It’s a momentous day for Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team as the founder rang the NASDAQ’s opening bell at 9:30am this morning on the East Coast of the United States.

To celebrate the moment, Zuckerberg updated his status to read: “Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others.”

the status update went live just as Zuckerberg was ringing the bell, which means that it was configured by engineers to appear just as he was in action.

According to Venture Beat, engineers actually “hacked” the NASDAQ button to post the update according to David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook:

“We hooked up our hack to run at exactly the same time as Mark pushed the button to turn on the light and ring the bell. Then we attached a wire that hooks to the hack and into the headset jack of a cell phone,” Garcia said. “When the button was pressed, it sent a signal through the hack, and the phone got the signal that triggered the custom action through our Open Graph API, posting a story onto Mark’s Timeline. It worked.”

(more…)

Having announced the availability of the upgrade for the latest version of the Android platform – Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich – for the Samsung GALAXY S II, yesterday, the uptake has since been astounding says Samsung.

“Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — easy multitasking, rich notifications and customisation – adding a powerful new way of communicating and sharing,” says Craige Fleischer, Director of Mobile Communications for Samsung Electronics SA. “It’s easy to see why our local Samsung GALAXY S II users are eager to get their hands on the ICS platform.”

“Given the high demand, users may struggle to upgrade immediately due to the limited capacity on the FOTA servers, but we urge GALAXY S II users to keep trying. We also encourage users to upgrade via Kies, as not only is it easy and simple, but as it is done via the PC, it has unlimited server capacity and as such, during this initial period of high demand is the preferred download method.”

Want Ice Cream Sandwich on your Galaxy S2? Get Samsung Kies here

The Samsung Galaxy S2 was BandwidthBlog’s favourite phone of 2011, so we highly recommend users to upgrade their software.

Press Release from Samsung regarding Ice Cream Sandwich for the South African Galaxy S2:

(more…)

Following the success of the Android version of ExpenZa, Apposition Consulting has now made available the BlackBerry version of the smartphone app for free download in BlackBerry App World, developed due to the persistent requests from South Africa’s BlackBerry users.

Since its launch on 17 May, first day download numbers of the BlackBerry version were more than three times the download numbers for the Android version, Apposition Consulting reports.

ExpenZa aims at helping people make smarter decisions about their finances through the automation of expense tracking by intercepting the expenditure SMS message sent by various banks in South Africa and uses the information contained in that SMS to automatically populate a user’s expense list.

With BlackBerry’s 8520 as the most popular phone in South Africa, developers of the BlackBerry version ensured that the app worked optimally for BlackBerry’s OS5 and higher.

(more…)

According to Mickey Drexler, CEO of J.Crew and Apple Inc. board member, Steve Jobs dreamed of one day developing an iCar.

Drexler revealed these never before heard insights at the Fast Company Innovation Uncensored conference that took place in April.

During an interview, Drexler said “Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars? Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”

While we will never know what the Apple iCar would have looked like with Drexler commenting that Jobs never actually got round to designing one, prior to his death, the former CEO was working on building other transportation vehicles including a luxury superyacht with designer Philip Starck.

Source: Wired

According to a report by My Broadband, Standard Bank has recently launched its new Muvo card. The card that incorporates both Near Field Communication (NFC) and debit card functionalities was developed in order to meet with the requirements of the National Department of Transport.

The card will be used to load credits for commuters using the PeopleMover bus service in Durban’s city center. As with the new myconnect card used in Cape Town for the MyCiti Rapid Bus transportation system, the card is tapped against a card reader upon boarding the bus in order to pay for the ride.

As part of its pilot phase, the card will be isssued to about 1000 commuters in Durban, after which it will become available for the remaining 550, 000 commuters.

The Muvo card, developed by Beyond Payments, Standard Bank’s business development unit has said in an official press release that “it is believed to be a world first in the realm of cashless payment technology.”

This was reiterated by chief executive officer of Beyond Payments Herman Singh who said that “The Muvo card is a world first, and showcases a transit ticket sitting inside a banking chip, secured with bank strength security, along with a payment wallet.”

(more…)

According to a report by the Korean Economic Daily, since its launch in London at the beginning of the month, the Samsung Galaxy SIII has already generated up to 9 million pre-orders from over 100 global carriers, reports Reuters.

The latest version of Samsung’s flagship phone will first go on sale in Germany on 29 May, shortly followed by a number of other countries.

An unidentified Samsung official cited as supplying the information also revealed that the Samsung factory’s production line in Korea was working to develop 5 million Galaxy SIII units per month in order to meet the international demand.

It remains to be seen if the Galaxy device will be as successful as its predecessor, the Galaxy SII, which resulted in 20 million shipments in just 10 months. At the moment, its 9 million pre-order figure, places it almost half way.

While Samsung declined to comment, last month, the company did say that the new Galaxy SIII would “substantially contribute” to its second-quarter earnings.

Among its many features, the new smartphone offers a 4.8-inch PenTile Super AMOLED display at 720p resolution, 8-megapixel primary and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras,   Bluetooth 4.0 support, GPS with GLONASS reception and a quad-core Exynos CPU.

Samsung beat Apple as the world’s biggest smartphone maker in the first quarter of 2012, with the help of its line-up of Galaxy named devices running on Google’s free Android software.

Source: The Next Web

Since mobile phones were developed, beginning with the mobile phone of 1983, there have been vast changes. Mobile phone manufacturers must keep up with each other to stay competitive in order to stay at the top of their game, and this means constant improvements, new additions and features that make each phone stand out from the others. Because this is the way the world in general works, there have been some pretty amazing moments in mobile phone history that have brought us some of the best designs and features available. Listed below are some of these historic events that made us love mobile phones even more than when they were first invented.

#1 The iPhone

When the iPhone was announced, it was a major news event in the world of mobile phones. This device made such a shift in paradigm that users speculated about Apple being the dominator in the mobile market for good. So far, Apple does just that. Although there were plenty of Android devices that could be viewed as competition to the Apple Droids, this new device is what put the iPhone ahead of the game. With its open handset alliance, it really took off and continues to dominate the market.

(more…)

Today, Google introduced its new Knowledge Graph in an official blog post which it explains will “help you discover new information quickly and easily”.

Typically, when one enters a search term, the search will be conducted based on the keywords submitted which can come down to just a few words. However, most search terms are far more richer in meaning than just those keywords. When searching for the The Eiffel Tower, for example, you could mean one of the world’s most iconic monuments in Paris, the name of a restaurant, artwork or the replica that stands in Las Vegas.

Google’s new graph or intelligent model “understands these real world entities and their relationship to one another” and will now give you options to determine exactly what you mean. Now, when you begin a search, a window will appear alongside your results, asking you what you mean. The results will then be filtered for that specific entity.

(more…)