Author: Toby Shapshak

Remember those statistics about how rapidly the internet has usurped more traditional business models. It took the telephone 50 years to reach 50 million, while television took 22 years, computers took 14 years, mobile phones 12 years, the internet seven years, Facebook four years and WeChat just one. Pokemon Go did it in 19 days. If that didn’t demonstrate the power of gaming, then nothing does. Another remarkable statistic has just emerged. It took Netflix a decade to reach 100 million streaming video customers. Late comer Disney + took just 16 months to do the same. Netflix remains the streaming…

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has made an important judgement this week which upheld an earlier ruling that classifies Uber drivers as workers instead of independent contractors. This key definition means the Uber drivers can get all of the benefits they would if they were employed in the normal way. Uber and the gig economy companies have tried to re-write reality, defining the drivers as “partners” and therefore avoiding what most businesses need to do to thrive, which is to give your workers the right tools for the job. In the case of a transportation company that would be car,…

If you haven’t already heard about them, non-fungible tokens (NFT) are the hottest new thing since, well, Clubhouse. The audio-only app, which eschews recordings for live-only conversations, is perhaps a fitting comparison for NFTs and equally ethereal. A non-fungible token is the closest thing we’ve gotten so far to creating ownership of something digital. A token is named for something on a blockchain, and as the name infers, it represents something. In this case a digital piece of art or music. Fungible means something can be exchanged for something else of the same kind. A non-fungible token therefore is a…

Just when it seemed like South Africa would finally get new spectrum licenced for the first time in 15 years at a month-end auction, a legal spanner has brought it to a halt. As I’ve tried to explain before, the issues are as clear as mud. Telkom, the third largest operator, complained that the auction rules would favour the two biggest players, Vodacom and MTN. So it sued ICASA last year. MTN also sued the regulator earlier this year, concerned that the auction would deny it access to the crucial 3.5Ghz range – of which Telkom already has. On Monday,…

There’s an enormous upheaval and major shift is about to happen on the internet, after Google announced it will ban so-called third-party cookies in a new drive towards privacy with its Chrome browser. On the face of it, this looks like a massive win for us consumers. Cookies are the little bits of software that live in your browser’s cache and tell advertisers what we do on the internet. You’d be surprised at how many important personal details can be gleaned from your browsing behaviour, especially if you visit shopping or ecommerce websites. These cookies follow us all over the…

Microsoft has unveiled an impressive new mixed-reality platform called Microsoft Mesh that lets people “share” the same hologram using its HoloLens 2 headset. The augmented reality (AR) headset is a technological wonder in of itself: A lightweight frame that fits comfortable over your eyes and has the entire computer built in (mostly in a largeish curved case on the back of your head). The lenses depict AR images, or holograms, that are amazingly good, while sensors in the eye sockets track your eye movement – so, for instance, if you’re reading a page (of instructions or just email) as your…

Fresh from a bruising public relations disaster in Australia, Facebook – as well as Google and Twitter – have much bigger problems this month when US lawmakers will grill them again for spreading misinformation about politics and Covid-19. Facebook has the most to worry about – especially the January 6 “insurrection” on Capitol Hill where it was used as the primary organising platform by right-wing rioters – and its reluctance to ban former President Donald Trump until after five people died because of that same riot. Last month the world’s largest social network, with over 2.3bn users, managed to score…

I risked the irk of this fine newspaper’s business editor and chief sub by waiting until Tito Mboweni had delivered his budget speech before writing. I was hoping to find something noteworthy and uplifting about tech and telecoms sector but – like pretty much all of his austere budget – there was no good news. I began writing this before our reluctant finance minister’s budget this week, fairly confident that any crucial strategy and investments around the critical telecoms and technology industries will not be substantively dealt with in his speech. Both Mboweni and President Cyril Ramaphosa make reference to the…

The Australian government has done the world a huge favour. Recognising the devastating impact of Facebook and Google on the media industry, they imposed a strict new requirement for the two big tech giants to “pay back da money,” as a red-clad political party likes to chant in our Parliament. Google blinked, Facebook didn’t. And even for Facebook, which tends to have a perverse mastery for public relations disasters, this was a new low. Not only did it ban all the news operations, but a list of essential services and government pages. Embarrassingly, Facebook banned its own corporate page. If…

One of my most important apps – and one that I recommend everybody should use – is that excellent password manager LastPass. It’s an essential tool in your cyber security set up. Passwords are obviously one of the most important security steps and should never be used on more than one website. But remembering long and garbled randomised alphanumeric passwords isn’t something us humans do very well. But LastPass does it all for you. And it does it wonderfully across multiple platforms different devices and different operating systems. Until now its free version has been so compelling it has hardly…