Category Archives: News

South Africa Online – September 2018

According to Narratiive, a leading online audience measurement, modelling and verification company a total of 39.6 million unique browsers viewed over a billion pages online in South Africa this past September. Nearly 70% of those were Mobile Unique Browsers. (Yes, mobile really is first.) Here’s the rest of their data on what South African’s did […]

50 Million Facebook Accounts Hacked

At the beginning of this month, Facebook announced that as many as 50 million user accounts had been compromised by hackers who took advantage of a vulnerability in the “View As” functionality (which lets you see how your profile would look to somebody else), to steal Facebook access tokens allowing them to take over other […]

20 Years Of Google

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 […]

Technology For Fake Video Improving Rapidly

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 […]

Google Faces Biggest Anti-Trust Fine Ever

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 […]

First Human Vs AI Debates By IBM

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 […]

Facebook Losing Importance As Source Of News

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 […]

Google Rebrands Advertising Products

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 […]

South Africa According To Google

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, […]

Are You Ready For The POPI Act?

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 […]