China is set to trump the US to take the number one spot for the fastest supercomputer ever made in a survey of the world's zippiest machines. Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, has a sustained computing speed of 2 507 trillion calculations per second, making it the fastest computer in China on a list published Thursday. But it is also 1.4 times faster that the world's current fastest ranked supercomputer in the US, housed at a national laboratory in Tennessee, according to the New York Times. Tianhe-1 does its warp-speed "thinking" at the National Center for Supercomputing in the northern port city of...
Marketing via mobile is a powerful way to expose people to a brand, and to get them to interact with it. Consumers want something from the sites they frequent on their mobile phones, while brands want to achieve something from their mobile marketing. You hit the marketing sweetspot when you manage to match these two sets of desires. What do consumers want from their mobile phones? • Social networking • Email and instant messaging • Music • Games • Content • News and information • Simple and secure payments What do brands want from mobile? • Ability to build a loyal profiled user base • Communication with a large, diverse base • Customer retention and repeat usage ...
The Russian state plans to revamp its computer services with a Windows rival to reduce its dependence on US giant Microsoft and better monitor computer security, a lawmaker said on Wednesday. Moscow will earmark 150 million rubles (US$4,9-million) to develop a national software system based on the Linux operating system, said Russian deputy Ilia Ponomarev, confirming an earlier report in the Vedomosti daily. "The devil is in the details," said Ponomarev, a computer expert, adding those details would be hashed out during a December meeting headed by vice-prime minister Sergei Ivanov. "We will become independent of Windows ... but it risks becoming...
Days of speculation are at an end after Liqui-Fruit and its advertising agency, Liquorice stood up and claimed responsibility for the Cape Town iceberg spotted off Clifton Beach on Monday morning. Earlier today, the South African fruit juice company released an adaptation of the original video with digitally added pieces of fruit on the iceberg, and copy which read "The end of global cooling....the start of the Liqui-Fruit summer meltdown.", and ending with a link promoting the Summer Meltdown on its Facebook page. The campaign is the brainchild of Brian Carter, Creative Director at Liquorice, and sources reveal that the...
Social network pioneer Myspace unveiled a redesign on Wednesday targeting the "Generation Y" younger audience as it seeks to regain ground lost to Facebook. Myspace, which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought for US$580 million dollars in 2005, said its new website and products are intended to "redefine the company as a social entertainment destination for Gen Y." "This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace," chief executive Mike Jones said in a statement. "Our new strategy expands on Myspace?s existing strengths -- a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural...
They hide under the bridges of online anonymity, ready to pounce on unsuspecting forums, chat rooms, news sites and blogs. They can ruin a lively debate with one well-placed comment. They do not care about contributing. Often they don’t even believe what they type. Their only desire is to provoke you – they are the internet trolls. What is a troll? The term originated from “trolling”, a method of fishing where bait or a lure is dragged behind a boat. This was reappropriated into the online world as "trolling for newbies", where experienced chat room users would "catch" and reveal...
Google rolled out a new feature called "Place Search" on Wednesday to make it easier for users to find information about local businesses. Place Search eliminates the need to perform several internet searches by grouping multiple results about a specific location into one entry. A search result for a particular type of restaurant, for example, may list several relevant local eateries and provide an address, a map, a photo, links to reviews from sites such as Yelp.com and other relevant information. "It makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place," Google product manager Jackie Bavaro said in a blog...
Finally, one of the big corporates has stood up and staked its claim to the iceberg that was spotted off Clifton Beach on Monday morning. Speculation has been rife about who was responsible, and now fruit juice giant Liqui-fruit has digitally added pieces of fruit to the iceberg, then added some lines of text which read "The end of global cooling....the start of the Liqui-Fruit summer meltdown.", giving the video a slicker, more commercial treatment and promoting the Summer Meltdown on its Facebook page. But is it really their campaign, or is Liqui-Fruit being opportunistic and hopping on the bandwagon? Check...
South Africa's premier domestic rugby competition, the Currie Cup, comes to a gripping climax this Saturday afternoon with the final between the Sharks and Western Province in Durban. But even though the game is still days away, the battle is already heating up on micro-blogging platform Twitter. Supporters of both teams are being encouraged to follow their teams on Twitter before the big final in a bid to establish cyber-dominance and gain a psychological edge. Sharks supporters are following just_sharks, while Province supporters are signing up at JustWP. By Wednesday morning the Sharks had just over 3 100 followers, while...
Politicians around the world have woken up to the potential of Facebook and Twitter as unfiltered platforms from which they can deliver their message to a receptive audience. But few have taken it up as effectively and with the same gusto as Nigeria's wonderfully-named President, Goodluck Jonathan. During the 1930's, the US President Roosevelt delivered a weekly radio broadcast to the nation, which consisted of reassuring the nation that it was going to recover and sharing his hopes and plans for the country during the Great Depression. These "fireside chats" were enormously popular and had a profound effect on...
The Nobel Peace Prize website came under cyber attack from Taiwan, Norwegian telecoms operator Telenor said Tuesday, less than three weeks after jailed Chinese dissent Liu Xiaobo won the award. "The site was compromised, or as is more commonly said, hacked," Frank Stien, in charge of computer security at Telenor said, confirming a report in the Aftenposten daily. Visitors to the www.nobelpeaceprize.org website risked infection by a "Trojan horse" virus, a difficult to detect programme that allows hackers to take control of victims' computers. Stien said the last IP address used by the hacker was at the National Chiao Tung University in...
Doesn't it seem that the Facebook Like buttons populating the web have been there forever? In fact they were only introduced in June 2010, and are already being used on over 350 000 websites, according to the Wall Street Journal. Essentially, the Like button is a tool that allows users to show appreciation for what they are viewing without having to say a word. All that is required is a simple click that lets your network know that you have given your stamp of approval. And this implementation of Facebook's Social Graph is subtly changing the model of how...
The demise of the old media appears to have slowed but it hasn't gone away as the transition towards a digital business model continues to hold many challenges. We still haven't figured out how to transfer high quality old media to the digital platform. And that's an astounding position to be in. You would think that by now we would have come up with a solution to this problem. Plus, we still haven't figured out how to produce high quality journalism on the economics of the digital business model. You really can't get there from here, based on the economics of...
PayPal unveiled a new micropayments service on Tuesday that makes it easier to buy digital goods and announced an integration with social networking giant Facebook. PayPal said the new micropayments system "lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site." It described the service, which will be available later this year, as the "online equivalent of dropping a quarter in the slot to buy a newspaper or play a videogame." "PayPal's new solution solves a key problem for the digital goods industry by...
Google, which has strained relations with publishers worldwide who accuse it of aggregating articles without compensation, says it is to donate $5-million (about R35-million) to encourage innovation in digital journalism. But the donation, a paltry sum in the face of significant losses by traditional publishers worldwide, is unlikely to mollify media owners who accuse Google of spidering content without sufficient compensation and threatening their advertising models via the disruptive (but extremely innovative) Adwords and Adsense programmes. "Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy," writes president of Google's global sales operations and business development Nikesh Arora on the official Google blog. "So as...
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