Celestica, the Toronto-based manufacturer that produces hardware for Research In Motion, have announced that they’ll be stopping production of BlackBerry hardware over the next three months, and charging the company $1 billion for unsold BlackBerry inventory. Between the BlackBerry 10 smartphone getting pushed back to late 2012, and new iPhone rumours, this could sort of be RIP RIM.
Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before the word ‘irony’ stopped being able to quite cover it. The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz have launched a Karl Marx credit card, after the father of Communism won in an online voting poll for new credit card designs. Somewhere a grave is spinning.
Broad Sustainable Building, a Chinese construction company, is aiming to assemble an 838m-tall building in Changsha, a city in southern China, beating the Burj Khalifa in Dubai by 10 metres. What’s more, they’re looking to build the thing – dubbed SkyCity One – in 90 days because, well, why not.
Within the next few days, every single Facebook user will be met with a request for a verified phone number, which will apparently help users “stay in control” of their accounts. This is partially a response to security breaches at LinkedIn, Last.fm and eHarmony, but it’s also because Facebook wants to know more stuff about you.
Skype have just introduced a new ‘feature’ called Conversation Ads, which displays advertisements during audio calls. Which sucks. To nobody’s surprise they’re trying to spin the feature as somehow good for users – apparently the ads “could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences.”
The South African documentary Dear Mandela, directed by Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza, won the Grand Chameleon Award for best film and documentary at the closing night ceremony of the festival.
The documentary continues to impress audiences after it won best South African Documentary at the Durban International Film Festival last year.
So there was this scene towards the end of the first season of Game of Thrones – that popular, high budget, swords/sorcery/nudity show that HBO’s running – where a bunch of heads were lined up on spikes. And director’s commentary from the recently-released Season 1 DVD has revealed that one of the heads belonged to ex-president George Bush.
Hear ye, Hear ye! If you didn’t get the the memo, Friday Done Jack’s Way is BACK! To that end, this is the call to entry for Friday Done Jack’s Way, Friday 22 June 2012. Ready? And GO! This one’s a goodie so listen up. With Cape Town firmly in the grip of winter, there […]
This week I answer a reader’s question: In a crowded wine market such as SA, is there still space for any new entrants? And if so, how should you approach things to ensure you aren’t destined for the scrapheap of failure?
I think I should urgently declare that this post is NOT paid for and this is purely a kneejerk reaction to the dinner I have just devoured. Whilst The Muse certainly is very skilled at getting chops to the perfect crispiness, the quality of Spar’s chops fell beautifully into her hands. And they were nothing short […]
New Lance Armstrong Doping Charges Could Cost Him Seven Tour de France Titles – The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency brought formal doping charges against former cyclist Lance Armstrong in an action that could cost him his seven Tour de France titles, according to a letter sent to Armstrong and several others. [washpo] SABC Will Not Be Televising […]
Sweden has been handing its Twitter account to a different citizen every week for the past seven months. Which has been great for the most part, with priests and lesbian truck drivers representing the country – except the latest @sweden handler has been catching some flack for trying to figure out “whats the fuzz with jews.”
Spanish activists are raising a large private fund to pay for a civil action suit against Rodrigo Rato – the former chairman of Bankia, one of the banks central to the Spanish financial crisis. The fundraiser is following the usual decentralized online-activist structure, with members organizing themselves under the #QuerellaPaRato (“Lawsuit for Rato”) hashtag.
A new concept restaurant has met with some recent success. Dinner in the Sky has diners, dining table and waitstaff hoisted some 50 meters into the sky with a crane, where they can enjoy a high-altitude gourmet meal. The latest branch just opened up in in Brussels – take a look after the jump.
30 years later the famous case of baby Azaria Chamberlain being eaten by a dingo while on holiday has finally been put to rest. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, long maintained that a dingo took her baby, even as she was sentenced to life in jail for her daughter’s murder, a conviction that was later quashed.
