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  • The ‘Flying like a bird’ hoax and the trouble with online advertising

    By on 23 March, 2012

    “My name is Floris Kaayk I’m actually a filmmaker and animator. I’ve been working on an experiment about online media for 8 months...” Now that the Dutch artist Floris Kaayk, also known as Jarno Smeets, the man behind one of the most elaborate internet hoaxes of recent times has come clean, how do you feel? You’re a dreamer and for a moment Kaayk’s project inspired you, you defended it to the hilt. You’re disappointed. You’re a skeptic and you gasped as high-profile news sources reported the story as a matter of fact. You feel vindicated. You were undecided, teetering back and...

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  • 17 Movies worth geeking out to in 2012

    By on 23 March, 2012

    I have learnt a great many things from movies. Every time I read a book, a comic or a graphic novel, I imagine what it would look like as a movie. The action packed sequences, emotional transitions and character development. I love seeing how a director's eye interprets the written word. Sometimes they win... sometimes they lose. I believe 2012 will cater for all geeks movie-wise. Hollywood is bringing its A game and tinseltown clearly has all you geeky movie fanatics out there in mind. The cheesy one liners, the cinematic theme songs, the hyper intense scores, the over extravagant...

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  • Pay per click advertising: You’re doing it wrong

    By on 23 March, 2012

    "Too many digital agencies are focused wholly on driving traffic to their clients’ sites without providing any insight into what to do with it," says Michèle Macnab, head of the Pay Per Click team at digital marketing agency World Wide Creative. We chatted a bit and she gave me five tips for managers wanting to oversee a profitable PPC campaign. Macnab has widespread experience, both in the United Kingdom and in South Africa, working on a large variety of Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns with clients across sectors including tourism, legal, retail, IT, e-commerce and online gambling. "Nowadays," says Macnab, "An increasing number...

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  • Facebook, Google and the death of online privacy [Infographic]

    By on 23 March, 2012

    I’ve come to the conclusion that online privacy is pretty much dead. Remember the early days of the internet, where everyone used fake names or nicknames and didn't enter their real location because there were creepy people out there in cyberspace that you were supposed to hide from? Then along came Facebook, which wasn’t interested in your pseudonym: it wanted your real name and birthdate, please. Twitter defaults to public profiles and Google has now gone and shared pretty much everything you've ever told one of its services with the rest of the Google family. Add cookies, IP addresses, tracking...

  • Heads up, DropGifts is taking social gifting to South Africa

    By on 23 March, 2012

    DropGifts, the service that lets you send free and paid gift cards to your friends on Facebook, will be launching in South Africa by the end of Q1 2012. Backed by Rocket Internet -- the German web incubator run by the Samwer brothers -- DropGifts is expanding its rollout strategy into emerging markets following good traction in the UK, France and Germany. Rocket is famous for its clone sites and DropGifts is no different. It follows the same recipe as the Swedish Wrapp. How does it work? DropGifts connects to your Facebook account and pulls in your friend list. Although...

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  • China is winning with staggering internet stats

    By on 23 March, 2012

    With a population close to 1.3-billion (yes, that's a 'B'); it's hardly surprising that Chinese internet statistics are staggeringly high. In fact, in 2011 almost half of all mobile subscriptions and two-thirds of the internet users in the six Asia-Pacific countries that were surveyed by Euromonitor International were from China. But how does this compare to the Western world and what impact does this have? While China's population does make it easy to achieve these kinds of internet user and mobile subscription numbers, it must be said that China has invested a tremendous amount in infrastructure. In a Forrester Research...

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  • Intel’s narcissism machine… oh what fun

    By on 23 March, 2012

    In its infinite wisdom, Intel has decided to give social network users a digital self-obsession tool -- because Googling oneself is so passé. The chip maker built a tool that creates an infographic that’s all about you. Oh yay. Mirror Mirror on the web, who is the fairest of them all? The app, called "What About Me?", gathers information from your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube profiles to produce a data visualisation of your entire social media profile. Yep, why Google when you can do this? The graphic looks something like a flower that tracks your interests based on what you tweet and...

