SA entrepreneurs have unrealistic expectations and a romanticised idea of what angel investment or venture capitalism means. They often blame circumstances beyond their control for their inability to secure funding, rather than focusing on their idea and ensuring it’s sufficiently
Director Alexander Payne was once the movies’ most acerbic observer of middle-aged masculinity. He has gone soft with his Oscar-baiting drama The Descendants, a slick but manipulative look at the trials a family endures after the mother is injured in a boating accident that puts her
Online “phishing” fraudsters, who try to con consumers out of their personal banking details to steal their money, target clients of Absa the most, data from a local e-mail company shows. Yossi Hasson, MD of open-source e-mail solutions and network management company Synaq, runs a phishing signature database using
It all began as a lark. Mark Zuckerberg posted pictures of his fellow Harvard students online to let viewers comment on who was hot and who was not. Eight years later, Facebook is one of the hottest companies in the world. On 1 February the social network
Emerging-markets telecommunications giant MTN is gearing up to fight a series of damaging allegations and legal action by Turkcell over claims by the Turkish operator that the JSE-listed group was awarded an operating licence in Iran corruptly. MTN claims
It’s official. TopTV founding CEO Vino Govender is stepping down from the satellite pay-TV operator with immediate effect amid plans for a “possible restructure” at the company to ensure it “remains competitive and relevant in the pay-TV environment in SA”. Eddie Mbalo, chairman of TopTV
Just over a year ago I asked whether Facebook was really worth US$50bn. On Thursday I got my answer: no, it’s worth more like $100bn. After years of flirting with the market, Facebook has finally opened its kimono and started the process of offering its shares for public trading. On 1 February
In an unassuming house on a golf estate in Centurion, south of Pretoria, nearly 30 Dell desktop computers run 24 hours a day in a makeshift server room. The machines are crawling Web feeds of breaking news along with all of the text of the US Library of Congress. This is the home of technology
Democratic Alliance MP Marian Shinn has been named by the party’s parliamentary leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko, as the new shadow minister of communications, replacing Natasha Michael, who takes on the public enterprises portfolio. Junita Kloppers-Lourens has been appointed shadow
Facebook has filed its S-1 form with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), announcing its intention to go public. The stock ticker symbol will be FB. No starting price has yet been named, but Facebook did say in the filing it expects to raise
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