In recent years we have seen reality television sink from the lows of Big Brother down through teen pregnancy, to the dregs of Jersey Shore. Earth, it would seem has little left to offer in terms of reality TV. Enter Dutch team, Mars One, who are looking to raise an initial $6 billion to send a team to mars by 2023, and make a reality show out of it.
The Citizen reported over the weekend that Tokyo Sexwale is to be booted out of President Jacob Zuma’s Cabinet in yet another cabinet reshuffle. The rumour comes from a “highly placed source” who told The Citizen that “Sexwale has been speaking against Zuma’s government lately. Zuma wants him out.”
Did you just get a little shiver up your spine? I did. I really did. Do you remember that amazing time that we shared together last year? I remember it, so fondly. I really do. We were building something, something good, something great – a movement. A movement based on the premise that no one […]
As the American government continues its internal adoption of cloud computing services, Google and Microsoft have been scrambling for contracts – what with their being lucrative and influential and such. Sucks to be Google, then, because the FAA just awarded $91 million to Microsoft to have their platform transition to the Microsoft Office 360 cloud service.
Over at Simply Sean, blogger Sean Wilson has written a very cheeky post on what former Sprinbgbok coaches think about Heyneke Meyer’s team selection for his first test in charge on Saturday against England in in Durban. From the absurd utterances of Peter de Villiers to the grumpy racism of Andre Markgraaf, Sean nails it. Here are a […]
Bob Welch, formerly Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist and succesful soft-rock soloist of the 70’s, was found in his Nashville home yesterday, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 65. Police reports say that Welch’s body was found by his wife in the mid-afternoon, along with a suicide note.
Ha! Model Melissa Stetten found herself getting hit on by vaguely-famous actor Brian Presley on a flight out of Los Angeles. Using this new thing called ‘the internet,’ she identified Presley as a married, outspoken Christian with a five-year-old kid. So she livetweeted his ridiculously awkward attempt at hooking up with her. Watch it unfold below.
In news that you want desperately to be surprised by, but just can’t, the creators of the Tupac-ogram have announced that they’re working on an Elvis Presley hologram, for making film and television appearances – and, depending on how unsettling they can get the reincarnated star to look, on tour.
In a rather feeble attempt to garner attention for the plight of abused animals everywhere, PETA has launched an adult content site peta.xxx [NSFW, sort of]. The site has been in the pipeline for a while now, and features porn stars like Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson. Although, to be honest, there is harder porn on late night E-tv.
Trying to avoid the title of White Elephant trainers, the City of Cape Town is considering turning Cape Town Stadium “into a hub of commercial activity”. The idea is to introduce restaurants, night clubs, sports bars and coffee spots to the stadium to make back some of the R44,6 million a year running costs.
Costner And Baldwin Go Head To Head In Court – A courtroom battle between actors Kevin Costner and Stephen Baldwin is under way over a £34m deal to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. [yahoo] Mark Keohane Never Was The Olympic Spokesperson – Following sports writer Mark Keohane’s resignation amid a sex and cocaine […]
Are you fed up with your marriage? Well you can now check in to one of a number of Dutch hotels for a long-weekend and get your divorce sorted at the same time. A great idea, I call it the reverse-honeymoon.
Called “pop-up forests” forest by a New York Times blogger, areas of the Arctic Tundra are greening faster and faster as temperatures rise. What is worse, is that with the increase of vegetation, more sunlight is absorbed and contributes to the increase in temperatures.
Okes – you think you’ve seen all the entertainment Rivonia has to offer, right? Wrong! There’s cool and then there is Avastar cool! Mike Basson is the owner of this exciting new night club in Joburg. This guy has managed to successfully fuse the world of nightclubs with…the world of Avatar (the movie with the blue people). Check out his promo video after the jump.
We love to forget to learn from the past. Learning from history has never been a strength of human beings. Even though we are continually reminded of our historical forgetfulness, generation after generation thinks it knows better. We repeat ourselves over time, asking the same questions and making the same mistakes; ignoring our artists and poets who have been obsessing over this phenomenon since the first falcon lost its hearing, and the gyre started getting fat.