South African legal history was made in the Durban High Court yesterday when Judge Esther Steyn agreed to allow the service of a legal notice on a man being sued to be posted on his Facebook page.
Big banks just continue to let us down. In the latest scandalous development in the world of banking, the global bank HSBC has been used by Mexican drug cartels looking to get cash back into the US, and by Saudi Arabian banks that needed access to dollars.
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.
SONY Corporation has declared an annual loss of 457 billion yen ($5,7 billion) in 2011, its fourth straight year of hemorrhaging money, and the worst in its 66-year corporate history. In spite of which, the company – which appointed a new president, Kazuo Hirai last month – is predicting return to profit by the end of 2012.
Forbes.com released a list of Africa’s 20 most powerful business people yesterday (they do like a list over there at Forbes) and it wasn’t too hard to pick up a trend on the list of the continent’s commercial high flyers – no less than 12 of them are South African. Are we awesome, or what? We’ve got the full list, including our Mzansi business powerhouses, after the jump!
Bob Skinstad will be kicking off his new weekly show on 2oceansvibe Radio today, from 3pm to 5pm. Bob will be giving away a smartphone every week for the first month, with today’s show featuring an iPhone 4S prize, courtesy of Vodacom! Bob will also be interviewing Chris Roper, the editor of Mail&Guardian Online, as […]
France Football magazine has released this year’s list of the world’s highest-earning soccer players – Rooney earned $32,6 million for a single goal, and Samuel Eto’o got $37 million for moving to Russia. And to everybody’s surprise, Beckham isn’t the biggest earner anymore; see who’s taken the lead after the jump.
An application by three ministers to have the decision of the Competition Tribunal set aside has been rejected by the Competition Appeals Court. This is a great step forward in getting Walmart to South Africa. The merger was approved by the Competition Tribunal last year.
Well. This just brings a whole other meaning to the phrase “mile high club”. Referring to an article about two airlines merging, Bloomberg Businessweek’s newest issue front cover features a lewd moment between the two companies’ planes.
Facebook is expected to file for an IPO later today – Wednesday morning stateside – raising $5 billion. This is a fair deal less than the $10 billion previously rumored. Folks figure Zuckerberg wants to start with a conservative base at first. Because he can’t be sure this “Face-book” thing is going to take off.
As part of its promotional campaign for the new Chrome operating system, Google has quietly opened up its first retail store in London, called the “Chrome Zone”. The store is Google’s first venture in realspace retail, using the location to sell its Chromebook computer line.
A Florida funeral home has unveiled an ‘alakaline hydrolysis’ unit, which dissolves dead bodies in heated alkaline water. Which is, apparently, something you might want to do; the process is being billed as a far greener alternative than cremation, producing far less greenhouse gas and requiring far less energy.
Huang Nubo, the sixteenth richest person in China, has offered $100 million to buy 300 square kilometres of Icelandic wilderness. He calls himself a “poet and adventurer,” so it would make sense that he’d want to buy the property to develop a golf course and tourist destination.
Recession reschmesssion. Russia has unveiled an ambitious (read: $65 billion) plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait – as part of a railway corridor linking North America to Europe, via Siberia. Because ships and planes just weren’t cutting it. Also, this sucker’s going to be entirely fueled by green energy, apparently.
This makes total sense. Apparently the upkeep of plants in Goldman Sachs’ London offices are costing the bank tens of thousands of pounds per annum, which is why the head offices have ordered many of the plants to be removed. It’s nice to see that these guys can make the big sacrifices when they have to.
And for the first time in years I actually have a reason to want a Motorola. Google today agreed to acquire the handset division of Motorola, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion (around 90 billion ZAR). It’s always nice to have money lying around for these little impulse buys.
Because robots can’t get depressed over awful working conditions and commit suicide, you see. Also we don’t have a robot union yet, so Foxconn (the guys who manufacture the iPhone and iPad) won’t need to worry about the slowly increasing factory worker wages in Taiwan, which are driving overhead costs upwards throughout the fancy-technology-making-industry.
Google has set up the first of its startup-funding offices in Cape Town, under the ‘Umbuno’ flagship. “Umbono” is isiZulu for ‘vision’ or ‘idea’. Google also showed that it knows how to make a girl feel special, saying it chose Cape Town because the city is in “the process of positioning itself as a hub for innovation and technology”.
Anonymous, the online sort-of-anarchic sort-of-activist group, forced Aaron Barr, head of HBGary Federal, the massive American tech security company, to resign. Which is sort of a huge deal in the way that Charlie Sheen isn’t. Even though I love everything that Charlie Sheen touches.
I was doing my thing in London in the late 90’s – you know, hanging at the Met Bar, getting fussy about pin-stripe suits and enjoying the exchange rate (20 to 1 when I left, can you believe it!). But one thing stood out during my time in London, and that was the chairs my […]
This is some pretty cool reading for those of you still trying to shake the post-public holiday major Bafana let down cobwebs. If you’re a white guy in Beijing incapable of speaking a shred of Mandarin, you might feel that your employment opportunities are limited. Or you could get off your ass and get paid […]