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

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

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

So, as you know, we are in the process of rebranding and personalising our mobile site (m.24.com), and I’ve been doing some research on what handsets are being used on our site.

Who would have thought that Blackberry would be the most used handset? … Continue Reading

I recently had the displeasure of having my iPhone stolen out of my hand and out my car window which happened to be less than half-way open while sitting bumper-to-bumper in traffic in Koeberg Road. Yes, you read all of that correctly.  My phone was snatched from my hand through my partially opened window from my semi-stationary vehicle. … Continue Reading

Dear Santa

Admittedly I have been a little naughty this year. For one, I didn’t always comb my hair or wear matching socks to work and my punctuality has been somewhat of late (excuse the pun). Also, I avoided pesky relatives where I could and threw moldy cheese at my ex-neighbor. And it’s not really my fault that I had to lie about that website which popped up just as the missus was walking in. … Continue Reading

It’s a funny thing about celebrities. Upon inspection their composition appears as a hybrid mix of paranormal hype, unnatural alien-like beauty and enormous amounts of purple ego goop. Furthermore, they all seem saturated in an over-abundance of wealth and fame, both of which appear to legally allow for a constant state of inebriation or raucous moments of paparazzi eye-candy. Celebs live off media coverage often exploiting their positions in society and as recent scandals have shown, I really don’t need to joostify my argument
… Continue Reading

Time and attention are both scarce commodities in this day and age, add to that the surplus of information both valuable and useless being flung at us from all directions and one may feel inclined to hide under the sheets in the morning and peep nervously at the flood of data lapping at your door … Continue Reading

So! Flirtaroo has been live for 3 months and it’s been doing super swell! Definitely a good uptake, for a dating site at least. As most of you know, Flirtaroo was supposed to be a mobile site only at first, we then decided to add a web component which would allow users to simply update their profiles, but not interact with other users. This idea lasted for all of a week (I stand under correction Matt), at which point we decided to build a fully functional website that would give users the same experience as on the mobile site as well as additional features.
… Continue Reading