Author: Toby Shapshak

“How easy is it to type on?” a friend asked me about the smartphone I was testing. It’s not a question I get very often, but then the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 5G is not an ordinary phone. It’s the third generation of Samsung’s remarkable new form factor which has a foldable screen. It’s an innovation I didn’t ever think I would come to like so much, because it enables you to open the “normal” sized 6.2in phone into a small tablet with a 7.6in screen. It’s a screen that folds. That alone is impressive engineering, especially given how badly-received…

Wholly unscientific justifications for inexplicably weird decisions have been a hallmark of the SA government’s response to Covid-19. The alcohol ban, prevention of e-commerce stores doing even a little economic activity during lockdown, and curfews are some of the lowlights. The latest confounding decision to withdraw the temporary spectrum from the mobile industry by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) is a new low in irrationality and pettiness. Icasa is an agency that is often maligned for imposing the frankly weird regulations the government passes. In this instance, the blundering is all of its own. At the beginning of…

Who does Gwede Mantashe think he’s fooling? The mineral resources & energy minister has been leading a one-man, climate change-denialist charge against common sense and the country’s best interests with his inexplicable defence of fossil fuels. Whose interests is he fighting for, when his public statements are so at odds with logic, common sense and the country’s best interests? Last month climate envoys from the UK, US, France, Germany and the EU came to SA to convince our government that Eskom should accelerate its shut down of coal-fired power stations, specifically nine of them by 2035. Please note that Eskom…

It’s hard to say what is more devastating for the Twitch community, that the source code for the game streaming service has been released or that all of the top gamers’ incomes have been revealed? This is after all an audience of people who tap into the strange voyeuristic nature of humanity that wants to watch sportsmen, and now gamers, do their thing. This generation of gamers has luckily been able to capitalise on this happy circumstance which allows video gamers to make a pretty decent income just by playing games. Never in all of human history have we geeks…

With a valuation reportedly of $3bn, Nigeria’s Flutterwave is one of the most successful – and inspiring – startups in Africa. Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak spoke with its CEO and cofounder Olugbenga Agboola during a recent trip to Lagos, where he also interviewed Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin. Also available on Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google podcasts Visit getshyft.co.za for more info.

“hello literally everyone,” @twitter tweeted last Monday during *that* outage. The six hours that Facebook and WhatsApp went down was a moment in internet history that will be recalled alongside that other famous outage when BlackBerry went down for three days in 2011. That catastrophe, which demonstrated how ineffective crisis communications can be just as catastrophic, was the beginning of the end for BlackBerry – the pioneer in mobile email and messaging. Will Facebook’s massive outage be as catastrophic to its fortunes? Probably not, you might say. Facebook is insanely integrated into our lives and is a gigantic profit-spewing multinational giant used…

Whistleblower Frances Haugen reveals the depravity of how the social giant is “tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world”. While not many people remember the name Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the same is not likely to be true of Frances Haugen. The former Facebook product manager of its civic misinformation team has blown the case against Facebook’s profit motive over the mental health of its users wide open. “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” the 37-year-old, who has an engineering degree and did a Harvard…

Eskom CEO André de Ruyter is looking beyond SA’s coal addiction to new, appropriate technologies and smarter investment strategies. Stuff publisher Toby Shapshak learns more. André de Ruyter is the most important businessman in South Africa today. If the Eskom CEO can’t deal with its debt, its notorious inefficiency and the load-shedding problems, the whole country will suffer. It wasn’t helped by an explosion in Medupi in August which caused an estimated R2bn in damages and will take two years to repair. De Ruyter is planning to evolve Eskom into a modern power utility, lessening its dependence on coal and…

In a sea of misinformation, there are 12 people whose odious spreading of toxic “fake news” about Covid-19 is so bad, they have earned the nickname of the Disinformation Dozen. The most prolific of this dishonourable crowd is Dr Joseph Mercola, a 67-year-old osteopathic physician, who the New York Times writes has “long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved treatments”. Now he has the dubious dishonour of being the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online. “An internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens, Dr Mercola has published over 600 articles on Facebook…

Samsung’s newly launched device offers the luxury of a larger screen on a compact phone — but it doesn’t come cheap I’ve got a confession to make. I am a closet foldable phone fan. I don’t know why it seems something to keep secret — perhaps the price tag makes these phones an exclusive device — but I just love the idea of a regular-sized phone that folds into a smallish phablet. There is a particular kind of usefulness foldable phones offer which may not be for everyone right now, because of their price. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 costs…