Sun International has announced the proposed purchase of Powerbet Gaming, the operator of interactive betting site Voltbet.com for R30 million, demonstrating the exponential growth of the online sports betting industry around the world and in South Africa and its current and potential impact.

A  hotel and gaming group, with properties including Cape Town’s GrandWest Casino and the Monticello Grand Casino in Santiago, Chile, Sun International has extensive experience of the land-based gambling industry and it has now recognised the vast potential of online and mobile wagering.

In the six month results posted on 28 February 2013 by Powerbet, Voltbet.com’s Gross Gaming Revenues (GGR) were reported to have improved by 51% over the comparative review period, posting revenue of R2.4 million at a 60% improved operating margin of 6.39%.

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Emerging Stars, an online portal that offers a selection of business opportunities in emerging economies, has announced the launch of their extended online service designed to partner entrepreneurs, distributors and investors.

Founded as a television project to scout emerging countries for young, innovative entrepreneurs, Emerging Stars introduced the online portal as a natural extension of the brand.

Initially a free service utilised to generate and direct interest from its TV series, the directory became a trusted listing service for entrepreneurs, distributors and funders alike. While working on the series, the research team built a fast-growing network of entrepreneurs, investment agencies and business consultancies – along with a cache of already-vetted business opportunities.

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Disqus has reached a significant milestone having hit 1 billion monthly unique visitors.

Other data also reveals 7 billion pageviews, 100 million user profiles and 1 million WordPress plug-in downloads.

To celebrate Disqus has launched a new product called called AudienceSync that “enables users to port their profile information to their favorite sites’ registration systems” and is useful for publishers who want to access the largest audience of commenters online.

In addition, Disqus’s engineers dug a little deeper into its 1 million monthly visitors to get a better understanding of comments and the community dialogues they make up. They published this information on the Disqus blog to share some of the results:

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Last week, ahead of the 2013 Google I/O that kicks off today in San Francisco, a Google Maps redesign leaked online  - the first redesign in quite some time.

At the time it was unclear whether the redesign included new features or if it was simply getting a fresh look. With the approach of Google I/O it was expected that the rumours would be put to rest and that if the redesign was indeed confirmed, all the details would be revealed.

However, more about the redesign has emerged. Just yesterday, one day before Google’s annual event, a sign-up page for the new version of Google Maps for desktop appeared online briefly and was spotted by Droid Life. 

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UK based Adzuna has recently launched in South Africa as well as Australia, Brazil and Canada. Adzuna is a search engine that finds the right job locally for you, searching thousands of websites daily including Gumtree, Junk Mail, Biz Community and Career Junction.

Adzuna has expanded internationally with the aim of achieving the success it has had in the UK. Since launch, Adzuna has grown to 1.5 million monthly visits and also powers the Number 10 Downing Street Dashboard, used by the Prime Minister and senior officials to keep track of economic growth on a daily basis. Impressive.

Adzuna was founded in 2010 by Doug Monro and Andrew Hunter and conceived on the back of an envelope in a central London pub. Having worked at Gumtree both knew that classified search could be greatly improved with existing and emerging sites not pushing innovation on the product side enough. Their extensive experience and understanding of the industry enabled them to spot an opportunity to create a next-generation vertical search engine.

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Today Kaspersky Lab’s team of experts published a detailed research report that analyses a sustained cyber-espionage campaign conducted by the cybercriminal organisation known as “Winnti.”

According to Kaspersky Lab’s report, the Winnti group has been attacking companies in the online gaming industry since 2009 and is currently still active. The group’s objectives are stealing digital certificates signed by legitimate software vendors in addition to intellectual property theft, including the source code of online game projects.

The first incident that drew attention to the Winnti group’s malicious activities occurred in the autumn of 2011, when a malicious Trojan was detected on a large number of end-user computers across the globe. The clear link between all of the infected computers is that  they were used to play a popular online game. Shortly after the incident, details emerged that the malicious programme which had infected the users’ computers was part of a regular update from the gaming company’s official server. Infected users and members of the gaming community suspected the computer game publisher was installing the malware to spy on its customers. However, it later became clear that the malicious programme was installed on the players’ computers by accident, and that the cybercriminals were actually targeting the computer game company itself. (more…)

Right now the entire web is all abuzz about Bitcoin – a digital currency you can use to buy things online, or trade for other currencies like dollars. But Bitcoin is a lot more than that, and is actually a very well thought out system.

Bitcoin was initially designed as a digital currency (“BTC”) to move outside any central bank, and to avoid the current rules of transactions. Bitcoin is entirely decentralized, and is not controlled by any government or reserve bank. Using cryptography and digital signatures, Bitcoin is “mined” by Bitcoin mining machines – these machines need to solve complex mathematical problems, which generate a 64 digit code.

These mining machines are standard PCs but typically customized with very high end graphics processors, and whatever hardware might be needed to work out that difficult maths problem. With each block of Bitcoins that are generated, the maths problem might alter in difficulty. There are thousands of machines working on these problems at any time, and because of increasing difficulty, the market cannot be flooded by a sudden onset of Bitcoins coming into circulation.

Every 10 minutes a block of Bitcoins are issued to miners, provided their machines can solve the complex mathematical problem. 25 bitcoins are generated every ten minutes, but every now and then the rate of new Bitcoins generate halves. For example, it will decrease to 12.5 bitcoins by 2017 – and then halved every 4 years.

Compare this to traditional government issued money – typically a reserve bank can simply print money as needed by the economy.  (more…)

The folks at Google have drawn up this great infographic to show the journey that Gmail has taken until now. Hard to believe it is 9 years old already, and at its launch it was pretty much the norm for web based email accounts to have less than 10 MB of space. So when Gmail launched on April Fools Day in 2004, many people thought it was a joke that Google is launching a service with 1GB of storage for you to use.

The service quickly branched out into a full consumer focussed personal information manager, with tools like Calendar and Contacts launching soon after. These days Gmail is the standard in web based mail – but the biggest problem is that now you cannot get the email address you want anymore. These days you have to settle for yourname1964kitty@gmail.com… See the evolution of Gmail below: (more…)