Apple Analyst Gene Munster recently commented at the Ignition: Future Of Media conference that he believes that Apple will be launching its very own television in time for the 2012 holiday season. Munster was so confident about the project that he told the audience to wait for Apple, if they are planning to buy a new television in the near future.

ExoPC has developed what could be the desk of the future  - a new 40-inch HD multi-touch desk on which the user’s monitor, keyboard and mouse can be placed, called the EXOdesk.

ExoPC who will officially be announcing the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2012, has uploaded a teaser video onto YouTube to showcase just a few of its features. The video shows a widget hub in the corner of the desk that can launch applications on the screen and the ability to pull down a timeline populated with news information, RSS feeds, tweets and other alerts from the top corner of the table. All applications can be easily swiped away out of sight and widgets and screen settings are all customisable.

While the EXOdesk isn’t the first in multi-touch desk technology with Samsung  having recently announced its Samsung SUR40, a 40-inch, 1080p multitouch table running Microsoft’s Surface software, the EXOdesk differentiates itself with its affordable price tag. The SUR40, designed primarily for business use and as a computer replacement, can be purchased for a staggering $8,400 (about R71, 990) while the EXOdesk, more of a computer supplement and desk replacement is offered at just $1,299 (about R11, 130), a bargain in comparison.

Watch the EXOdesk teaser video below:

source: Gizmag

Local entrepreneur, Joe Botha’s TrustFabric has received an investment from World of Avatar. WOA recently made headlines with their acquisition of MXit, and this seems to be one of their last investments for a while.

TrustFabric, which was founded in 2010, will integrate closely with WOA companies, including MXit to provide anti spam measures and child protection services. The child protection service, which is a new addition to TrustFabric, lets parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number and email address of their child. This helps protect children from inappropriate content such as adult SMS services, alcohol marketing, tobacco, gambling etc. brands and with MXit in mind, it can prevent adults interacting with minors for the wrong reasons.

MXit’s active South African user base enables TrustFarbic to profile a big portion of internet users in South Africa and then eventually provide that data to third parties via an API. These third parties can then check if they are allowed to send marketing content to specific numbers.

We reached out to Joe Botha for comment and he had the following to say:

TrustFabric is based in Stellenbosch from today. We’re happy to be a part of
the World of Avatar group and it made sense to be close to all the
action in the next few months.

We’re going to be integrating our TrustFabric Connect service and Child
Protect service with MXit, and we have a nice roadmap of related services.

The deal made a lot of sense for us: big user numbers in MXit, solid people
to work with and for me personally – an opportunity to move back to
Stellenbosch and get on a mountain bike more often.

TrustFabric is Joe’s 8th startup. He’s been a co-founder of Frogfoot Networks, Amobia Communications and South Africa’s first vendor neutral data centre provider: Teraco Data Environments.

With MXit’s past with inapproriate content being sent to underage individuals, TrustFabric is a great idea to prevent this in future. Another smart move by World of Avatar and Alan Knott Craig – look out for our video interview with Alan later in the week.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Steve Jobs’s career was the creation of NeXT Inc. and the sequential pivoting of the company from hardware to software to acquisition. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the least documented. Many people may have hoped that his biography by Walter Isaacson entitled ”Steve Jobs” would have illuminated this period that defined a lot of the skills and practices that made Apple a success. However, it didn’t adequately deliver in that department.

This video is from a series called Entrepreneurs, that documents the creation of NeXT and may provide more information about this period in his life. The footage provides insight into the way in which Jobs interacts with staff, conducts a brainstorming session with specific goals and seeks out solutions and, of course his genuine passion and enthusiasm for his projects.

The opening line of the video says it all: “Steven Jobs figures heroically in the history of American entrepreneurship.”

View the video from Entrepreneurs below:

source: thenextweb

Since its launch in 2007, pMailer, a general email marketing delivery platform, has undergone continuous improvements and enhancements due to the the high growth and changing email technologies landscape. pMailer, the latest v5 version of which was launched in 2011, continues to evolve with recent improvements to some of its features. In 2010 SMS was added to pMailer making it the only true integrated email and mobile communication tool in South Africa.

The new features of pMailer include:

• Improved Geo-location reporting layout: pMailer now has enhanced geo-location reporting. Users will now be able to view this report via an improved map layout to determine where their contacts are located nationally and internationally. This type of information provides insight into where companies should allocate resources and sales efforts, shows the areas where production is high and can be utilised as an effective sales tool.

• A slicker and cleaner user interface: The menu navigation has been simplified, making it easier for users to find what they need with a lot of effort having gone into usability design, making the “Getting Started” process simple. Message composition has been streamlined to simplify the message composition process and includes improved template selection with colour customization. A message template can also be created by uploading a ZIP file of the design. Users will now be able to manage lists and list group simultaneously.

