Cell C’s new weatherman ad mocks Rain’s LTE network

I don’t often use productivity apps, but there’s been such an increase in the quality of these apps that my attitude towards them might be changing. That’s mostly to do with a wonderfully designed and fantastically functional personal organiser, Todoist. The interface of the app is clean, sophisticated and very professional looking. I will start by saying that although I love this app, it might be for people with more intense schedules than mine. Read more on Gearburn. var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

Phew. It's finally April 2, and we can stop being so automatically distrustful of any suspiciously timed new products launched by the companies inhabiting the tech sphere. This year's crop of April Fools jokes included everything from the International Space Station to Twitter's latest means of generating revenue to Nokia's attempt to, um, enter the home appliance market. Twttr If you go all the way back to co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet back in 2006, you'll notice he referred to his fledgling service as "twttr". Twitter capitalised on this name on April 1 to announce the launch of its new tiered...

Twitter has relaunched its Twitter for Business site, giving it a new look as well as extra content. One of the most obvious changes Twitter has implemented with the relaunch is separating the sections for businesses new to Twitter and those who've been on the platform for a while now. If you want to see how other people have done well on Twitter, you can also see their success stories based on industry and size.There are also tips on how to promote your business using Twitter. Perhaps the most immediately useful thing to come out of the...

Alan Kay is one of Silicon Valley's top computer pioneers due to his work with colleagues at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on a broad range of technologies in the early 1970s that directly led to the creation of the PC industry -- a $35 trillion global business. In this short video clip he speaks about Silicon Valley's current boom being based on innovation that was funded by the government and by private companies such as Xerox, over a span of more than 13 years beginning in the early 1960s, which helped create the Internet and modern computing. He was...

When prices start soaring in tech, it's inevitable that you'll start hearing the term "bubble" bandied about. It happened with dot-com in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of years ago, everyone thought it was happening with social media and now some think Bitcoin is going through a bubble. Prices in the virtual currency have surged over the past few months, recently hitting US$100 after trading below US$35 in early March and US$15 in January. Less than a year ago meanwhile, the currency appeared to be in free fall with no end in sight. It certainly looks like...

This is interesting. We've just received a media invite to the launch of Investec's smartphone banking app. The fact that the South African-founded banking group, which also operates in the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland isn't as interesting however as the date. The app is set to have its official launch on 5 April, five days before banking giant Absa makes its foray into the world of smartphone banking apps. ABSA is the last of the “big four” consumer banks in South Africa to launch a smartphone banking app. First National Bank (FNB) led the way by launching its...

Pocketing US$50-million is no joke, so hopefully this one is not inspired by April Fool’s Day. According to Indian tech blog NextBigWhat, eBay has led a huge round of investment in India-based ecommerce site SnapDeal. Not yet officially confirmed, the rumored US$50-million sum comes 18 months after a US$40-million round, and an earlier US$12-million injection shortly after it launched. After starting out specializing in daily deals, the homegrown online mall soon surpassed LivingSocial in terms of traffic in the country and then pivoted/expanded into a broader e-commerce company early last year. SnapDeal is now up against local rivals like FlipKart...

WordPress founder and open source advocate Matt Mullenweg dropped by the Memeburn offices today to speak about how WordPress went from a blogging platform to the CMS of choice for around 15% of the web. The 29-year-old entrepreneur, named one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Media, started WordPress 10 years ago, mainly as a blogging platform for him and his friends. "I had to push it on a lot of people," he says. "I built blogs for my friends and basically forced them to use them". To get to the real roots of WordPress however, you have...

Evernote is cool -- ask any one of its 15-million monthly active users. True to the company's slogan, "Remember Everything", the suite of applications designed for note taking and archiving is on top of the world. The more successful it gets, the more headlines it grabs -- like the recent password reset due to a security breach, which caused some commotion among users. But that's not keeping the company down. Users are growing with India and the UK hitting one million and two million respectively. Founded in 2008 by serial entrepreneur Phil Libin, the company has managed to raise funding...

I recently received an awkward notification. A woman I had blocked on Facebook wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn. I had blocked her because, after a second meeting, I had realised that she was loopier than a theme park ride, and I felt a little suffocated at the 23rd missed call in the hour-long status meeting I had. This was nearly two and a half years prior to the notification that exploded in my inbox with the tactless indecency of an attention-seeking comedian hanging on the strings of a lost career. So then I obviously looked at...

This week's instalment of our top tech stories series involves everything from the changing music industry to a man who sold shares in himself. Yes, really. Along the way we also touch on the phone-fuelled bonfires that made Samsung what it is today, the questionable usage of hashtags, the early days of Google Reader and the messaging apps that have industry leaders worried. The music industry has irreversibly changed — the labels have not iTunes. Spotify. Pandora. Music no longer involves a CD player and a nice stream of revenue for the artist. But as the shift into digital continues,...

BlackBerry ended the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 -- the first to include sales of the Z10 -- in, well ... the black. The Waterloo-based communications company today announced its quarterly results and, while it's managed to stay profitable things are far from back to booming at the company. Revenue for the quarter was approximately US$2.7-billion, down US$49-million or two percent from approximately US$2.7-billion in the previous quarter and down 36% from US$4.2-billion in the same quarter of fiscal 2012. Ouch. Despite revenue falling though, its profit margin actually increased slightly. The company reported GAAP income from continuing operations...

Absa has announced that it's finally ready to launch a smartphone banking app, sometime after its competitors. The bank, which is a subsidiary of Barclays Bank, has sent out media invitations confirming an official 10 April launch date. ABSA is the last of the “big four” consumer banks in South Africa to launch a smartphone banking app. First National Bank (FNB) led the way by launching its app in mid 2011, while Standard Bank and Nedbank launched theirs within a couple of days of each other in mid 2012. At this stage it's unclear which platforms the Absa...

If all goes well, Twitter's global ad revenue should hit a billion dollars by 2014, says a recent eMarketer report. The research firm says this number comes in the wake of advertisers showing "more interest in spending money on mobile advertisements on Twitter", which suggests that Twitter's reach is improving. With more than 200-million monthly active users, Twitter is one of the top tier social networks so an improved interest in mobile advertising is hardly surprising. eMarketer reckons that Twitter will generate US$583-million in ad revenue in 2013 and US$950-million in 2014, a significant increase from a previous estimate of...

Facebook users that click "like" on a variety of cultural subjects reveal a surprisingly large amount of information about themselves even if they've taken steps to tighten up their privacy settings. A recently published study by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK and Microsoft Research, used an automated analysis of 58 000 volunteers' Facebook "likes" to make highly accurate predictions about a person's private and very sensitive personal attributes. The authors of the study: "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behaviour " claim that they were able to use "easily accessible digital records of...