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  • Mad Men: The game — help Don Draper with new ideas or find inner peace

    By on 23 March, 2012

    Filmmakers Benny & Rafi Fine make up the awesome production company Fine Brothers. The duo is famed for producing innovative videos on YouTube. Who knew YouTube could be so interactive? Until I came across one of the Fine Brothers productions, I didn't. We all love Mad Men and the brothers Fine decided to help us interact with the characters a little bit more. So they have launched a Mad Men Interactive Game that asks users to help Don Draper. It's designed to look like one of the 8-bit video games of yesteryear and it incorporates other characters from the...

  • Facebook: Most people get into a relationship early in the week [Study]

    By on 23 March, 2012

    You’re not really in a relationship until you’re FBO (that’s Facebook Official for the uninitiated). We all know that that little relationship status update has become incredibly important, but have you ever wondered when most people make the switch? Nope? Us neither, but it was clearly on the minds of the Facebook Data Team. The team collated U.S. Facebook data from 2010 and 2011 in a bid to find out “how different times of the year affect the beginning and ending of relationships”. As it turns out, most people go from “single” to “in a relationship” between Sunday and Tuesday. Interestingly,...

  • Facebook takes a stand against bosses requesting employee passwords

    By on 23 March, 2012

    Facebook may have all the dirt on you, but it doesn’t think your boss should too. The issue of employers requesting their employees’ Facebook passwords has recently come to the fore. In response to these kinds of reports, the social network has issued a statement damning the practise. According to Facebook, “this practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends”. Moreover, the social network believes that employers who engage in the practise are opening themselves up to "to unanticipated legal liability". If an employer looks at someone’s Facebook profile and...

  • Twitter time machine: What the first 30 tweets looked like

    By on 23 March, 2012

    A little over six years ago, an idea that started out on a scrap of exam pad became reality. Twitter was born, its creators probably unaware that earth changing events would soon come to us in 140 character-sized chunks. In fact, judging by the messages Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and company sent out, they had absolutely no idea. If you saw their tweets today, you’d probably judge them for being so banal. The only one to show any kind of prescience is Dom Sagolla when he says, “oh this is going to be addictive”. twttr...

  • Previewed: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

    By on 23 March, 2012

    Samsung did well with its range of tablets, and continues to do well as it pumps out slightly upgraded iterations of its hardware. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is no different, but represents a slight bump in hardware specs, as well as being one of the first tablets to offer a stylus interface option. Follow us as we weave you through the highs and lows of Samsung’s latest offering. Hardware, more of the same Let’s start with the design of the Note 10.1. The back is matte, wiping out fingerprint nightmares and the speakers have slightly shifted around. That’s it for...

  • My my, TweetDeck how you’ve changed… again

    By on 23 March, 2012

    Twitter got bored again and decided to do some tinkering with TweekDeck for Mac, Windows and Chrome. The official Twitter client received a major upgrade this week, with a host of new and improved features. The upgrade looks to be a major enhancement to TweetDeck’s functionality, solving the problem of features that were found wanting in the previous upgrade. The Twitter client has been tweaked so its features align more closely with Twitter’s own goals for its future. Possibly the most appreciated of these improvements is the return of the classic "RT" for retweeting rather than simply quoting a tweet. About...

  • ForgetMeNot Africa eTXT Apps Challenge: Win big in Zimbabwe

    By on 22 March, 2012

    If you’re a Zimbabwean tech entrepreneur, this might be of interest to you. A competition launching next week at the Harare Club of JumpStart -- the community driven initiative for tech entrepreneurs -- will enable developers to launch their apps and earn revenue from them on Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s biggest cellular operator with an estimated 6 million subscribers. The competition is called the ForgetMeNot Africa eTXT Apps Challenge. ForgetMeNot Africa (FMNA) is the company that partners with mobile operators to provide internet type services to users who don’t have smartphones or data connections. FMNA provides these services as part of...

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  • How to hitchhike across the US in 162 seconds [Video]

    By on 22 March, 2012

    How do you condense a year of hitchhiking around the US into 162 seconds? Well, if your name is Benjamin Jenks, you take a load of photos, making sure your camera is at exactly the same angle for each one, stitch them all together and set it to a funky dance beat. It’s sort of like one of those videos that were really popular a couple of years back. You know, the kind that had someone taking a photo of themselves in exactly the same sport for three years. The difference is, this is a lot more dynamic and,...