Uber Air sees the ride-hailing company taking to the skies and hoping to trim commute times, albeit for a price.
Author: Toby Shapshak
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."
But the big news on Monday was that the Department of Justice was investigating Google and Apple; while the and Federal Trade Commission (FTCO is looking into Facebook and Amazon. All of accused of anticompetitive tactics for promoting their own services over that of rivals.
The first problem I encountered, as I gave up Google for a week, was that I couldn’t get my email. As the possibility of living without Android and Google services emerged as the US government banned American firms from dealing with Huawei, I tried to live without the world’s biggest mobile operating system (OS). The short answer: it’s virtually impossible to live without Google in this smartphone era.
When the news broke that the US government was blacklisting Huawei in the last two weeks, it seemed like another incremental escalation in the China trade war that could blow over.
That didn’t take long. Facebook’s new plan to be more secure lasted just two months since Zuckerberg’s pronouncement in early March about this shift after 2018’s annus horribilis.
The Facebook CEO “controls three core communications platforms… that billions of people use every day” namely Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and has control of 60% of the voting stock. “I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.”
This will be published after South Africa’s election, which we certainly hope has only been manipulated by the usual political forces and not online trolls using Facebook, as happened in the Great Brexit Scandal and the US presidential elections of 2016
The Competition Commission last week confirmed what all South Africans have been telling each other for years: the cost of cellular data is too high. Releasing a provisional report from its data services market inquiry, which has been dragging on since August 2017, the commission’s finding no doubt contributed to the fall of Vodacom and MTN shares. They said the convoluted pricing structured “lacks transparency” and it is “anti-poor”. It’s hard to disagree. Just looking about Sub-Saharan Africa show how cheap data can be – often from the same South African networks operating in our neighbouring countries. “Consumers of small…
In 2004 at a Nokia event in Helsinki a nerdy engineer showed off a fancy new concept that he hoped would be a big hit. Calling it an “automatic multimedia diary” it was a way to upload pictures, thoughts and other titbits from a mobile phone to an online site. Using the then popular concept of blogging, he called it a Lifeblog. “Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone,” Nokia’s Christian Lindholm told me at the time. “Lifeblog automatically organises your photos, videos,…
The most astounding thing about Uber’s long-awaited announcement of its listing is not its expected $100bn valuation but the admission that it “may not achieve profitability”.