Author: Brett Venter

When you think of technology and innovation, you’re usually not thinking about the financial sector. Unless you work on FNB’s Twitter account and/or app development team, that is. But the fintech sphere is technology too, even if you can’t purchase its products from a shiny retailer. It makes sense to have a space where those innovations or ‘disruptions’, if we’re going to jump feet first into the most popular buzzword of the year, are created, incubated, and unleashed. Enter Rand Merchant Insurance Holdings (RMI) and Rand Merchant Bank Holdings (RMBH), who have announced the Sandton-based AlphaCode. AlphaCode is set to…

SpaceX are giving their new Dragon hover capabilities – This is what that looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI SpaceX have been operating as a cargo service for a while but they’re soon going to be transporting passengers to and from the International Space Station. Which is why their Dragon capsule is undergoing an upgrade, as this recently-released footage of the capsule hovering under its own power shows. It’s one thing for a capsule to fall to Earth when there aren’t people inside it but you want an astronaut to have a softer landing. The eventual plan is to use this hover capability…

This is how you satisfy a need for speed (without DLC or speeding tickets) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qumtP541tp0 Someone out there with the correct experience might be able to tell us just what is going on in this video. It’s almost obvious: A couple of guys are getting a small remote-controlled vehicle going on a circular track, shepherding it along until it gets fast enough for the speed camera to kick in. And kick in it does, with the small vehicle starting to smoke at around the 180km/h mark. If you thought that was  fast, the little… thing…. keeps on picking up speed…

Leica’s latest object of desire is waterproof Leica cameras are like luxury motor vehicles. Everyone wants one but not everyone can cover the price tag. The German company’s latest, the Leica X-U, is no different. It’ll cost, at its very cheapest, more than R50,000 but you might want to take out that personal loan after all. The X-U will survive immersion up to 15 metres (in water, not beer or vodka or something), has been dust-sealed and will work in the cold as well. That’s in addition to the 16.5-megapixel APS-C sensor, the Summilux 23mm lens and f1.7 aperture. It’s not the elegant,…

Making a computer chip for keeping an eye on the human brain (and making it dissolve) One of these days you could have a doctor-recommended chip in your brain. Or in another body part, watching over your recovery and sending information to a medical professional. Does that seem like a science fiction stretch? It’s not. These chips, called transient sensors, exist, though they haven’t been stuck inside human heads just yet. The sensors have found instead a home inside rats, as these are still early versions of the technology. They could be used for organs other than grey matter and…

We were not really aware of our reliance on social media. Not really, until yesterday’s Twitter outage hit and we were unable to view or post on the service. Then it suddenly felt as though a hand had been lopped off. We don’t think we were alone. As to the cause of the outage, which spread its productivity-increasing tendrils around the world to Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Twitter has an explanation for it. The outage came about as a result of a borked software update. Once Twitter rolled back the changes, service resumed as normal. More…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRih_VtVAs Everything can be made better with a little Freddy Mercury but the trailer for Suicide Squad, which is set to release on circuit in August this year, would have looked good even without Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in the background. A little more is revealed about the circumstances of the Squad’s assembly in this outing. We’re hoping for a montage in the film proper. Collecting DC’s super-villains in one place, even when they’re all in a prison, isn’t usually a good idea, as the Batman can attest. But using them to accomplish a nearly impossible mission with the promise of…

Samsung’s rumour machine is still ticking over, though ‘revving up’ is perhaps a more accurate description. The Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge handsets have been sighted in AnTuTu benchmarks – as opposed to a sighting of the handset itself – and the data contained there confirms rumoured specifications for both handset. The Galaxy S7 has already been seen in benchmark results, with a Snapdragon 820 at its core, but the AnTuTu sighting has the Exynos 8890 from Samsung in the driver’s seat. The specs for the device are given as: a 5.1-inch 2K display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of…

We’ve all heard of Tinder, at the very least, and there are versions of the popular dating app out there for everyone from same-sex couples to those with specific political or religious leanings to bacon aficionados. But there’s a dating app out there, called Once, which wants you to follow your heart. Literally. Dating apps generally rely on physical stimulus. You swipe, see someone that looks like someone you might you like and then, possibly, start talking to them to see whether the personality matches the er… drapes. So to speak. But what if you could add another physical response into…

Samsung’s Gear S2 smart wearable has some company on the way and we’ve got a good idea what it looks like, thanks to an extensive image leak of the device. The wristwear, which lacks an official moniker but does have a model number (SM-R150), bears a striking resemblance to the S2. The circular design and rotating bezel are a bit of a giveaway. Where it differs is that it’s thought to be based on Samsung’s so-called Bio Processor, a chipset designed for use in the company’s fitness gear. The Bio Processor can, according to SamMobile, “…monitor heart rate, perform electrocardiogram as…