According to MyBroadband, Stellenbosch is planning to provide free Wi-Fi Internet access for everyone in the town, a service that will be offered free of charge without any need for registration.

Stellenbosch mayor Conrad Sidego has said that they are planning to make Stellenbosch a Wi-Fi town, an initiative by Stellenbosch, MXit and the University of Stellenbosch. While large downloads will be prohibited all other services like web surfing, messaging and VoIP services will be fully supported.

The trial network will go live on Friday 24th February according to Stellenbosch councillor and head of the municipality’s finance portfolio, Pieter Venter. This trial Wi-Fi network will cover the town centre, and will run for two to three weeks before extending the network to the greater Stellenbosch area. The next phase involves rolling out the network to all populated areas within the Stellenbosch municipality including Franschhoek and Pniel.

While the rollout period of just six months may be considered especially fast, Venter explained that the core Wi-Fi network is already in place and currently used to connect the municipal offices and carry municipal calls therefore cutting costs and limiting their reliance on Telkom. All that needs to be done at this point is to put repeaters on lamp poles and on suitable high sites closer to residents to “fill in” the network and boost coverage.

Venter explained that Stellenbosch has been wanting to provide a free Wi-Fi network for its residents for a few years now but Internet access costs (hence national and international bandwidth) was a problem. MXit stepped in to solve this problem by making their unused capacity available.

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Research In Motion announced that the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 will be released for download today. BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 delivers an enhanced tablet experience and allows you to use the BlackBerry PlayBook in new ways throughout the day – at work and at play. But is it too little, too late?

“Building on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s proven web browsing, multimedia and multitasking strengths, the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 introduces a range of new communications and productivity enhancements as well as expanded app and content support,” said David J. Smith, SVP Mobile Computing, Research In Motion.

New BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 features include:

• Finally, Integrated email client with a powerful unified inbox: With BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 you have the option to use a  unified inbox that consolidates all messages in one place, including messages from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as personal and work email accounts.
• Social Integration with Calendar and Contacts apps:  The built-in calendar harnesses information from social networks and makes it available where and when users need it.  Contact cards are also dynamically populated with updated information from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to create a consolidated view of contacts.
• Updated BlackBerry Bridge app: BlackBerry Bridge is the Playbook app that provides a Bluetooth connection between your BlackBerry PlayBook and core apps on your BlackBerry smartphone (including BBM, Email, Contacts, Calendar and Browser) in order to let you view the content on the larger tablet display. With BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, it’s easier and quicker than ever to take documents, web pages, emails and photos that appear on your BlackBerry smartphone and display them on your BlackBerry PlayBook for an optimized viewing and editing experience. The updated BlackBerry Bridge app also provides a new remote control feature that allows a BlackBerry smartphone to be used as a wireless keyboard and mouse for a BlackBerry PlayBook.
• Improved mobile productivity: Updated document editing functions, the new Print To Go app, and increased control and manageability of corporate data with BlackBerry Balance  allow you to get more out of your BlackBerry PlayBook every day. Plus, an updated virtual keyboard with auto correction and predictive next word completion learns how you type to enable faster, more accurate typing.
• New apps and content: Thousands of new apps are being added to BlackBerry App World today (including a range of Android apps that will run on the BlackBerry PlayBook). Enhanced web browsing capabilities are also available with BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0.

In conjunction with the release of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, RIM is making available an initial release of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion that will include support for managing BlackBerry PlayBook tablets and BlackBerry smartphones in an enterprise. The full release of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion (with mobile device management capabilities for iOS and Android devices) is planned for general availability in late March 2012.

It’s official. Pinterest has arrived! One may be forgiven for thinking that this is surely not breaking news considering the reports earlier this month on many tech sites that Pinterest had become the fastest standalone website ever to achieve 10 million unique visitors. That kind of news is however only read by geeks and the information shared with the long suffering species, ‘spouse of geek’. This week, Pinterest received a major boost in its endevour to dominate the worldwide time spent on social media, with a David Pogue review in the New York Times. World, meet Pinterest!

Pinterest is in essence a platform for the collating and sharing of pictures. Think of it like scrapbooking without the glue and scissors, Scrapbooking 2.0 perhaps, or iScrapbook. Your account is comprised of multiple ‘pinboards’, which you will ‘pin’ relevant images to e.g. If you come across an image online of a beautiful antique lamp, you may choose to pin it to your ‘future renovations’ pinboard or, a recipe for beef tagine could find its way onto your ‘adventurous recipes’ pinboard. The examples above were carefully chosen to provide the reader with an image of what Pinterest may currently look like. In fact, it may best be described as,

‘Pinterest… where hot fitness models frolic among exotic travel destinations and mouthwatering recipes’.

Representatives from Pinterest are welcome to contact me should they wish to utilize that slogan in future but the point is that Pinterest is presently very female orientated, with women making up more than 80% of it’s members. I am however not implying that, Pinterest does not cater to other interests. Statistics and unique visitor records aside, I cannot recall becoming this addicted to a website before. I find the  Humour and Geek pins immensely entertaining and this is where the social networking aspect of Pinterest comes in.

