eSlick new Kindle competitor?

A handheld screen that lets you read ebooks; magazines; and documents in electronic and PDF format is now available in South Africa. The eSlick reads PDF-format documents, and because nearly anything on a PC can be converted into PDF format, anything can be read on the eSlick.
Some of its benefits are that it is easy [...]

Sandra Gordon gives insight into this week’s Vodacom Women in the Media Awards

The local Awards that recognise female media stars (the seventh annual Vodacom Women in the Media Awards) gala event will be held at Summer Place on 30 July. These Awards honour remarkable women who have made a significant impact on the media industry – as well as Rising Stars, and this year’s Lifetime Achiever. I [...]

Amazon: Like taking candy from a baby

Earlier this week, online retailer Amazon, took back a few hundred George Orwell books and refunded its customers who had made the purchase, without informing them about the move, or requesting their permission.
This was possible to achieve because the books were in electronic format and were stored on Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle. Since the [...]

FNB brings LOTTO to your cellphone

I don’t ‘do’ the LOTTO-deal. And as a passive observer, I watch with curiosity and fascination those queues on Wednesday and Saturday nights as people, with eyes glazed, rush to fill in their special numbers; and wait, like thousands of others, to enter their numbers into the lucky machine! It’s almost a sacred experience. If [...]

Google News and YouTube invite news groups to share videos

On 28 June, Google paved the way for professional news organisations to share their video content online in order to build bigger audiences for their video content. Google News and Google’s YouTube video-sharing website are inviting news publications that are already sourced in Google News to join the YouTube partner programme.
News sites that allow their [...]

Facebook’s users are mainly adults – what will the marketers do?

According to iStrategyLabs research, there has been a 513.7% hike in the use of Facebook by users aged 55 and older between January until July this year, and traffic from high school and college users on the social networking site has dropped approximately 20%.
Interestingly, this supports research from comScore, which found that Twitter use for [...]

Do you trust everything that appears in the blogosphere?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring the need to curate news that has been sourced online. One of the defining elements of the blogosphere and online communities is that they are open and easy to access. However, this means that there is hardly ever any checking of facts (unless comments are a tad [...]

Facebook same-name couple to marry

Many benefits of the internet have been discussed over the years, indeed, the commentary on the benefits of social networking sites has grown exponentially, from using these as marketing tools, to connecting with long-lost friends. However, finding a suitable marriage partner has rarely been discussed. In yesterday’s newspapers, a story was published which reported that [...]

Mobile web usability is a contradiction in terms

According to Jakob Nielsen, in user testing, website use on mobile devices scored very low, especially in cases where users accessed regular websites not designed for mobile use.
Nielsen describes the mobile user experience as “miserable” and says the phrase “mobile usability” is an oxymoron as it’s neither easy nor pleasant to use the web on [...]

The murky waters of blog content copyright

I was horrified to learn that one of my favourite bloggers, Peas on Toast, has such an ardent ‘fan’ out there that she has been copying her original posts (sometimes verbatim, sometimes not) practically since starting out in the blogosphere.
The problem with this problem, is that blogging isn’t exactly a platform where plagiarism can be [...]