Thought Leader

It’s comforting to know that South Africa now has a formal, cabinet-approved digital migration policy, and even more so that our digital TV future will be curated by a Digital Dzonga (“digital south”) Advisory Council, drawn from the industry, labour and public, and reporting to the Minister of Communications. The announcement will come as a…

Since we all have to think about saving electricity from now on – if not in the hope that it will avoid future load shedding than perhaps to keep our personal the electricity bill down – I thought it might be a good idea to find out what quirky inventions are out there that could…

Ha! My favourite six words of fiction. “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” come a close second. I am a sucker for brevity, and appreciate writers who can cut a long story short without losing the essence of the plot. (Unlike Woody Allen who said he “speed-read War and Peace. It was about Russia.”) So,…

My last status update simply said: “Alex says bye”. And then I did it. I deactivated my Facebook account. The decision to leave the ubiquitous social networking site even took me a little by surprise. How on earth was I going to survive without the website I compulsively visited several times a day? The more…

Did you know that mobile is considered to be the seventh mass medium? In an excellent article on Communities-dominate, the argument is made emphatically. Here are some of the points. These are the current mass media:- print, music recordings, movies, radio, TV and computer based internet. The mobile phone, at number seven, has a huge…

Is it only me, or has the media’s leverage of technology allowed its coverage of economic news to stagnate? The technology is now available to plug so many automated feeds into tracking of daily market indicators that the people responsible for economic coverage no longer think about what they are reporting. Usually, a sure sign…

Should you ever wonder what the intellectual capacity of social-networking contributors and participants would be, then consider this. A picture of an anteater garnered 2 345 diggs, or votes, and 172 comments, within a matter of 23 hours and 24 minutes. In other words, the groundswell of opinion towards a picture of an anteater with a…

I certainly enjoy being connected to the Internet and digital world, but as my bills poured in at the end of the month, I started wondering just how much this is costing me. Here is a (very approximate) breakdown: 3G modem, 1 Gig , R350 3G modem, 2 Gig, R550 Cellphone contract, R500 Blackberry subscription,…

I have noticed a life cycle with my enthusiasm for any new piece of technology: At first I love it Then I love it some more, and start hooking up other people with it Then I begin to notice the bugs, which I try to ignore because the technology is so cool Then the bugs…

I just love lotteries. What I especially love about them is that you don’t even have to enter them any more. You just win them! I won four only this morning. I won lotteries in Spain (again!), France (my third), Egypt and Norway. Even if I had won only three since waking up, I would…