Author: Marcé

Before the great lockdown, what feels like aeons ago, Vumatel announced that it will double internet speeds of all its clients for the duration of the lockdown. Now Telkom is following suit.  How nice, right? Telkom says the free additional bandwidth will help provide uninterrupted online connectivity for customers staying at home during the lockdown — so if you’re stuck at home at least pics on Facebook will load doubly quick.  This week, Telkom announced that qualifying fibre and DSL internet customers “will realise improved network experience as Telkom doubles access speeds free of charge”. The change will come into…

Some of the most hard-hit in our economy are the performance industry. Musicians, stage performers and even athletes have lost their income. These are hard times, but there has to be another way of making money. No, we’re not talking about opening an Onlyfans account… Luckily, streamers and content creators have been doing this for a long time, and monetised digital channels have made it easy enough to make some cash. They can opt for Patreon donations or affiliate money from Twitch or YouTube for example. But now it looks like Facebook also wants to help people monetise their content,…

It has been a long time coming, but crucial municipal and governmental services are now being pushed to go digital amid the current pandemic. The SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) will roll out a WhatsApp registration process for the R350 COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grants. Over the weekend, Sassa confirmed to Business Insider SA that it had been testing digital registrations through WhatsApp. This will instigate a shift away from cash payments to more streamlined digital channels, which is in line with the current social distancing movement.  To access registration for the grants, citizens can use the current national…

UPDATE: LG’s Velvet 5G lands in South Africa from 1 July, with various contract offers on the way. But if you wanna buy the handset outright, that’ll run you R13,500. That’s… not bad, as far as 5G handsets go. Original story: It’s not a great time for smartphone launches, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. LG has pushed ahead with the reveal of its upcoming handset. Just labelled LG Velvet, the new device’s specs have been revealed on the company’s Korean website ahead of launch.  The specs aren’t game-changing, but not anything to scoff at either. The announcement post…

At this stage, nothing can surprise us anymore. Tech conglomerates around the world are pushing their creative capacity to launch weird and wonderful new products. But that doesn’t mean that it’ll be successful. Like this concept Xbox project that doubles as a smart speaker and a… projector? “Designed to be at the very centre of your life at home, the Project Oris lets you play games, listen to music, and even watch media. You could hook it to a screen, or you could just point it at a blank wall and let its in-built projector broadcast an 8K HDR display.…

Since that first case landed in South Africa (quite literally) it has been endless waves of numbers being thrown at us. Fifty cases, fifty-four cases — in no time it was in the thousands of positive COVID-19 cases. But what we all actually want to know is, how many people around me are infected? Which is why a team of local developers from Entelect decided to develop a web application designed to show the latest figures, including active cases, recovered cases and deaths. The application displays world data, with stats for all the countries affected as well as more localised…

Have you even typed a random string of characters and letters to see if you can crash your phone? Neither have we. Apparently, a text string made up of random Sindhi characters and the Italian flag will now crash any iOS device running the latest iOS 13.4.1 software.  The weird part is that you don’t have to type the string in a first-party iOS app, and either a notification or message in a third-party app can trigger the bug. If you own an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you better keep an eye out for this bug. Luckily it won’t…

How’s this for a bummer. Not only does Facebook want to bombard you with five ads in a 20-second video, they still plan to serve ads in one of the most popular chat apps in the world.  Late last year, Facebook, the parent company that owns both Instagram and WhatsApp, confirmed that it will start serving advertisements in WhatsApp. This followed an announcement back in January 2019 that Zuckerberg plans to integrate all three apps’ messaging platforms into one.  Although rollout of ads in WhatsApp has been put on hold for now, it looks like Facebook is still very keen…

At the end of December 2019 Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) start-up BlueDot picked up a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases near Wuhan in China. A few days later the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) noticed the flare-up. But it wasn’t until January 9 that the World Health Organisation (WHO) notified the world of a new flu-like outbreak in China. In the year 2020 it doesn’t come as a surprise that digital technology can play a critical role in the global effort to stop the spread of a virus. BlueDot uses language processing and machine learning to sift…

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic national lockdown has hit South African businesses hard. The two-week extension implemented by Pres. Cyril Ramaphosa hasn’t helped one bit. And now it looks like the biggest online retailer in the country, Takealot, is losing-alot.  In an interview with Reuters, Takealot’s chief executive Kim Reid said that the company is planning a loss of at least R350 million. This following the restrictions on what the retailer is allowed to sell. It’s a miracle Takealot was allowed to operate at all, and now it’s getting ready for massive losses.  As you may know, Takealot…