Author: CraigWilson

Toby Shapshak and Craig Wilson consider the biggest technology stories of 2018, including Facebook’s multitude of massive missteps, Elon Musk’s somewhat smaller ones (“Funding secured”), Huawei’s highs (and woes), the Fortnite phenomenon and what to look forward to in 2019, like the coming upheaval facing the South African banking sector. https://soundcloud.com/user-492019255/stuffed-ep-11-2018-in-review-facebooks-annus-horribilis-musk-huawei-fortnite-and-more Catch up on previous episodes of Stuffed over here. Or subscribe to Stuffed in iTunes or via the podcast app of your choice (our favourites are Pocket Casts and Google Podcasts).

Samsung has announced that Samsung Pay, its mobile payments solution that launched with Standard Bank and Absa earlier this year, is now available on the company’s recent wearable devices, specifically, the Gear Sport, Gear S3 and Galaxy Watch. The Korean electronics giant has confirmed the service will be coming to five more banks in 2019, including the recently announced Discovery Bank due to launch in March. In the interim, because Samsung Pay is app-based, it will also work on a range of non-Samsung, Android handsets. So if you bank with Standard Bank or Absa, and want to take it for…

Car-on-demand service Uber has announced it’s increasing fares for South African consumers by 5%. The new rates come into effect today. Given the stratospheric rise in the price of fuel this year, the only surprise is that it’s taken so long. In a blog post about the move posted on Friday, the company says the new rates will help drivers “continue to maintain a sustainable living while using the Uber App” and that the change in fare prices “will allow driver-partners to earn more in order to make up for the rising cost of business and living expenses that affects…

Mobile network MTN recently bought music streaming Simfy Africa. Now it’s using its new acquisition to launch a novel take on a streaming service — which it’s calling a ‘world first’ called MusicTime. As the name suggests, the service lets users buy streaming access by time. MTN subscribers can buy 120 minutes of access to the service for R5 or 300 minutes for R10 — this includes the data needed for streaming. Both packages are valid for a week from purchase. Customers can buy packages with their MTN airtime. In order to get consumers to try out the service, MTN…

The LA Auto Show is underway this week in, you guessed it, Los Angeles, and if we had to sum it up in two words they’d be “electric vehicles”. If we had to sum it up in six words, they’d be “electric vehicles: so hot right now”. Seriously. Just about every big manufacturer has an EV — or at the very least, a hybrid or three — to show off for the event’s 2018 instalment. Of course, being a US motor show there are plenty of enormous, fossil-fuel guzzling trucks, too, along with a handful of traffic-stopping (sorry) concept cars,…

Stuff editor Craig Wilson talks to Holger Hampf, the head of BMW Designworks, at the LA Auto Show 2018 about the future of mobility and BMW’s Vision iNext, whether the company is leaving it too late to join the all-electric SUV fray, and the challenges of innovating while maintaining BMW’s brand identity and respecting its heritage. https://soundcloud.com/user-492019255/stuffed-ep-10-holger-hampf-head-of-bmw-designworks-on-the-future-of-mobility Catch up on previous episodes of Stuffed over here. Or subscribe to Stuffed in iTunes or via the podcast app of your choice (our favourites are Pocket Casts and Google Podcasts).

Pictures of the poster child vehicle of the all-electric motoring future BMW envisions have been circulating for months now, but on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles the German automaker showed off an actual car, one we could walk around, peer into and coo over, if not actually touch, sit in or drive. It’s unclear whether it’s fair to call the vehicle the iNext, or whether the term should only be used as a blanket term for BMW’s overarching electric strategy, but whichever it is, the SUV BMW showed off today is extremely, unambiguously, brashly ambitious. The fast and the… futuristic…

Major General Charles Bolden is a former astronaut, fighter pilot and NASA administrator. He sat down with Stuff magazine publisher and editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak and Stuff editor Craig Wilson to talk about his illustrious and varied career, how seeing the earth from space changed the way he thinks about it, and how bicycles might be more dangerous than space shuttles. As it’s not every day we get to speak to someone who’s been into space four times (or at all, for that matter), we figured we’d record a podcast and a video of our conversation. You’ll find both below, or…

Are you a Discovery Vitality member? Do you have medical aid or insurance through Discovery, or one of its credit cards? Do you like gamification? Have you had enough of these questions? If you answered yes to any of these questions (except, perhaps, the last one), Discovery is hoping it’ll be able to sign you up to Discovery Bank when it launches to the public in March 2019. Billed as a ‘behavioural bank’ by the medical aid giant, its forthcoming bank uses many of the same incentive mechanisms as its Vitality scheme… except now the product isn’t medical or car…

German car maker Mercedes-Benz is the latest to throw its hat in the South African all-electric vehicle ring. Well, it hasn’t actually flung, but it’s shown us the hat, and confirmed its intentions to fling. In addition to bolstering its hybrid offerings, the company plans to begin selling its luxury compact all-electric SUV, the EQC, locally in mid-2019. It also plans to offer 10 all-electric vehicles globally by 2022 in all major categories, from compact hatchbacks to luxury sedans. The forthcoming EQC is powered by an 80kWh lithium-ion battery and is built on the GLC platform. Buyers can expect around…