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."
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…
Fintech app Shyft won a prestigious innovation award from global banking organisation Efma in Barcelona in 2016 before it even launched – “The Most Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services” at the 2016 Efma awards. The innovative forex app – which was the first to offer virtual credit cards in South Africa, about five years before they became mainstream – has grown significantly, adding investment. Its head Arno von Helden tells Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak how it is planning to Shyft digital banking. Also available on Apple podcast | Spotify | Google podcasts Visit getshyft.co.za for more info.
The British computer pioneer’s influence can be directly traced to the growth of the UK’s computer industry and the emergence of mobile processors. “He’d come up with an idea and say, ‘There’s no point in asking if someone wants it, because they can’t imagine it’.” Pride of place in my technology archive is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the earliest, and most impactful, computers. It was created by that rampant genius Sir Clive Sinclair, who died last week aged 81. Sinclair’s amazing computer, the ZX Spectrum 48K, was launched in 1982 and is widely credited for the UK’s computer…
Until last Sunday, Pegasus usually meant the fabled Greek mythical flying horse. Now the name to stand for arguably the most diabolical spyware the world has ever seen. Starting revelations this past weekend have emerged that a spyware tool called Pegasus – made by Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group – might have been used to snoop on Presidents Cyril Ramaphosa and France’s Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and 11 other heads of state. Once “infected with Pegasus, a client of NSO could in effect take control of a phone, enabling them to extract a person’s messages, calls, photos…
TikTok is the new MTV. Except you don’t actually have to have any talent or do anything original, like sing your own songs or choreograph your own dances. So-called influencers are the ultimate expression of hype over substance, real or otherwise. I read an enthralling, but horrific, profile of the epicentre of so-called influencers’ activity, Los Angeles – or Lost Angeles – in Harper’s magazine, a New Yorker-esque publication that still spends time on so-called deep journalism. Thanks, Anne Taylor, a die-hard journo in her soul. “The Anxiety of Influencers” is a brilliant, albeit disturbing, feature about the TikTok generation by…