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| Aki Anastasiou stops by David O'Sullivan's show to discuss the latest developments in the field of technology. Included is global IT news from the preceding week, major IT stock moves, virus warnings, interviews with experts in various sectors, the latest gadgets and technological advances. Podcast the latest Technobyte - click here. |
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TECHNOBYTE for 30 August 2010 |
On Technobyte this afternoon is Skype on sale again? Sony talk of 3D without glasses, and the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary won’t be printed again.
Skype, the Internet telephony company that recently filed for an initial public offering, might be up for sale… again! After being sold to eBay and then spun out, a report suggests that Cisco Systems is looking to buy the company. The report adds that Google might have been interested in Skype but has backed off because of anti-trust concerns. The deal, if it indeed goes through is going to cost Cisco some serious chunk of change — upwards of $5 billion. If Cisco does indeed buy Skype, it would be the first time the router and switch maker would enter the world of services. An entry into services would put the company in competition with many of its customers, especially the telephone and cable companies.
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Google is taking on internet telephone companies like Skype by allowing users to call from its free web-based email service. The service allows users to make calls to land lines and mobiles from inside their Gmail account. Phoning anywhere in the US and Canada will be free until the end of the year, while calls to the UK, France, China and Germany will cost 2 cents a minute.
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Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation. The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience. “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
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Sony Corp. is working on 3-D televisions that don't need special glasses, joining a race with rival Toshiba Corp., but sees cost and technological hurdles to overcome before they can go on sale. Toshiba said earlier this week it is working on glasses-free 3-D TVs, although no decision had been made on when they will go on sale. Mainstream 3-D TVs now on sale, such as those from Panasonic Corp. and Sony Corp., require glasses. But there are already screens that don't require glasses, mainly intended for store displays. They require the viewer to stand in specific spots for the 3-D effect to emerge, and the image quality is much lower than that of screens using glasses.
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The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world’s most definitive work on the language, will not be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.
The second OED was published in 1989. Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.
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TECHNOBYTE for 23 August 2010 |
On Technobyte this afternoon the technology behind the 360 degree Vodacom Fan Cam and viewers are invited to help direct Carte Blanche’s 22nd birthday show.
The Vodacom Fan Cam Image is a 360 degree HD image of the entire stadium and all the people in it. The image takes roughly 4 minutes to capture the stadium in its entirety with 800,000 individual images being taken, the 800,000 images will then be “stitched together” to create a seamless image of the entire stadium and all the people inside it. Tinus le Roux is the MD of Virtual Africa the company which also did the 360 degree views of all the World Cup stadiums.
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M-Net’s Carte Blanche show is doing something different for their 22nd Birthday on Sunday 12 September. To celebrate, they want their Facebook fans and Twitter followers to help them direct their Sunday night birthday broadcast live! How? Become a fan on Facebook ( Go to website) or Twitter ( Go to website). Invite all your friends - the more people directing, the bigger the party. Facebook and Twitter links can also be found at Go to website. You will then be in a position to choose which stories go out and in the order of the broadcast.
The Digital Edge podcast is the voice of digital marketing in South Africa and hosts, Saul and Jarred, will deliver a talk-show style afternoon of engaging content and in-depth interrogation live at the Alex in Johannesburg on the 16th of September 2010. This is your chance to make sense of digital, to meet the opinion-makers, and to refine your understanding of what the digital marketing and media revolution is all about.
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TECHNOBYTE for 16 August 2010 |
On Technobyte this afternoon your photographs could reveal your personal information and crowd sourcing software company Ushahidi on their success.
When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser. Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was “Now it’s off to work,” potential thieves knew he would not be at home. Security experts and privacy advocates have recently begun warning about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras.
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Last week I had the privilege of attending tech4africa a conference about technology, social media, mobile, infrastructure and emerging tech in Africa. There were some great international speakers incredible speakers and companies like Ushahidi spoke about the amazing work they are doing with crowd sourcing. Erik Hersman, founder of popular crowdsourced mapping platform Ushahidi spoke to me about some of the incredible work that they are doing. Well done to Gareth Knight who’s idea the conference was and his team at tech4africa for a fascinating conference.
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TECHNOBYTE for 02 August 2010 |
On Technobyte today we talk to one of the internet’s new provocative voices, Clay Shirky and mobile tv on demand launches in South Africa.
Clay Shirky is one of the keynote speakers at this years Tech4Africa conference taking place from the 12-13 of August in Johannesburg. Clay is a provocative new voice on all things Internet: economics and culture, media and community, and the open source movement. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the way network technologies provide new ways for groups to get things done, including collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and Open Source development.
In addition to his consulting work, Clay is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program , where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology—how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. Prior to his appointment at NYU, Clay was a partner at The Accelerator Group, an investment firm focused on early-stage companies.
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There have now been more than 20 billion tweets since Twitter Twitter)’s inception in 1996. The milestone comes just two months after the service hit 15 billion tweets and about five months since it reached 10 billion, indicating that activity levels on the microblogging service continue to accelerate.
Twitter indicated earlier this year that they’re seeing more than 50 million tweets per day. With the company recently breaking its own activity records during the World Cup (World Cup), we imagine the numbers are fairly accurate.
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An new service from Vodacom was launched today called TV:On Demand! Basically for R75 a month or R20 a week, Vodacom users with a 3G phone will have access to hundreds of hours of content like movies, series and music videos on their cell phones. Users can browse through an extensive content library for an episode, entire series or the latest music videos from the hottest Billboard artists.
TV:On Demand! benefits include:
Stop, play or resume functionality on TV viewing
Complete DVD-like viewing control
New TV episodes released every week
Music Genre playlists including hundreds of music videos
Great content from key providers including; HBO, Disney, MTV and Nickelodeon.
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TECHNOBYTE for 26 July 2010 |
On Technobyte we talk about charging your laptop and electronic devices using solar panels and is the internet running out of space?
The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist. The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web. Currently the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. Each IPv4 address is limited to a 32-bit number, which means there are a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol and uses a 128-bit address, so it supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses. Enough, in fact, to give every person on the planet something like 50 thousand trillion trillion addresses, according to Dave Evans, Chief Technologist of the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco.
Vint Cerf is an American computer scientist who is the "person most often called the father of the Internet" and currently works for Google addressed the issue of IPv6 at a recent conference and raised some worrying issues.
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Become green is one area where the IT industry has been focusing its attention, and lowering ones carbon footprint is certainly one thing behind many users of today’s technology. Solar power is one technology that has matured and is now starting to be used effectively in a domestic environment in our homes, but how about solar power to power up every day devices like laptops and cell phones as well as portable electronic gadgets? I have been testing a range of products from a company called Power Traveller, who make different solar charger devices to charge a range of electronic devices. So if you are an outdoor person and struggle to find a power point to charge your devices, or even someone who wants to use the power of the sun and be eco friendly, these award winning products are fantastic and work really well.
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