Author: Toby Shapshak

Dear Parliament, let me tell you about some great meeting software called Teams. It’s made by Microsoft, the same people with whom government has a big contract for software. It’s part of the package and you can run a whole company on it. Microsoft itself has been doing this internally for years – known in the tech industry as “eating your own dog food” – while innumerable large companies have discovered how to in the last two months since the Covid-19 pandemic. Why Teams and not the easier-to-use Zoom? Well, after last week’s Zoombombing of the programming committee of the…

As middle-class South Africa emerges from self-isolation, blinking in the sunlight and the harsh reality of this new normal, there seemed a palpable lift in the country’s spirits this week. Perhaps I am projecting because I have been able to go for an early morning walk with my wife and nearly three-year-old son for the last three days. The sense of camaraderie is so 1994, but with facemasks. So, this is what level four looks like. Restricted exercise, mandatory face masks (it’s been de rigueur in Asia for over a decade) and takeaways. The early signs of a restarting economy.…

After years of denying they could filter out disinformation, the social media giants have suddenly been able to effectively keep rampant fake news off their platforms. All it took was an unprecedented global pandemic where false information could be life-threatening. Suddenly, human lives outweighed he need to keep eyeballs glued to your platform, at any cost and with any drivel (looking especially at you Facebook and YouTube). With such a stark contrast, the obvious response from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and others was an outright ban. Rational people the world over sighed in relief. So, science-based arguments work…

Since the lockdown started in SA three weeks ago, yoga teacher Shasta Jordan’s online streamed classes have grown by a third. They are relatively small numbers, but it demonstrates the shift towards streaming in this sudden onset age of self-isolation.

The World Health Organisation already has a word for this other terrible, global, viral spread of disinformation, an “infodemic”. And it is travelling faster than the pandemic itself — waves of blatantly false information that are causing panic. In the United Kingdom, people have burnt some 20 base network stations, causing untold damage and angry disbelief from the networks, because of unsubstantiated rumours that 5G has caused the coronavirus. This spectacularly stupid and self-defeating vandalism – which could be just as easily used to describe the self-inflicted economic woes of Brexit – means crippling the very critical infrastructure most of…

As decades go, the last 10 have been quite remarkable for the amazing technology innovations that came out. In 2010 Steve Jobs introduced the iPad. Although it was to be his last great product reveal, in many ways I think it set the tone for the decade: clever upgrades of previous categories and the plateauing of the innovation curve. But the usefulness of the new products, and sometimes the categories they created, is why we’re such fans of technology, isn’t it. Looking back over the last decade, there are noteworthy innovations that have changed the way we do things. Think…

The government is tracking your cellphone, and it’s happening in many parts of the world. Instead of being horrified at the obvious fears of a surveillance state, many people are happy to participate because – for once – the invasion of our privacy is arguably necessary and potentially lifesaving. The data is being used to track the spread of the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic and hopefully help contain it by “flattening the curve”. But, before you panic, it’s not your own individual data, but so-called aggregated metadata. It’s anonymous aggregated data from the South African cellular operators that will be provided…

Every day for the last three mornings my wife – an M&A lawyer – has logged into that video-calling service Zoom. But instead of the usual conference calls about a deal, it’s an early-morning yoga class. As this period of self-isolating against the novel coronavirus begins in earnest, for those of us who can shut ourselves away to help “flatten the curve,” there are equally novel ways people are using technology to carry on doing the things they normally would. This smart way that yoga teachers have found to innovatively repurpose business conferencing technology to replicate the immediacy and intimacy…

Most South Africans had never heard the phrase “flatten the curve” before last week. Nor “social distancing”. A week ago, the seemingly improbable horror movie script of the global shutdown that has been caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic was farfetched. Now it’s our reality. But it’s a strange reality, isn’t it? The clarion calls to “work from home” and “self-isolate” are all good and well for the middle classes with an office job that involves sitting behind a computer. For the working class, it’s an entirely different story. Suddenly, South Africa’s steep Gini coefficient between rich and poor looks…

If you haven’t heard of it, you soon will. Edge computing, or computing at the edge, is going to be a term you’ll hear more of in this cloud-connected internet age. The computer as we know it has evolved from the beige box on our desk into the vast and powerful thing we now call cloud computing. Much more powerful machines than those desktop pioneers sit in massive data centres with innumerable racks of servers. Our laptops, even though vastly upgraded from the early laptops I used in the mid-1990s, are really on the edge – as are smartphones and…