Author: Toby Shapshak

Discovery’s Vitality wellness program is a clever way of incentivising people to live more healthily. That’s the simplest way of putting what has become the gold standard for health-related initiatives. To call it a loyalty system is to miss how deeply and potentially life-changing its impetus can be. From the original offerings of cheaper gym contracts and movie tickets, Vitality has evolved into a remarkable service into a great example of behavioural economics, which incorporates how psychology has evolved people’s decision-making. Dinesh Govender, the long-time CEO of Discovery Vitality, tells Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak – a self-confessed non-practising health fanatic –…

Dr Ryan Noach is about the only person I can think of who could succeed the legendary Adrian Gore as CEO and Dr Jonathan Broomberg of Discovery Health. He’s hard to miss. The medical doctor is also an ardent health fanatic and a pilot. He’s been part of the Discovery mix for years and nobody was surprised when he took over the health division of what is now a larger financial services industry. He spent two years working on Discovery Bank, which not only continues to grow but provides another arrow in the group’s quiver. I sat down with Noach…

Google makes at least thirty cents of every US dollar in advertising for website publishers, the US government says in a groundbreaking antitrust lawsuit. Filed last month, the lawsuit is over “violations of the Sherman Act to halt Google’s anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google’s monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising,” argues the US government and several States. The 133-year-old antitrust act is the principal US legislation to prevent monopolistic abuse, and has been previously evoked against Microsoft in 1999. While search is the biggest source of revenue for Google and its parent company Alphabet, it makes…

Unsurprisingly, it was a tweet that caused the most recent troubles for Elon Musk. On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The ‘420’ is a weed joke, considered to be the right time of the afternoon to light a joint, and a meme Musk had recently discovered. The man who would later buy Twitter for $44 billion and call himself “chief twit” later added: “Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote.” As expected, Tesla’s share price surged for three weeks,…

There was a huge outcry when Elon Musk summarily fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and most of its contractors when he took over last October. That was a lot of people suddenly out of jobs. But that was just the beginning. Not long afterwards, Facebook cut 11,000 people. Its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has almost as little EQ as Musk, seemed almost benign and civilised compared to the head-on-fire Tesla CEO. Amazon kicked off the year, saying it would retrench 18,000 workers. Having “weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote to staff, “these changes…

How do you solve a R1-billion a year credit card fraud problem? That R1bn – which is 77% of the overall R1.2bn card fraud recorded in 2021 – comes from online transactions, where some websites don’t require a second authorisation. These match global statistics for card fraud. If you’re Bank Zero, you build your own banking system from scratch and patent a system that prevents credit cards from being used without authorisation. It may not have solved the problem for the whole banking industry, but it has for itself. Since it launched 15 months ago, Bank Zero has had zero…

This year has begun for Facebook as last year ended. Having been barred from buying the online database and gif-search engine Giphy last year, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has discovered he can’t buy his way out of trouble as he did with Instagram and WhatsApp. The cause of his conundrum is that he can’t reinvent Facebook or Instagram, respectively, into a virtual reality (VR) app or TikTok. Both are floundering, and Facebook’s new holding company Meta, is bereft of ideas on how to keep them growing. Zuckerberg’s disastrous VR focus has seen him spend over $10 billion on it with…

When I first started working on the Mail & Guardian’s website, the first news site in Africa, I had to learn to code HTML. HyperText Markup Language is the glue that holds the internet together – and makes those underlined blue links click through to another page. It was 1998 and internet publishing was in its infancy. Things like content management systems (CMS) for creating a database of stories and publishing them automatically were still in the future. WordPress – the most widely used publishing system – was still years away. Everything we did was manual. We wrote the stories…

How much do you think access to your company is worth? More specifically, how much does it cost to break into your company? Just $2,100 (R36,000) in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) region says cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, reaching $4,000 (R70,000) globally. No wonder 1,270,617 user accounts were hacked in 2021-2022, according to the company’s research, after their devices were infiltrated and their details posted on the so-called Dark Web. This is the unseen internet beloved by criminals, drug dealers, CSM distributors, and other cyber criminals, who use these hard-to-find servers, chat forums, instant messaging services and sites to…

The newest frontier in the fight against cyber criminals is identity, Nedbank’s Vickus Meyer tells Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. As South Africa has gotten more fibre and faster speeds, criminals are finding new ways to hack into companies and personal accounts, requiring new ways of keeping yourself safe, including multifactor authentication, adds Alan Dewaal Smit, a security expert from ITR Technology. Keep your identity safe Also available on Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google podcasts