Author: Toby Shapshak

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…

If President Cyril Ramaphosa wants us to take his much-needed reforms seriously, surely, he should start with his cabinet. When he took office as a much hoped-for reformer who would help reverse the nine wasted years under former #Presidunce Jacob Zuma, he promised, among other things, to make governments smaller and therefore less expensive. Much has been written about how unnecessary and useless many of the deputy ministers are, several of whom have been referenced at the Zondo commission. One glaring example of an incompetent deputy minister is deputy communications minister Pinky Kekana. She achieved enormous notoriety last year for…

“We stopped the voting in the house,” Ronnie Vincent tweeted during the January 6 riots in Washington that led to the Capital being stormed. But he insisted that he didn’t go into the actual building. The only problem, according to a blockbuster expose by the New York Times, he did. “There is no way that my phone shows me in there,” he told the newspaper. The data says otherwise. However, an unnamed source handed the newspaper a database of mobile location records that allowed it to track the movements of the cellphones during that fateful afternoon; that is seeing former President…

The retirement of Jeff Bezos has generated enormous headlines and interest, which befits the man who grew his business to one of the biggest, and most valuable, in the world, while making himself the richest human to have lived. Indeed, Amazon is a success in many ways that were unexpected. Bezos was himself an older, more experienced businessman when he had the idea for this online bookstore. He aggressively built an enormous empire essentially from turning a strategic disadvantage – logistics – into something that Amazon does so successfully both for itself and others. As Scott Galloway, the famous marketing professor at…