Finance Minster, Pravin Gordhan, has warned that South Africa would face a dark economic future if the interdict temporarily halting the e-toll project wasn’t set aside urgently. We’d have to brace ourselves for negative international credit ratings. And essential services to schools, hospitals and roads would also be adversely affected, he said.
Namibia’s MTC (Mobile Telecommunications Company) rolled out Africa’s second 4G LTE network in capital Windhoek today, but don’t fret, South African high-speed data desirers, because our local companies have some good reasons for pause in rolling out 4G locally. Well, so they say…
2oceansViber, Rory Allen, spent four days last week documenting the Eihatsu Maru as it lay stranded on Clifton’s First Beach. He’s put together an amazing time lapse of events as they unfolded.
I could tell you how cool this is, but seriously, that should be pretty obvious. This new full-sized foldable plastic boat is capable of sailing with a person inside it AND fits in your backpack! See what the Foldboat looks like, inside.
Japan just opened its tallest tourist attraction yet, the much-anticipated 634 metre tall Skytree tower in Tokyo. It took four years to build, cost 65 million Yen to make, is about twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, just beats out the 600m tall Canton Tower in China, and even survived the devastating earthquakes that rocked Japan about a year ago, barely denting its construction schedule.
Apple’s Tim Cook and Samsung’s Choi Gee-sung were instructed by a San Francisco federal judge to meet for a two-day mediation to help resolve a high-profile US patent case. The companies are locked in bitter patent litigation all over the world, and the judge diarised the meeting to take place yesterday and today, with the intention of bringing one of the many cases to a close.
Oh hey, that V-for-Vendetta-themed hacker collective is back, this time with a 1,7 GB lump of data that they claim “used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.” The file was uploaded to the Pirate Bay yesterday, and allegedly contains “internal emails, and the entire database dump.”
Because apparently having your own talk show for starting a thing on the internet isn’t enough, recent polling of Australia’s Labor Party suggests that the Wikileaks founder is reasonably likely to get elected to the Australian senate, should he choose to go ahead with plans to run.
Pakistan yesterday temporarily banned Twitter in the region. The move was in response to a competition on Facebook called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, now in its third year. The competition encourages entrants to draw caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and Pakistan authorities actually used censorship to quell the spread of images, unlike South African authorities who dealt with a similar “caricature” incident on Friday.
The Eihatsu Maru has been successfully towed off Clifton’s First Beach by maritime authorities today. The Smit Amandla tug worked tirelessly for hours to free the stricken vessel that ran aground last Saturday morning in thick fog.
It brings to a close an agonising six days of salvage attempts by officials, who twice previously failed to remove the stricken vessel.
It’s taken long enough for Japanese officials to step up to the plate and offer South African Authorities their assurances that they will do everything they can to locate the stricken vessel’s owner. After a slight mishap overnight, Samsa confirmed to 2oceansVibe a little while ago that salvage experts were putting the finishing touches together for an operation at lunchtime today.
So Google’s trying to change things, again. For those of you who decide that this is the last straw and that you’re going Bing, farewell and good luck finding anything. For those of you wanting to find out what exactly Knowledge Graph is and why it isn’t as terrible as G+, click on through.
Science! Technology! In a worldwide medical first, researchers have successfully implanted a computer-mind interface into the motor cortex of a 58-year-old, quadriplegic woman which allowed her to control a robotic limb using only the power of her mind. The future is now.
Pinterest, the hottest social photo sharing website right now, looks set to receive a nice $50 million injection from Japanese giant, Raukten. Plus another reported $70 million coming in from other international investors! This means that Pinterest’s valuation is now in the range of between $1 billion and $1,5 billion. Impressively, they’ve only been around for two years.
It looks like new Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig just made his first big move. The company has just announced that it will slash prepaid call rates by more than 34% with a plan called “99 Cents for Real”. More details inside.
