Over the last few months we’ve seen a huge increase in Blackberry devices visiting the News24 mobile website – m.news24.com. In fact - four Blackberry devices currently head the list of our most active devices - with the Blackberry 8520 Curve leading the pack. The 8520 is a popular choice due to the affordable packages currently offered by Vodacom and MTN which includes unlimited web browsing and data usage in apps (Via BIS) for less than R200 per month.

The QWERTY keyboard and dedicated Twitter, Facebook and Mxit apps also makes the 8520 a hit with digital natives who live their hyper-connected lives through their mobiles. It’s no wonder Vodacom have sold over a million Blackberry devices  in South Africa!
… Continue Reading

Anyone who knows me will know that my usual company consists of male developers and my mostly male circle of friends, so when I was invited to a conference about Women in Leadership I admit that I was somewhat intimidated by the idea of spending a day in a room full of women.
The agenda was a simple one – As our gracious host Debby Edelstein emphasized,it was NOT about talking heads – It was about the value of collective wisdom, the responsibility of leadership and about how to listen better, by becoming more comfortable with silence and respecting the views of those around us.
With speakers who had impressive CV’s and a wide range of expertise we were given a holistic view of how different women cope with the challenges we face in positions of responsibility. … Continue Reading

I’ve always enjoyed change, they say two of life’s most stressful events are changing jobs and moving house- personally I’ve always enjoyed doing both.
We have been through some changes here at labs and I think the time has come for me to reflect on what I have personally learned from my time at 20fourlabs and 24.com in general
… Continue Reading

Now that the Oscar dust has settled, not the sparkly kind that you’d expect from a star studded event like this, but the gritty kind blown into the air by the Hurt Locker bomb, it’s a good time to take stock and look at the technical detail behind Avatar that led to the three, in my opinion well deserved, Academy Awards that Avatar received. Just in case you don’t recall they were for Cinematography, Production Design and Visual Effects. … Continue Reading

It’s been a long time coming but Letterdash Phase 2 has finally arrived!
I must start off by saying that Phase 2 was really the brainchild of the great Alistair Fairweather (whose shoes have proved REALLY big to fill) and Matthew. I just had the honour of putting the wheels in motion and getting what has turned out to be a huge and wonderful improvement to our blogs, launched. … Continue Reading

As a geek I quite welcome the idea of time travel. Some of my favorite sci-fi movies involve, in part, the idea of stepping into a rectangular box where time and relative dimensions in space make little to no sense at all and the overly-calculating hero battles household appliances and gets to be called a Doctor without the necessary qualifications. The concept of a time machine has had me fascinated since I first happened across HG Wells in those early infant years. I remember watching Back to the Future repeatedly so much so that my Dad would jokingly mention that he had returned from the future only to find me watching Back to the Future there as well. I remember developing entire science debates in high school around movies such as Twelve Monkeys, Planet of the Apes and The Terminator. My fascination with time travel became my crazy obsession and I would always wear two watches, set exactly two days apart but never really showing the actual time.
… Continue Reading

With the Argus Cycle Tour around the corner and every avid cyclist frantically increasing their cadence to reach a fitness level that would possibly give them a chance of catching up to and getting a glimpse of the 7 time Tour De France winner, Lance Armstrong, it’s no surprise that SA roads will be dominated by cyclist during February and early March.

… Continue Reading

I was fortunate enough to be burdened with the task of heading to Barcelona for the MWC2010 event that takes place here annually. Although a beautiful city with loads of culture, the freezing temperatures are something to get used to.
… Continue Reading

It’s time for another update on the mobile applications we’ve been working on at 20fourLabs over the last few months.
… Continue Reading

So we have another social/microblogging/lifestreaming service, called Google Buzz. It is, without doubt, Google’s boldest social play yet. Despite dominating pretty much all the key areas of the internet, it’s no secret that social is one area that has eluded the search giant so far. … Continue Reading