20 years ago this month, and two years after it was launched internally at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google was officially incorporated as a company. At first, they didn't get much attention, being only one of a large number of competing search engines and "web portals," but within a few months [...]
So-called fake news has been one of the hottest topics for the last year, and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have working on addressing threats posed by disinformation. At Facebook's developer conference earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that the platform would "never be unprepared again" for things like the interference of Russian trolls [...]
In Europe's biggest ever anti-trust claim, Google is facing a potential US$ 5 Billion fine for anti-competitive practices relating to their use of the mobile Android operating system to "stifle competition." According to the charge, Google uses the mobile operating system (which is installed on 80% of the smartphones in the world), to unfairly favour [...]
In the first ever public demonstration of an AI technology that IBM has been working on for the last 5 years, last week saw the tech giant's "Project Debater" pit their artificial intelligence against two human debaters on the topics of government-subsidised space exploration, and telemedicine. Although the computer had never studied the topics, it [...]
A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has revealed social media in general, and Facebook in particular, is losing ground as a source for news as more people lose trust in social media for hard news. According to a survey of 74,000 people across 37 countries, the use of social [...]
Yesterday, almost 18 years after launching their Google Ads platform to allow businesses to advertise in their search engine results, Google announced that they will be re-branding their advertising products / solutions. According to the post on the Analytics blog, these new, "simpler" brands and solutions will help advertisers and publishers choose the right solutions [...]
With around 40,000 searches being processed every second by Google, the internet giant can provide some interesting insights into the everyday lives of the people who use it. They use this data to help them understand the intent of users, and improve the user experience by providing relevant information as quickly as possible. Every year, [...]
The Protection Of Personal Information Act (No 4 of 2013) has been hovering in the background for quite some time already. Its intention is to bring the practices governing data collection and direct marketing in South Africa into line with European standards and guidelines governing these issues, and although the Act was first published in [...]
Google My Business has been a valuable resource for some time, allowing you to put information and images about your business into Google, which can display in Google maps, or in the Google Local Results pack. Back in 2016 though, Google removed one of the features from "My Business," namely the ability to edit your [...]
The beginning of this month marked the 10th anniversary of the opening of the first Google office in Africa, and Google held an event in Johannesburg to celebrate the milestone. They used the opportunity to announce that their Digital Skills Programme had reached their target of training 1 million Africans in everything from social media [...]
