Author: Toby Shapshak

We found it eventually in a tub of Lego. It was one of the many very minor crises of the Great Covid Lockdown of April 2020. Towards the end of the strict five-week shelter-in-place, our three-year-old son lost our DStv remote. No tech stores were even open, while grocery stores generally don’t stock emergency DStv remotes. We watched the news through the DStv Now app for three days, until we played with that box of Lego. It was a subtle reminder of how important, even in this age of streaming, access to news is. Our TV sets have evolved, as…

As hard as it seems to overwhelmed the exciting first private launch of humans from Earth and the successful docking with the International Space Station, there was actually a bigger story in tech in the last week.

So, this is the new normal. Here we are. After the worst of lockdown, as it were, on level three. What does it mean and how will our lives and the nature of work change? We’ve been hearing about this “new normal” for the last two months. The only consistent thing appears to be that you still can’t buy cigarettes. Two months of lockdown have decimated the economy, let’s hope it was worth it. Now we have to rebuild. What is certain is that the economic landscape post-COVID is much like the devastated wasteland you see in futuristic sci-fi movies.…

You can’t buy flip-flops in-store, but you can online; while you can only buy a T-shirt if it’s worn under your clothes. If you weren’t aware that our government has lost the plot with its own convoluted attempts at stopping Covid-19, the latest round of absurdities in the lockdown regulations should alert you to it. Our economy is trashed (by a decade of Zumarisation before the lockdown) and desperately needs some coherent and practical solutions. That our government has time to fiddle with such madness as what clothes you can buy and what time of the day to exercise, shows…

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…