NASA will start training a team astronauts to land on an asteroid in the next month, in preparation for a mission that will take humans farther from Earth than ever before. They’ll be collecting mineral samples and determining how to destroy an asteroid in the event that it might collide with the Earth. Seriously.
Tomorrow, SA Maritime Safety Authorities will make another attempt to remove the stranded Eihatsu Maru from Clifton’s First beach. Last night, 2oceansVibe spoke to one of the men in charge, Samsa’s chief operations officer, Sobantu Tilayi. Many questions still remain about the reasons why the captain grounded the vessel, but Tilayi said the operation has now reached a critical stage.
Environmental activist group, Greenpeace staged a protest outside tech giant, Apple’s head office in Cupertino yesterday. The protest was a call for Apple to start powering its data centers with greener energy, and to move away from coal. They did this is the strangest way possible – by live tweeting from a “pod” dropped outside their HQ.
Earlier we reported that Rebekah Brooks, the ex-News of the World editor, and her husband, Charlie Brooks, had been charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Another four people have also been charged. Rebekah and her husband have come out fighting however, and have called the charges “weak and unjust”.
News has just emerged that Former News Of The World editor, Rebekah Brooks, and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie Brooks, have been charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to the phone-hacking scandal.
In February this year, Twitter unveiled a service that allows researchers, and anyone who has the money to pay for the service, to unlock the Twitter archives, as it were. They’ve expanded their product range again; and now you can get a weekly email summarising the most relevant tweets and stories distributed by the people on your timeline.
Apple has been forced to drop the use of the term “4G” in its UK advertising for the new iPad, bacause not only is 4G not yet available to iPad users in the UK and Europe; it also appears that not all new iPads will be able to work on UK and European 4G when it does arrive. Is SA likely to suffer the same fate?
Various officials are currently meeting with the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) to establish a salvage operation for the stranded trawler on Clifton’s First Beach. A source familiar with the maritime industry believes it’s quite unlikely that the vessel wouldn’t have known what it was doing, and that fog would not have played a role in the grounding.
Look at this technology. Just look at it. What prevents you from making EFT payments for absolutely everything in your life? It’s the clunkiness of the process. You log on, you enter a ream of details, you wait for confirmation code, you pay… And the recipient waits two days for their money. Whereas a cash […]
That’s right, I am officially considering it. I spent some time with Virgin Galactic‘s Commerical Director, Stephen Attenborough (no relation, but an appropriate coincidence, nonetheless) the other day, as we shot the breeze at the Mount Nelson hotel. ETV News captured our conversation, so keep an eye out for the Tech Report on Thursday nights (channel […]
After receiving a tip-off, the Sunday Times on Friday discovered that millions of rands worth of school textbooks had simply been dumped at a warehouse in King William’s Town, in the Eastern Cape.
Hey there, science fiction. Defence contractor, Pegasus Global Holdings is building a replica of Rock Hill, a South Carolina city, in the middle of the New Mexico desert as a testing ground for futuristic infrastructures – self-driving cars, green buildings and next-generation Wi-Fi. It’ll be an uninhabited laboratory – they’re calling it “an amusement park for scientists.”
Microsoft announced today that they are preparing to roll out a revamped version of their net-based search engine Bing, after spending nearly US$6 billion on the service over its three year existence. They’re attempting to increase Bing’s market share of search engine revenues globally. But how is Facebook involved? Before you all go Google what a “Bing” is, read on…
Eskom’s electricity generating capacity has reached record lows over the last week, with unplanned power outages reaching their highest level for the year on 3 May, and yesterday coming precariously close to that figure again. Considering winter’s only just begun, this is going to cause some major worries across the country.
Venture capitalist, Peter Theil’s dream of an artificial island utopia for tech start-ups is inching closer to reality off the coast of San Francisco. Riding a wave of investment capital from Thiel, the project has a name – “Blueseed” – and a website, as well as a lengthy lineup of tech companies that want to get on board.