Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
Toby Shapshak

Creator

Toby Shapshak

Guest Author

David Beresford: The man who taught me the alchemy of words

Toby Shapshak celebrates the life of an international award-winning journalist and author who always had the patience to mentor the young and eager.

The outcome of the ANC’s long-awaited KwaZulu-Natal conference was a win for the Thuma Mina crowd. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)

Africa is where it’s at

It is already the most overused word since Web 2.0, so how can we take anything that involves "innovation" seriously anymore?

Chris Froome aims to sweep clean at Tour

The French race’s new wonder, Chris Froome begs comparison with Armstrong, but he rides to a different beat.

A new-look Office suite

If you’re looking for that feature in Microsoft Word or Excel and you can’t remember where you originally found it, you’re not alone. About 80% of feature requests from users…

Join the YouTube generation

It’s an old tune that has been playing in South Africa for years — unless we get viable and cheap broadband the country will be left behind. The digital divide may separate those…

Make your own podcast

Three times a week, Brian Ibbott sits in his converted basement in his Denver house and plays his favourite cover songs. He explains their origins, reveals little-known musical…

In search of a good tighthead

Jake White will tell you the best thing about the team he has picked for the first Test against Scotland this weekend is that they share 525 caps among them. Ad, while Os du…

Nothing super about SA rugby

It might be a surprise that Jean de Villiers will captain the Springboks in a non-Test match this weekend, but not that South African rugby is still trying to drag itself out of…

Pocket dialling Adam

When Jeff Bezos launched his e-commerce website, he chose the name Amazon because it would appear at the top of the predominantly alphabetically listed website indexes. That has…

Chinese IT giant goes global

Lenovo, the world’s third-largest and Asia”s largest computer-maker, signalled its intention recently to compete globally with top companies Dell and Hewlett-Packard, after…

Broadband bunfight hots up

In the week South African cyberspace was given an area code (O87), the country’s first report on wireless broadband offerings was released and the cheapest asymmetric digital…

Talk is cheap, unless you’re using Telkom

Although most industry players expected this week’s colloquium on telecommunications costs would be no more than a talk fest, some hard- hitting proposals were made by government…

The outlaws who sold Skype for $3,2bn

A few years ago, Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were persona non grata in the United States, scared to enter the country in case they were arrested for…

South Africa’s other space pioneer

Ask most South Africans who our most successful internet entrepreneur and space adventurer is and they’ll tell you it’s Mark Shuttleworth. But Elon Musk might just go down in…

Google starts talking

Google has thrown its considerable weight into the burgeoning market for internet telephony, or voice messaging as it is now being called. Google has announced its own voice…

Telkom and Icasa lock horns over ADSL

The most high profile legal battle in three years is likely between Telkom and the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) over the cost of high-speed…

.mobi domain launched

Cellphones moved a step closer to being fully-fledged Internet terminals when the .mobi domain was introduced this week. Until now, surfing the Web using a cellphone was…