Author: Toby Shapshak

A fascinating debate is unfolding in the nascent field of artificial intelligence about the fundamental building blocks of this new technology. At the heart of the debate is ethics – and how to build it into these new AI systems. Attempts to introduce algorithms to help judges make less emotive or prejudiced sentences has resulted in rulings that have shocked the organisers, in some instances in the United States, by being more prejudiced and sentencing black defendants more harshly. The problem is the underlying assumptions can be prejudicial, it seems. While computer scientists assumed the base statistics of incarceration (in…

Twenty-seven Instagrams. That’s what Salesforce paid for Slack, the upstart messaging app that has become a market leader in its rapidly growing category. Actually, nearly 28 Instagrams, given the $27.7bn price tag. It’s a phenomenal success story for a company that started out making computer games. The game was called, ironically, Glitch; while Slack was originally the in-house messaging tool for the company that made it, called Tiny Speck. It has raised about $15bn but the game, launched in September 2011, bombed. However, that messaging app proved to be the real star of the show and Slack was launched in…

Facebook used its “monopoly power to crush smaller rivals [and] snuff out competition” argue 48 US states – along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – which in two mammoth lawsuits want it to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. The most damning quote comes from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself, who wrote in a 2008 email about smaller competitors: “it is better to buy than compete”. There you have it, the Zuckerberg Approach to Innovation in a sentence. This email is included in the FTC’s filing, which argues that Facebook had a “systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly” and Zuckerberg…

In the end, it was Airbnb that finished the year with some good cheer for the tech industry. Although it was an economically crushing year for most of the world, as people were forced to shelter-in-place for a global pandemic, it was a booming year for tech, telecoms and social media firms. Airbnb, so long a startup darling, proved it could step up when its shares more than doubled on their first day of trading, giving it a US$100bn valuation. Forced to work from home, tech services – and their stocks – soared. Unheard of in February, Zoom became –…

I can’t help it. I’m a news junkie. I read all the news. All the time. And I’ve found a new way to get my fix. I noticed it at first on the Daily Maverick, a right-facing solid arrow symbol, the universal icon for the “play” button. So, I played it. A nice voice read me the article. It was great. Then I spotted it on businesslive.co.za, and then in the newly updated News24 app. If I don’t see the text-to-speech functionality, I then “select all” for that article and get Siri to read it to me (by right clicking…

With his squeaky voice Charles Martinet is instantly recognisable as that lovable Italian plumber Mario. But he looks nothing like the character he’s been voicing since 1990 in the eternally popular eponymous video game, Mario. With a thick head of white hair Martinet has an impish smile that seems to come through in his voice when he chimes that famous line: “It’s-a me, Mario!”. Affable and still seemingly somewhat bemused at his unexpected fame, Martinet was in South Africa a few years ago for a previous Nintendo launch. Since 1990 he has been voicing the “Italian plumber from Brooklyn” as…

As a mental health excursion on a Saturday morning during lockdown, my wife and I would get a cappuccino and a croissant, and take our three-year-old son for a walk. We have old people in our families – my mother is 92 – and our priority has been to make sure we don’t inadvertedly give it to them. This was the middle of August. There was none of the strange certainty that would emerge by October, and now November, about this “novel coronavirus pandemic”. As us South Africans emerged from the harshness of level five lockdown, we tentatively ventured out,…

It’s fantastic news for small businesses that some of the country’s largest firms have committed to paying SMEs on 30 days. It’s really great. As any small business owner will tell you, managing cashflow is your biggest headache, caused usually by a bigger company with lumbering, painfully slow internal processes and scant regard for the impact on suppliers. Called the #PayIn30 campaign, it was launched by Business for South Africa (B4SA), the South African SME Fund and Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA); and also involves Business Unity South Africa (Busa), the Small Business Institute (SBI) and the Black Business Council (BBC).…

Like all big businesses with a loyalty scheme, Pick n Pay is the latest to try its hand at expanding its program. Announced this week the retailer is launching a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), called PnP Mobile. It differs from a mobile network operator (MNO) like Vodacom or MTN because it is a virtual operation that piggy backs on the MNO’s network. It’s not only notable that the second largest retailer in the country is expanding its Smart Shopper program but that it’s partnered with MTN. Previous MVNOs – including the original Virgin Mobile (now in business rescue), FNB…

The ANC still thinks it lives in a pre-internet age. When Ace Magashule stood outside the Bloemfontein court last Friday spewing his political conspiracy theories and refusing to step down as secretary general of the ruling party, he thought he was talking to his supporters. But the whole world was listening, including any potential investors wondering if the unprecedented charging of such a senior official meant a sea of change in wanton state capture bequeathed to us by the lost decade under Jacob Zuma. Like #PresidunceZuma before him, who used a similar scotched earth political strategy, Magashule isn’t just trying…