Author: Brett Venter

Amazon is due to launch in South Africa (finally) in the next few months but, in the meantime, it’s rolling out innovations that will benefit advertisers on its platform. Less impressed, perhaps, will be photographers and graphic designers who used to do this sort of work. The new feature from Amazon is intended to spice up those product images you might be used to seeing on the online storefront’s ads. You know the ones. A basic product shot on a white background with nothing to distract from what you’re buying. Amazon’s new discovery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OubJGcUx0 Only, once you’ve looked at your…

Leave it to DStv to use its near-monopoly on the 2023 Rugby World Cup to drive its subscriber numbers. The company is offering a hectic special for its DStv Stream service that expires just before this weekend’s World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand kicks off. The price? Twenty bucks. The catch? You’re signing up for Multichoice’s Stream Access tier, which is usually billed at R100/m and requires an internet connection. This R20 special is just the first month’s pricing. Honestly, though? Even if you don’t watch anything else on the service, twenty bucks for access to the…

There’s a vague theory that Sega’s Sonic franchise is cursed. It was, with the first three games (plus Sonic and Knuckles), an absolute gaming darling. After that… nothing seems to have gone as planned. Early efforts to go 3D were hated. Heading back to 2D flopped. There was that Werehog incident that nobody likes to talk about and then there’s Sonic Frontiers, which was okay but… eh. Sonic Superstars hopes to right these wrongs and, perhaps, put an end to Sonic’s cursed half-life beyond the Mega Drive. Sonic Superstars is an updated take on the original trilogy of games (plus…

Human exploration of the solar system will be greatly assisted by machines like NASA’s Dragonfly. It’s not the first time we’ve heard its name, nor is it the first time we’ve been made aware of its mission. Dragonfly is intended to travel to Saturn’s moon, Titan, to explore the surface of the moon, the methane cycle there, and maybe to locate some alien life. That last point isn’t the main point but even Arthur C. Clarke was of the opinion that Titan was a great candidate for alien life. The satellite hosts water, weather, and methane, otherwise known as rocket…

Apple does love a good surprise, even if sometimes it’s not very surprising. The company has confirmed that there’s one more thing headed our way this year. What that is, exactly, will be unveiled at a 30 October event. The tagline for the outing? ‘Scary Fast’. Which, based on the date, makes perfect sense. Odds are we’ll see Tim Cook dressed as Bill Gates (or maybe Tom Hanks) if there’s room for levity at the Apple campus this late in the year. It’s far more likely we’ll be bombarded by spooky puns and references to the new chipset the company…

Apple seems to be the only company not enthusiastically bouncing on board the generative AI bandwagon. This is for a variety of reasons. The company is notoriously cagey about anything it’s doing, preferring to remain silent until it thinks it can reliably blow minds. Plus, this artificial intelligence thing is tricky and apparently the tech giant is trying to do it right. A new report suggests a timeline for when we might see more advanced AI appear on iPhones around the world. The soonest it will occur, according to analyst Jeff Pu, is when Apple unleashes iOS 18 onto the world.…

Chinese tech maker Xiaomi has a new batch of goodies headed to market soon. The official reveal has just been confirmed for this week, on 26 October. Since the event is being held in China, we’ll probably see some of the details late on 25 October. On the menu is the company’s 14 series smartphones. If the naming pattern sticks around, we’re likely to see a Xiaomi 14, a 14 Lite, a 14 Pro, and perhaps even a 14 Ultra. That’s not counting any 14T editions that happen to turn up somewhere along the line. Oh, and there’s some new…

India’s Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced that it plans to extend the country’s reach into space over the next decade and a half. The start of this was the recent successful mission to the lunar surface with its Chandrayaan-3 mission. The country’s Vikram lander and Pragyan rover might have stopped responding, as of 22 September, but the mission was enough of a success to allow the country to consider sending humans up there next. This includes developing its own launch capability, constructing a space station, and, eventually, putting Indian boots on the moon using the country’s own hardware. India…

South Africa has been lucky when it comes to Netflix price increases. We’ve seen one uptick in costs since the service launched, dodging the January 2022 increase that much of the rest of its customers were nailed with. Will we be lucky again? That… depends. The news that Netflix plans to hike costs isn’t new, but this time it’s come directly from the streamer. During the company’s recent financial results call, it announced that its Basic and Premium plans would increase, starting in the States. Paying Netflix’s price Those two plans will increase by $2 each (about forty bucks), climbing…

There isn’t much of a gap between the announcement of the new Chromebook Plus standard and the arrival of its first representative, the Acer Chromebook Plus 514, in South Africa. We’ve had our hands on it for a short while and it might just have solved the largest issues we’ve had with Chromebooks in general — the hardware. Chromebooks, being mostly reliant on an internet connection and software to function, have historically been slack when it comes to the hardware. The new Plus standard demands at least 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, an Intel Core i3 or AMD…