Author: Brett Venter

Swedish (technically) auto brand Volvo has plans to launch six new EV models before 2026, according to a new report. Five of these vehicles, three sedans and two SUVs, are destined for international markets. The sixth, a luxury electric van, is slated for launch in the Asian market. The move is unsurprising in at least one way. Volvo may be nominally Swedish but it’s mostly owned by Chinese automaker Geely. Vans are generally popular in the region and the company is looking to drive EV adoption in that particular market. Electrifying Volvo The first of these vehicles, the company’s EX90…

Load shedding has been around for far too long but there’s some relief in sight. South Africans are in for a lessening of the mental, physical, and financial burden of not having power, according to Eskom. If, that is, everything goes according to plan and nothing else breaks. Load shedding is a load of… https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1621180625892917255 Eskom said yesterday night that today, 3 February, would see rolling blackouts stepping down their intensity to Stage 4. Saturday is supposed to offer further improvement at Stage 3, followed by a brief, blissful period on Sunday when there are no outages planned at all.…

Where there’s money to be made on the internet you can bet that Meta’s not far behind. Instagram, possibly inspired by recent events over at Twitter, may be considering paid verification for its users. That speculation is the result of some code mining within the app. Developer Alessandro Paluzzi has been poking around in Insta’s app and has discovered a couple of very suggestive references. Authenticity on Instagram? Surely not? Paluzzi, speaking to TechCrunch, shared screenshots of the references. They suggest that Insta is acting true to form for Meta in ‘borrowing’ features it thinks might be beneficial. The references…

One of the unpleasant things about living in South Africa is that sometimes our tech isn’t entirely functional. Services and features are all too often geo-limited. Well, Sonos and Amazon have ensured that there’s one less item on the list — Alexa voice control for Sonos products. South Africa isn’t entirely special, however. Yes, Alexa support is coming to various Sonos devices but it’s also coming to 26 other countries. Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and…

When you talk about Facebook, it’s generally appropriate to use the word ‘billions’ in conversation. The company bought VR company Oculus for $2 billion. It passed 2 billion monthly users some time in 2017. At the time, it saw a little over 1.2 billion of those users turning up every day. Well, now there’s a new milestone for Mark Zuckerberg and co. to celebrate. The company’s most recent earnings reports dropped a surprising statistic — Facebook has crossed the 2 billion daily users mark. Facebook hungers To be fair to the company, it has been creeping up on the total…

Netflix giveth and occasionally the streaming platform taketh away. Mostly it taketh away just lately, with the company cracking down on sharing accounts outside of single households and eying paid password revenue. It’s about time it tried something else. That ‘something’ is making its most expensive tier just a little more attractive. After all, getting subscribers to go from a standard subscription to a Premium one counts as increased revenue. And, if you’re a certain sort of viewer, the streaming platform’s incoming upgrades might just justify the cost. Sounds like a good idea, Netflix The company announced new features for…

Stuff had a chance to play with Samsung’s newest smartphones. We got our hands on the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra… for a few minutes. It wasn’t nearly long enough for a proper review but it was enough to show us that Samsung hasn’t taken any steps backwards. It was also enough to show that the company hasn’t made any massive strides forward. Once you hit a certain level of quality there’s bound to be diminishing returns and Samsung’s handsets… have just been too good lately. There’s not much headroom for improvement. A refined experience If there hasn’t been…

Samsung has launched its year in technology with an impressive debut — the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra all made their expected appearances at the first Unpacked of the season. And, as expected, everything’s just a shade bigger and/or faster than it was last year. It’s also apparent that there’s a proper leaky spigot inside Samsung. The full spec for the S23 Ultra, give or take a few fine details, was known thanks to a Chinese regulator as far back as December 2022. Still, rather than dwell on what was or wasn’t predicted, it’s time to move on to…

ChatGPT parent (hopefully that isn’t a literal description) OpenAI has unveiled a tool designed to tell its users whether a section of text was written by a human being or an AI. Because, to slightly paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, they were so preoccupied with whether they could [build a convincing writing AI], they didn’t stop to think if they should. ChatGPT Runner The new tool, called an AI classifier, is trained to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers.” But, as with everything to do with AI, there’s a catch. For…

All good things must come to an end. By this, we mean that some Xbox 360 games that were previously available on the South African online store are going away in the very near future. This is the result of an upcoming update for the console’s marketplace. It’s not just South Africa being whacked with the cancellation stick, either. In fact, as countries go, we’re being let off relatively lightly. That… might have something to do with our region having fewer games on its store, however. Last call for (these) Xbox 360 purchases Among the Xbox 360 games disappearing from…