Review : State of violence

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:38:01 +0100

What is it : Drama/crime/somewhat thriller

Kinda like : a history of violence meets portrait of young man drowning

Whose in it : Fana Mokoena ( the lab, hopeville) , Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi) to name a few

Helmer : Khalo Matabane ( When we were black, conversations on a sunday afternoon)

Story : BEE man's comrade era ghosts come to roost when he reaches the pinnacle of BEE success

The Review ;

Well SA cinema this years has given us Afrikaans Read More...

London sneezes BBM virus

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:37:17 +0100

I thought when China sneezes, the world catches the cold but it seems the London madness has come down to eMzantsi with the BBM virus.

South Read More...

New Media + Communication = Green power for all

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 07:04:50 +0100

After many weeks of blogging on sustainability, renewable energy sources, solar power, education systems, economic problems and much more... I have come to the realisation that I achieved my goal for this blog without even realising it.

My aim was to propose ways in which new media technologies could aid the development and sustainability of developing countries like South Africa. And after many weeks of struggling to argue my way to this poRead More...

“Dumbphone” of the season: Vodafone 555 Blue

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:01:06 +0100

Yes, I know the general term for WAP enabled phones these days is “smartphone”, but after doing some research on the Vodafone 555 Blue, I had to borrow the term “dumbphone” from Tech Crunch’s Chris Velazco.

While there have been other Facebook phones, this latest feature phone claims to take Facebook integration to the next level on pay as you go (PAYG) phones.

The reality is 555 Blue was launched about two years too lateRead More...

Re-civilise who?!

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:30:12 +0100

A black person can call another black person a n*gg**, a white person cant. A black person can refer to another black person’s hair as nappy, a white person cant. A black person can joke with another black person about being uncivilised, No, Nivea, you can’t!

I didn’t invent the rules; I’m just playing the game.

Nokia Maps: @PigSpotter’s got competition

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 05:52:09 +0100

Nokia Maps may just be the answer for South Africans who feel like they spend a substantial chunk of their days in traffic.

While @PigSpotter has been a source of humour for some*, it has helped its followers dodge the popo, their camera’s and on the odd occasion traffic caused by an accident.

The more legal route is to listen to the traffic reports on the radio, but those only happen every half an hour or so and are limited to high traffic areas.

Since Read More...

Celebrating Mediocrity: a South African complex?

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:16:12 +0100

Two weeks ago I had an opportunity to see a pre-release screening of How to steal two million starring our lady in Hollywood Terry Pheto , the soapie gods Menzi Ngubane, Hlubi Mboya and Rapulana Seiphemo ( the man whose agent is doing a fine job in making sure his in everything South African motion picture). It’s basically a heist movie with a tinge of film noir set in Johannesburg, all the tropes of heist movie and film noir are there; the femme fatale ,in thRead More...

MTN Mobile Money: Debit comes to the party

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:53:01 +0100

The online shopping industry in South Africa is pathetic. There are a number of reasons people do not shop online; security, stupidity and general lack of trust in the general process.

I know many people who buy their groceries online from Pick n Pay Online Shopping but I for one wouldn’t even bother buying a carton of milk because I have no faith in the service industry in general.

Another major obstacle is the credit card. According to the World Wide Worx’s Online Read More...

Social Media to the rescue

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:39:50 +0100

When your car gets jacked or a house caves in – who you gonna call? GHOS....ah wait it’s not 1984! You’d think that 27 years later we’d have better ways to communicate emergencies – but wait – we do!

Social media has been used to save lives, but not because emergency services are always actively involved, they just happen to be alerted by other social networking followers. What if there were dedicated accounts like ambulance, fire, and police departmRead More...

Instant Chat Combats HIV

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:19:03 +0100

HIV/AIDS has plagued South Africa for many years now. The infection rate is among the highest in the world. According to estimates drawn from surveys, one out of three women under age 25 are living with HIV. In 2009 a phone-based counselling centre called RedChatZone was launched to support and to give information to those living with HIV.

Wikipedia says “white privilege is a way of conceptualizing racial inequalities that focuses as much on the alleged advantages that white people accrue from society as on the alleged disadvantages that people of color experience”. Now if one is to take our history from colonization throughout to the apartheid system you would see that racial inequalities were guaranteed to the advantage of the white man and his family at the disadvantage of the blacRead More...

Pocahontas and the web app

Tue, 31 May 2011 08:24:07 +0100

What is the first thing you think about when you hear the word ‘native’?

The first thing that pops into my head is Pocahontas.

My second thought: “What was the name of that *song when she is singing on top of a mountain and dives off a cliff into the river below”?

My third and final thought: oy vaysmeer (short for oy vay) am I being discriminatory?

I asked my friend what the first thing he thought of and he said &lsquRead More...

Twitter, how could you sell me out?

Tue, 31 May 2011 07:21:39 +0100

English Premier League footballer, Ryan Giggs, was identified by tweeters as having had an affair with model and Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. Giggs, who got an order from a British Court, wants Twitter to reveal the identities of the various tweeters.

This has been considered one of the many defamation cases leading to the issue of such Read More...

Teacher save me, please. Teacher save the world, please.

Mon, 30 May 2011 20:09:13 +0100

This week's blog post will look at The Millennium Development Goal number 2, which is as follows:

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

Target 2A: By 2015, all children can complete a full course of primary schooling, girls and boys

o Enrolment in primary educatRead More...

AIDS: A solution for overpopulation? Methinks not...

Tue, 24 May 2011 07:39:23 +0100

On Monday 23 May and Friday 27 May, the Student HIV AIDS Resistance Campaign (SHARC) Society of Rhodes University, is hosting an HIV/AIDS test drive, offering free tests to all voluntary participants. And seeing as combating AIDS/HIV is one of the Millennium Development Goals, I thought it would be most appropriate to discuss this topic.

Dad got a BlackBerry: what this means for mobile marketing

Tue, 24 May 2011 07:14:57 +0100

While there was all this bubbe meise hype about the world ending, the only thing that came close to it for me was that my dad had upgraded to a Blackberry. This was quite a surprise, considering he has had his same Nokia phone for years and has stubbornly refused any kind of upgrade.

The tipping point for him was the fact that most of his employees own BlackBerry’s. When one of them was late to a meeting or stuck in traffic the entire office knew because of the BlackBerry group tRead More...

Blog entries tagged south africa