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IMB, which stands for Internet Mobile Banking is a Cape Town based startup that believes it is “more than just a bank” because it offers customers far more. IMB’s main focus is to make payments, particularly from mobile devices, easier for both consumers and merchants in a way that is beneficial to both.

The motivation behind IMB, which initially began by building a mobile wallet back in 2005, was to solve a number of problematic issues associated with online banking. These include expensive fees, lack of micro-billing, inability to use debit cards for online transactions and the search for more efficient ways to transact with money via more efficient software and API services. Another important factor was that many people, like mobile game developers were having to use services like premium rated SMS messages in order to get money from those without credit cards.

James Godwin, Chief Information Officer, who is passionate about what IMB is trying to achieve, says that “Visa, Mastercard and the banks control how people pay for things and we wanted to change that.” Godwin first entered into the mobile technology industry when he began running an internet service provider that he later sold. It was when he opened a developer business that he met IMB’s CEO, Tim Colman. At first, the two wanted to find a way for people to shop online with debit cards, but they met resistance from some SA banks and so headed in another direction allowing websites and brick and mortar businesses to receive payments via mobile phones that was cost effective, safe and efficient.

Another way of making mobile banking more cost effective and providing customers with alternative ways to receive notifications other than from an sms (which is expensive) is by introducing a social element that can further evolve into geo tagging to monitor your spending, sending a checkin to foursquare upon purchase or notifying a friend through Twitter. “There are a lot more options” says Godwin, “but we would like customer feedback to best evolve and direct our system to better enable the social space.”

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Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding  platform for creative projects, has raised over $1 million for one of its latest featured concepts, the Elevation Dock, surpassing its goal of $75, 000.

Designed by Casey Hopkins from Oregan, the Elevation Dock is the solution to the frustrations of undocking from lightweight docking stations currently available on the market. The Elevation Dock makes for easy undocking by simply pulling your phone up and works without a case. The ease of undocking is achieved by a special low-friction connection, the weight of its solid metal construction and tacky rubber feet.

The dock is made from solid aluminium and comes in a variety of surface finishes similar to those found on Apple’s unibody Macbook Pro’s and iMacs. The result is an accessory that is heavy, durable and attractive.  The Elevation Dock compliments the craftsmanship associated with Apple products far more than its current docking stations.

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To-do list apps are never that exciting – in fact, most of them simply rehash the same ideas. Different lists, and items you check off underneath each. But today a new app launched that has had a few user interface desginers very excited. You see, Clear does not follow any user interface guidelines which most good designers seem to agree with. Instead it uses an interface entirely devoid of buttons.

Users use a combination of pinches, drags and sweeps in order to create and complete tasks. In fact, the only familiar part of the interfaces is the occasional keyboard that pops up. Here is a basic guide to using the app:

- Pull down on a list to add an item

- Swipe an item right to complete it

- Swipe an item or list left to delete it

- Pinch apart two items to insert a new one between them

- Pinch vertically together to close the current list and show all the lists

Any items in your list can have a colour associated with it, but you simply hold them and drag them to the priority you want. You might want to check out this hands on demo of the app:

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OK – lets start off with a tip. If you are planning to buy an iPad, you might want to wait a few weeks.

According to AllThingsD, Apple is planning to announce the iPad 3 in the first week of March 2012. In the past this meant that the device will land in US stores about a week after that, and other territories about 2 months later. In 2011 South Africa didn’t have to wait too long to get the iPad 2, so hopefully it will be the same with the iPad 3. Apple does not typically deviate from their release cycle when it comes to iOS devices (except with the iPhone 4S), so this is one rumour that will probably turn out to be true.

So what will be new in the iPad 3? Is it worth waiting for? Seeing as the iPad 2 was not a massive update from the iPad 1 (slightly faster, thinner and cameras added, see our review here), the iPad 3 might be a bigger update than expected. Also, Apple does not seem to increase prices with new models, so it might be well worth your while. Here are some of the changes you can expect: (more…)

Apple’s stock price jumped up quite a bit in the last few days (up to $493), which now makes it worth $456 billion, which is worth more than the two other computer superpowers, Microsoft and Google, combined.

Google’s shareprice is currently trading at 189.9 billion, after it took a 9 percent knock on recent missed expectations for earnings and revenue. Microsoft’s Windows division took a 6 percent revenue drop to $4.7 billion, but the rest of the company did very well. This is also thanks to the Xbox division which has finally turned profitable for Microsoft.

Now Apple’s market cap has grown tremendously, part in thanks to the iPhone business, which is alone worth $222 billion. Think about that for a second – the iPhone business revenue is now worth more than Microsoft. And this from a product that did not exist 5 years ago. This makes this interview with Steve Ballmer even funnier – watch his reaction after he gets asked what he thinks of the iPhone:

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