Fifty years ago this week humanity landed on the moon. The moon landing was a pivotal moment in human history that has shaped our self-consciousness about humanity and our place in the universe.
Author: Toby Shapshak
Toby Shapshak
Toby Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff, a Forbes senior contributor and a columnist for Business Day. He has been writing about technology and the internet for 30 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."
I think it’s a good thing that President Cyril Ramaphosa is dreaming of a high-tech future. We need someone to dream big about the way our country will operate, not in some distant sci-fi future, but in the next few years. We need to start embracing the technologies that can make us a better place to live, find work for our youngsters in the new growth industries, and make us more attractive to investors.
Africa’s burgeoning reputation as a source of programming talent got a major boost last month when Microsoft launched its Africa Development Centre (ADC) that will invest $100-milliion over the next five years.
And then sanity prevailed. On Sunday, US President Donald Trump effectively lifted the ban on US firms dealing with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. This follows a turbulent six weeks where the threat of not being able to buy from US firms sent the telecoms industry and its supply chain into chaos.
The HoloLens is a powerful example of this, as multiple demonstrations of its capabilities showed. The original model was launched four years ago and was used by NASA for its Mars Rover mission. Because of the eight-minute delay in communications from earth to the red planet, controllers needed to map, plan and execute the path the rover would take, former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told me last year.
The first thing that Stoffel van Wyk appreciated about his new Dyson hairdryer is how quiet it is. These days, he says: “I can have a discussion with my client over the sound of the hairdryer.” Van Wyk has been a hairdresser for 25 years. “I’ve lost a bit of my hearing because of the constant droning of hairdryers. This is far less intrusive,” he says from his Sandton salon, Urban Sass. The creator of the Dyson Supersonic Hairdryer, Sir James Dyson, is arguably the UK’s greatest modern-day inventor, having worked for decades to reinvent household objects such as the…
Social media has allowed conspiracy theories, disinformation and antivaxxers to spread because it brings more eyeballs, and therefore more advertising. It’s common cause that Leni Riefenstahl was a gifted filmmaker, whose movies were well shot and hugely evocative. The only problem is that those films were almost purely propaganda for the Nazi regime. The odious content of the films was a covert propaganda messaging to sell the Third Reich’s nonsense that Aryans were superior to other races, as conveyed by the title of her most famous one, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will). Sadly, this was one of many…
So what constitutes art?
I’ve been asked about this a lot in the last few months. I was asked to help curate a digital arts festival, called Creativate, which took place last year for the first time as part of the National Arts Festival in Makhanda.
Despite all the advances of technology and transportation, what hasn’t transformed is the amount of time it takes the average person to get to work, says Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber.
Access to a city’s centre is a greater success factor than education, he told the Uber Elevate conference in Washington last week. “It Is the key to success in society.”
I’d never heard of Carlos Maza until this month, when the Vox video producer made a supercuts video of all the homophobic and racist ranting by a popular YouTuber called Steven Crowder. The right-wing pundit has 3.8m subscribers to his YouTube channel has attacked Maza repeatedly, called him an “anchor baby, a lispy queer, [and] a Mexican”.