Author: Toby Shapshak

Toby Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff, a Forbes senior contributor and a columnist for the Financial Mail and Daily Maverick. He has been writing about technology and the internet for 28 years and his TED Global talk on innovation in Africa has over 1,5-million views. He has written about Africa's tech and start-up ecosystem for Forbes, CNN and The Guardian in London. He was named in GQ's top 30 men in media and the Mail & Guardian newspaper's influential young South Africans. He has been featured in the New York Times. GQ said he "has become the most high-profile technology journalist in the country" while the M&G wrote: "Toby Shapshak is all things tech... he reigns supreme as the major talking head for everything and anything tech."

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…

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It seems like a script form a movie, doesn’t it? Filled with fear-mongering Hollywood hyperbole, it’s a global pandemic that kills indiscriminately as it is piggy-backs on intercontinental flights and sews havoc across the globe. But this kind of worst-case scenario that is a stable of Hollywood hyperbole is all too real. And it’s going to hugely influence not just on how we travel and live, will have a destructive impact on the high-tech industry. An estimated 90% of all consumer electronics are made in China and the Shenzhen region. Apple has already warned of a potential US$4bn impairment on…

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Swiping right has become a phrase that is synonymous with online dating, after the gesture in that hook-up app Tinder to confirm your interest in another person. To the uninitiated, Tinder shows you images of people with similar interest or in your vicinity (you can specify the radius in metres or kilometres) and if you’re interested in them, you swipe right. If the other person also swipes right, then the app gives both parties the other’s details. But that phrase “swipe right” is now as much a part of the popular lexicon as “hashtag” or “like” and Tinder is arguably…

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Ray Donovan is the new Tony Soprano. A more respectable gangster, but still a gangster. He wears his crisp white shirts and immaculate suits with the style that befits his Hollywood fixer character. But his favourite weapon is a baseball bat, and he uses it when his persuasive talking doesn’t get the results he wants. Liev Schreiber plays the stoic character with a strong screen presence. Ray isn’t a big talker but he’s a real doer. He’s the guy that the Hollywood celebrities call to fix their messes. And fix them he does. Most of the reason Ray Donovan is such a…

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In South Africa, the biggest threats to democracy are pretty obvious: the stuttering economy, never-ending rolling blackouts (let’s call them what they are), the rampant unemployment (nearly 30% in total, over 50% for youth) and a delusional political elite that doesn’t know it’s out of touch, out of money (due to said economic woes and therefore the inability of Sars to collect revenue) and generalised arrogance.

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