An attack on Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the U.S., which exposed identifiable personal data of tens of millions of people, has again put cyber security in the spotlight, especially as identity theft is on the increase in South Africa. According to the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service, identity theft, which costs the economy R1 billion a year, increased 16% between 2012 and 2013 and was expected to rise further in 2014. Protecting organisations and safe-guarding the personal data ...

Hooked onto Africa’s strong growth, the continent has over the past few years been seeing a record high of foreign direct investment, peaking at US$56.3-billion in 2013. Yet, studies still show that medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are struggling to get their share of the pie. Freshly launched in Kenya, a relatively new startup called Solvesting has geared up to serve an estimated US$850 000-billion untapped credit market that exists in emerging markets today. How is it planning to do this? Well, Solvesting introduces ...

There were many things that Nintendo got right with the debut 3DS and 3DS XL systems. They were easy to hold, lasted long on a charge and had a plethora of great titles to choose from, but they also had their flaws. One of them was ashamedly highlighted in their name. While the 3D system caused more migraines than good memories, there was also a lack of control nubs modern day console gamers are used to.

South African / Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp -- the director behind sci-fi jaw-droppers District 9, Elysium and soon-to-be-released Chappie -- announced that he'll direct the next instalment of 1979 horror movie masterpiece Alien: Xenomorphs, facehuggers and all. Fans of the sci-fi cult classic are overjoyed by the news, especially after original Alien director Ridley Scott's follow-on Prometheus, which was considered a flop by many. Similarly, the more recent survival horror video game, Alien Isolation, was criticised by among others IGN, calling it "frustrating", "repetitive" and plain "boring". Read more: ...

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 ...