In order to enhance the MXit user experience in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, the largest mobile social platform in Africa has made the move of teaming up with Opera Software in a partnership agreement last week Tuesday. The aim of the deal is to offer Opera users in African countries one-click access to MXit services with MXit users being introduced to the Opera Mini browser through the popular chat client.

Christen Krogh, Chief development officer at Opera explains that the Opera Mini will appear under the MXit applications menu and MXit will appear on the Opera Mini browser’s start page. Both will be accessible via almost any data-capable handset.

The Opera Mini browser offers compression technology which allows for a fast Web experience at a lower price by compressing the size of pages before they are sent out to the consumer while still retaining functionality.

MXit’s CEO Alan Knott Craig says that “MXit empowers African people by helping them build community and make money via their mobile phones. We believe the alliance with Opera will bring us a step closer to fulfilling that vision.”

MXit, bought by World of Avatar back in September, has a global registered user base of 44 million, with the majority of these users residing in Africa.

source: moneyweb

One of the most often criticized ‘flaws’ of the iPad or iPhone for that matter is it’s inability to play flash. How can something described by the Apple marketing gurus as the best way to experience the Internet not allow the user to experience all the joy that comes from watching a kitten dance on youtube or the trailer for an upcoming movie? Friends deciding on which tablet to purchase, would often play around with my iPad but then inevitably ask one of two questions. “But why can’t it play Flash videos?” or ” Where is the USB connection port?”.

To answer the latter simply, there is no USB port on the iPad yet there were adaptors for the iPad 1 that allowed an external camera to be connected to it but those adaptors arguably became obsolete with the inclusion of onboard cameras on the iPad 2. Unless you need to store images from your actual digital camera. The transfer of media and files to the iPad can also be accomplished via iTunes, the cloud or some apps that allow wireless transfer via FTP.

The former question is one I myself thought about quite a lot before buying my iPad. At the time it seemed to dominate the discussion with most reviews of the iPad focusing on this ‘shortcoming’ and some Apple fans even starting Facebook fan pages trying to show the stubborn Apple execs that there is a strong market for Adobe flash support on the iPad. The android fanboys were also quick to criticize Apple for it’s non adoption of an open market philosophy. One would have been forgiven, amongst all this hype, for thinking that Apple could not incorporate Flash into it’s device. I decided that I hardly watch videos on the web so the lack of flash support on the iPad was not a deal breaker for me.

I raise the issue, rather belatedly , because I had always answered this inevitable criticism about the lack of support for flash with some muttering about how it ensures a better battery life. Talking about things like support for HTML5 to non-tech people is like explaining to a ‘Trekkie’ (Star Trek fan) why the Star Wars prequels were a waste of celluloid i.e Pointless. Recently however, I realised that although I am not one to watch random videos on youtube, there are often links to videos on Facebook or Twitter and I have been happily watching by merely pressing the Play button at the centre of the clip. How was this possible? (more…)

Smartphones are no longer only used by suit-clad business people. With the tremendous growth of smartphones it is only a matter of time of time before everyone owns them – in fact almost half of all UK teenagers now own a smartphone. And with all the upcoming low cost Android handsets coming, it is pretty obvious that SA should follow soon enough. Problem is – these smartphones are now more connected than ever, so parents will need a way to keep an eye on their children’s phone usage.

Mobiflock today announced the launch of its parental control service for Android phones (which was already available for Symbian). This means the child safety service is now available for almost 60%* of the global smartphone market. Mobiflock helps to make smartphones safer for children by giving
parents visibility of how their children are using their phones, as well as providing blocking and alerting capabilities to protect their children from harm. Although child safety and parental control services are established good practice in the computer world, they are only now also becoming available for the mobile device.

A Carphone Warehouse and YouGov study in the UK showed that 85% of parents don’t use parental control services on their children’s phones. In addition, nearly half of all parents were unaware that adult content can be accessed by mobile phone. Mobiflock has been specifically designed for the mobile environment and its particular challenges. Some of the existing dangers children might encounter, including bullying, accessing inappropriate content and sexual grooming, have spread to the online mobile environment. In addition, newer risks to children are emerging thanks to the popularity of the mobile phone, such as sexting, mobile chat or being online late into the night. What’s more, a mobile phone is a very personal device and is often carried by the child 24/7 – further exacerbating the impact and potential of these threats.

“The digital generation gap that exists between children and parents today is unprecedented. This is impacting moms’ and dads’ ability to be effective, proactive parents,” said Patrick Lawson, Mobiflock’s founder. “As a first step, parents need to learn about how their children use their smartphones so that they don’t over-, or under-, react if the child does encounter a dangerous situation. This way parents can educate their children about how to cope with online threats.”

Mobiflock is currently available as a free beta service. Parents can go and find Mobiflock in the Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mobiflock.android . Bandwidth Blog also previously mentioned the Symbian version of Mobiflock.