Browsing: James Francis

I never get tired of this: hold down the button and tell Siri to set a timer. It has, at the very least, made me a better cook. As Marco Pierre White said, cooking is part art and part exact chemistry, so measure and time precisely. I’m not alone, at least as far as

If you ask me, we hear too much from those who sell technology and too little from those who use it. They certainly get the opportunities at numerous closed-doors corporate meetings, where the people selling do all the listening

Would I buy Google Home? I’m not sure. Then again, I’m not the target audience, since I’m not interested in Amazon’s Echo either. I like shouting commands at technology: I frequently use Siri to launch mundane tasks like

As one of the many perks of the oh-so-hard life of a technology journalist, I was flown to Las Vegas as a guest of EMC for its annual EMC World event earlier this month. Like all such events, this was a chance for the company to trumpet its

Just a few days ago, a sliver of news slipped out that went mostly unnoticed, except for a mention here and there. Ford announced an investment in Pivotal, a big data and cloud-based software platform company to further enhance its

There is no want for topics today that concern South Africa. Race, the economy, our president’s naked emperor tendencies – these are all important. It is, in fact, refreshing to see all that discourse. In our most cynical moments we complain how the country is going backwards

There’s an elephant in the room. It’s a phrase that hails from a short 1814 fable, in which a man enjoyed all the small wonders of a museum but failed completely to see the giant elephant exhibition. It’s a brief read and pretty much encapsulates the idiom

Get ready for the great South African video-on-demand cull. I have no figures to back this up, but my gut tells me that most of the local offerings are doomed. Services like Vidi, MaxVU and ONTAPtv.com made a go at it, but their reliance on rental models

I’m a technology cynic. Often, I simply can’t see the magic in the bottle that’s being advertised. Sometimes I just get hung up on semantics. For example, a conversation around Microsoft’s HoloLens once degenerated over my annoyance that everyone was referring to it