks ago, WorldRemit partnered with MTN to enter the African market, first in Uganda, ...

African cellular giant Vodacom has launched an e-school portal which will enable any learners who are Vodacom subscribers to access curriculum content through their mobile devices. The portal, which is called Vodacom e-school, was launched at the COSAT Centre of Science and Technology inILitha Park, Khayelitsha, Cape Town. “The project is in line with Vodacom’s ongoing drive to help provide ICT tools and Internet connectivity to communities that do not have access," says Vodacom executive head for corporate citizenship, Suraya ...

"If you can click on a Facebook picture, you can be a digital humanitarian," author and technologist Patrick Meier says. The old sentiment “Information is power” is so much more pertinent in today’s age where, every minute, over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube and 300 000 tweets are posted. Beyond all those funny videos of cats getting vacuumed and celebrity twars, there is stuff being done on social media that can make a real difference. Gathering this data and making ...

Two years ago, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies announced a whopping 35% reimbursement on production costs over three years as an incentive for local electric car manufacturers. Thus far, only Ethiopia and South Africa have attempted to launch electric cars on the African continent which some have hailed as an environmental victory for both countries. Eskom has already taken delivery of electric cars and installed charging stations at its Head Office and research facility to test the infrastructure demands ...

A growing number of consumers are turning to social media as their first point of contact when they have a question or complaint for a brand with which they do business. Yet too few companies have yet started to think about social media as a customer service tool – and the result is that they are missing out on some golden opportunities to build better relationships with their customers. The implication is that social media should no longer be considered to ...

Finally, I can breathe, eat and sleep again. The gripping anticipation is over. A few weeks ago, Grim Fandango: Remastered was released and my world practically stopped for a month. Unfortunately, my prediction of presidential speeches and world celebrations was a bit off. But who cares? This is a day I have been waiting for since I heard that the critically acclaimed point-and-click adventure game will be resurrected in glorious HD. The original Grim Fandango was created by Tim Schafer while ...

While the web has gone through a lot of changes since it first came into existence in the early 1990s, the fundamental tech behind it hasn't changed since 1999. That's until now with the introduction of a fresh new upgrade to HTTP 2.0 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), spelling faster page loads, more mobile-friendly and more encryption. HTTP is a big deal. It's the application that makes the web what it is -- enabling the transferring of packets of data between the user ...

Facebook has your data and it is going to use it. With its new service, Product Ads, the company is trying to simplify how businesses display ads. Product Ads is aimed at businesses that sell more than one product. Instead of displaying all the products to every customer, Facebook will help them display products to a particular user, ending the wild goose hunt for buyers, going direct by using the users’ interest and activity. All your likes, cookies, ad clicks, ...

Google is looking to force its way back into China, even if it means going through the back door. The internet giant has launched a new YouTube channel aimed at educating Chinese developers on the ins and outs of its various technologies, including Android and Compute Engine, its cloud computing offering. The channel, which includes new content as well as closed-caption content from its English-language service, may not be easily accessible in China but it is a sign that Google is ...