Author: Brett Venter

Active noise-cancelling headphones are the standard now but not everyone can afford to place the tech in or on their ears. Until now, that is. South Africans will be familiar with Volkano, a budget brand that makes audio tech and other odds and ends. The VolkanoX Silenzo is from the company’s more advanced lineup but these over/on-ear headphones don’t move beyond budget pricing. There is, of course, a reason for this. They absolutely are budget headphones but this comes across mostly in terms of performance. The VolkanoX brand has its look, feel, and features down so well that you’ll be…

Translator, Microsoft’s answer to Google Translate, has just added a new batch of African languages to the service, bringing the total number of supported languages to 124. Of the thirteen new languages, four are native to South Africa and its immediate neighbours. The newly supported languages are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba. A Translator for Africa Of these, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, and Xhosa are official South African languages. They join the company’s support for the Zulu tongue, which was added to the service along with Somali in…

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a satellite the space agency launched in 2008, while SpaceX was still taking its first steps in the launch industry. Its job is to keep an eye on the boundaries of the solar system. It tracks energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) formed when solar winds meet the colder winds of interstellar space. It’s an important job. Unfortunately, IBEX stopped doing it a while ago. Something went wrong with the fifteen-year-old probe that forced the space agency to reset it. This has happened before. Only, this time, IBEX failed to reestablish communication. NASA uses the firecode…

It’s not a case of if but a case of when Samsung announces its new slate of Galaxy A mid-range devices for 2023. That date is pegged for around 15 March this year, according to industry speculation. But it wouldn’t be a Samsung launch if we didn’t know everything before it took place. Well, guess what…? If you guessed that basically everything is already known, well done on your ability to spot trends. The Galaxy A54 5g and the Galaxy A34 5G have both been outing way before the announcement. The third device, Samsung’s A14, has already launched in the…

Russia and Ukraine, if you haven’t been paying attention for the last year, are in the middle of a substantial disagreement. That has had quite an effect on the former Soviet Union’s economy. Not so much the country’s earning potential — that seems to be doing better than expected (though that could and probably will change). But several international brands and services are no longer available in the country thanks to various sanctions. Those sanctions mean that the likes of Samsung and Apple have left the country. So have Intel, LG, Microsoft, Netflix, and many others. Heck, even McDonalds has…

Vodacom Business in Johannesburg today unveiled a new strategy that the company has named ‘Turn To Us’. The implications are apparent. The company wants South African businesses to turn to Vodacom to find solutions to problems they may face. It’s not hard to agree that South Africans face plenty of the latter and could do with more of the former. Turn To Us is not a product. It’s more of a statement of intent. The company wants South African businesses to partner with businesses of all sizes and shapes to tackle issues the country faces. It plans to do this…

A commercial humanoid robot is apparently the next target for several companies. Figure, a new startup, reckons it has what it takes to be the first to market with one. Its own creation is called Figure 01 and it doesn’t exist yet. But that’s more or less fine. Aside from Boston Dynamic’s Atlas, nor do any of the others. And Atlas has other things to its mind beyond turning up in stores. The company is making some seriously bold promises about what its to-be-created robot will be capable of. It will have, according to its creators, “the ability to think,…

Ford has only just had a patent revealed that would allow its cars to repossess themselves and now the company has announced Latitude AI. That’s a new subsidiary of the American automaker dedicated to “developing new automated driving technology with an initial focus on a hands-free, eyes-off driver assist system”. In other words, exactly the technology needed to make sure its cars can drive off if you don’t pay for them on time. That’s obviously not the whole point of Latitude AI but it does strike us as a little coincidental. It shouldn’t though. Last year a self-driving startup Ford…

Ford has figured out a use for self-driving cars that you can bet every other car manufacturer is about to develop in a hurry. The American automaker filed for a patent in 2021 that was published in late February. It describes a vehicle that’s able to up and bail on an owner that has stopped paying for it. The patent, called Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle, deals with autonomous, semi-autonomous, and conventional vehicles. In the latter case, the company could “disable a functionality of a component… or may place the vehicle in a lockout condition.” That’s a remote…

Apple has managed to secure its largest-ever share of the world’s smartphone market, according to research done by Counterpoint. This was against a backdrop of generally falling smartphone sales but it doesn’t matter. It still counts. Usually, when words like “smartphone” and “market share” are thrown around, it’s because Samsung is (still) on top or was (briefly) dethroned. Performance tends to go the South Korean company’s way but it turns out that Q4 2022 was the exception. Whether it proves the rule remains to be seen. A good Apple quarter According to Counterpoint’s analysts, Apple secured 18% of the world’s…