Toby Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff, a Forbes senior contributor and a columnist for the Financial Mail and Daily Maverick. He has been writing about technology and the internet for 28 years and his TED Global talk on innovation in Africa has over 1,5-million views. He has written about Africa's tech and start-up ecosystem for Forbes, CNN and The Guardian in London. He was named in GQ's top 30 men in media and the Mail & Guardian newspaper's influential young South Africans. He has been featured in the New York Times. GQ said he "has become the most high-profile technology journalist in the country" while the M&G wrote: "Toby Shapshak is all things tech... he reigns supreme as the major talking head for everything and anything tech."
Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Flip 5 have folding glass screens, an engineering innovation that still delights Stuff’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Mobile executives Justin Hume and Zahir Cajee join in the geek-out. Samsung’s folding glass still astounds Also available on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
In a sea of bad news for Elon Musk, there was one piece of good news: Tesla has started making its electric bakkie. The Cybertruck, as it’s called, is a futuristic-looking pickup that was first announced in November 2019. The Tesla CEO’s unveiling of it featured what is now a meme when he was trying to demonstrate how tough the car’s glass was. A steel cannonball was thrown against the window, which was promptly smashed, and Musk blurted out “Oh my f****** god” to riotous laughter. Electric bakkies and big promises Last month, Tesla announced, on X, obviously, “First Cybertruck…
Instead of buying expensive textbooks, which learners are stuck with, what if you could “rent” them? Calling it “Spotify for textbooks,” this is the idea behind MTN’s new educational offering, MTN South Africa’s general manager of digital services Jason Probert tells says Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Joining them is Thabiet Allie, the head of new business development and who is driving the operator’s online learning. Don’t break the bank, rent your textbooks Also available on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts
One of my son’s favourite books is James and Giant Peach. I was just as enthralled when it was read to me as a child. I recall my mental images of a peach so big it had tunnels inside it, and you could just bite into it to taste that cool, refreshing peach flesh. As unrealistic and fantastical as it seemed, who doesn’t want to fly in a giant peach borne by seagulls? Apple is that giant, well, peach. Preserving the Peach Apple It was merely a coincidence that we were reading this Roald Dahl classic when Apple hit that…
Whether TikTokker Mikayla Nogueira was wearing false eyelashes or not is probably not a question that has crossed the minds of the average techie reader. But the furore over “mascara gate” as it was dubbed, is whether so-called influencers can be trusted. Finding sanity in the deinfluencing trend Nogueira, a so-called beauty influencer with 14 million followers on TikTok, did a paid-for post for L’Oréal in February to promote its mascara. But by the end, she appeared to be wearing false eyelashes. Angry social media users have done a frame-by-frame analysis and a wave of indignation has erupted online. “When…
The only thing worse than being spoken about, as Elon Musk is discovering over at Twitter 𝕏, is not being spoken about. The owner of Twitter 𝕏 has mangled the purchase so badly, having fired so much staff, cut back on server hosting, refused to pay outstanding rent and hosting fees, and alienated the advertisers who support it. Many commentators believe this caused server instability and why Musk instituted the 600-tweet limit last month. Although he later increased this “temporary emergency measure” and blamed it on “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” purportedly by artificial intelligence (AI) services…
If only tweets could come true. Wouldn’t you love to see Elon Musk fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight? I’m no fan of physical confrontations like boxing or mixed martial arts – but I’m sure I could eat a bowl of popcorn watching the two mega-dorks of all geekdom fight it out. All of geekdom, as it happens, seems to be thrilled at the prospect. There are memes and everything. Zuckerberg would obviously win because the Facebook CEO is a practising health fanatic with an overzealous competitive streak, who has recently embraced competitive jiu-jitsu. Just kiss already “I’m up…
When Google introduced a way to sell YouTube video adverts on other websites, it offered its customers a quick way to expand their video adverts’ reach. But Google violated its own service obligations by as much as 80%, according to an explosive new report by research firm Adalytics, which tracks how adverts appear online. While Google promised advertisers they would “gain up to 20% additional reach for a given budget” and that its video partners would be “high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps”. They weren’t. A true view of Google’s schemes Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, says Adalytics.…
Most non-geeks have never heard of Reddit, nor know of its centrality to online culture. Once labelled “the front page of news on the internet” – a title once held by Twitter, and now usurped by TikTok – Reddit is the granddaddy of internet forums. It’s as much of an institution as the internet is, partly a throwback to the early bulletin boards and partly its highly engaged community. For a long time, it was the de-facto source of internet memes – before social media apps took over that role. Despite the advent of so many other ways to lure…
On TikTok, the world’s most famous shipping tragedy never happened. Or, to put it in the words of one conspiracy theorist: “The Titanic NEVER actually sank”. During this half-minute video, the man who says this also peddles a favourite theory that the Titanic was actually replaced with its sister ship the Olympic, as part of an elaborate insurance scam. Another TikTok video – that someone commented on “the titanic never sank!!!” – was seen 111 million times earlier this year before it was removed. Yet another conspiracy theory is that the sinking was a “hit job” by financier J.P. Morgan…