MarcForrest.com

Category: Tech News

  • It’s off to Tech4Africa I go….

    You may recall a while back I did a post asking for a couple of pennies to help me get to the amazing Tech4Africa conference being held in Jozi next week. Well the response to the post was incredible, and I got a whole stack of mails from people offering ways & means to get me there. I got sponsored R500 from 2 companies in Joburg, and also got a couple of PayPal donations.A big big thanks to EVERYONE who donated. It is much much appreciated.

    But, the post was picked up by the Tech4Africa conference organisers, and soon I was emailing Gareth Knight, the clever man behind the whole show. After a couple of emails back and forth, I offered to write a couple of blog posts on the Tech4Africa blog telling people what the conference was all about, while also assisting with general social media stuffs, and become a T4A “ambassador”. Needless to say, I was in :) In exchange, the guys would offer me a discounted ticket, and help make my Tech4Africa dream become a reality.

    So, I’m pleased to say, that it has all worked out just the way I wanted, and this time next week, I will be boarding my flight to Jozi. If you going to be at Tech4Africa, please come and say howzit. I know I can.not wait :)

  • Nominations open for SA Blog Awards


    nominate this blog    The SA Blog Awards have officially opened for nominations, and the call for blogs to be nominated in the various categories has opened.

    Over the last year, I have put a lot of time into MarcForrest.com. And the rewards have paid off. My traffic has increased tenfold, and my search rankings are higher. The idea behind my site is just an information site, that allows people who love tech as much as I do to congregate. I know I should put more effort into the site, and with a whole bunch of other projects that I have worked on like SAiPhoneApps & StreetviewSA, taking up a lot of my time, I have decided that I am going to start pouring a lot more time and focus into this blog.

    I don’t really dig asking for people to nominate me for awards, purely because I believe people should nominate sites they feel are the best. But, If you do feel that my site stands out a notch above some of the other blogs in SA, please feel free to click on the SA Blog Awards banner on the right of this post ->

    Feel free to nominate me in any of the categories, but I think the one I would love to feature in is the Tech Category.

    Good luck to everyone who is being nominated. Hopefully see you all at the finals ;)

  • Samsung Wave Launch Durban

    Last night I was invited to the launch of the new Samsung Wave Phone & Bada operating system in Durbs. The event was held in a huge blowup “tent arena” on the outer fields of the ABSA Stadium. It was a pretty swanky affair, with cocktails and sushi on the menu, as well as guys & girls walking around demo’ing the phone.

    The evening kicked off with a show by some really talented gymnasts, by doing a show that demonstrated some of the phones features. They then had a DJ playing some awesome tunes, and huge screens with the Samsung Wave plugged in playing the Asphalt car racing game that comes pre-installed on the phone.

    Samsung have a huge push to affordable smartphones and the Samsung Wave does impresses in a couple of departments. In fact, I may even go as far as to say, that from it is a close second to the iPhone. The hardware specs of the phone are pretty impressive, and the Super AMOLED touchscreen really looked awesome, although the iPhone 4 has a much higher resolution (640×960) compared to the 400×800 of the Wave. The Wave also offers full HSDPA with WiFi and also has a 5MP camera and video camera. The memory can be expanded to 32GB with a micro SD Card. This post on brighthub compares the iPhone 4 and Samsung Wave pretty well.

    The guys from Samsung also officially launched the Bada operating system in SA last night. The Bada OS, is an open source OS developed by Samsung, and offers developers a full SDK to develop apps, and allows them to submit apps to an app store, much like apple, which are then sold through the Samsung app store on the phone. The OS is still pretty new, but from what I could see it has a lot of potential. The SDK uses C++ as it’s development platform, and is only available for Windows at the moment.

    Usually before attending an event like this I go and research the phone and the specs etc, but last night I took a different approach and went in, without knowing a single thing about the phone. Everyone I spoke to at the event knew the phones capabilities, and it’s limitations.

    Overall, after playing around on the phone for about 5 minutes, I give the Wave a thumbs up :) At almost half the price of an iPhone, it will be the perfect entry level smartphone for people looking to enter the smartphone market, and with it’s own OS, and the potential it offers, I think I can see the phone becoming pretty popular amongst the younger market in SA.

  • Flipboard – WOW !!!

    I got asked the other day, why I haven’t blogged more about my iPad since I got it almost a month ago. Well, the dead honest truth, is that I haven’t been wowed by any apps. There have been a few ( a whole separate blog post) and  News24 & Mix Mobile apps, def did catch my eye, and every morning I read the news on the News24 app.

    Well, that was until this morning. Enter Flipboard (iTunes Link). A free app for your iPad from the iTunes app store. Flipboard will revolutionise the way we will use the iPad. It puts the news you WANT to read and is relevent to you, in an awesome looking magazine format.


    Here is a video on how the app works:

    You simply “swipe” through to the next page, pinch & zoom into an article, and read your news. But for me, the big seller in Flipboard is the fact that it integrates with your social networks. So, it links into Twitter & Facebook and shows you content that has been retweeted or shared by your friends. So for example if someone shares a link on Twitter from any website, it will present it on your Flipboard.

    Here is an example. Here is a page from my Flipboard which shows images & stories shared by friends on Facebook.

    You can also add specific catgories, like tech & photos etc, which will show you the best of the web. I also love the way page turns and the “animation” it uses.

    This is by far one of the best mobile or desktop applications I have used in a long long time. If you have an iPad I highly recommend you download Flipboard, and if you don’t have an iPad, I suggest you download the app, and go and buy one :)

  • CellC gets it all wrong with Photocode

    Earlier today CellC announced that they have launched a new “innovation” called Photocode.Chris from iMod has the whole schpiel about it on his site

    Photocode is a name they have used for what is essentially called BeeTaggCode. BeeTagg is a mobile application that you can download to your phone, which allows you to capture the popular 2D bar codes, including THEIR proprietary code, called BeeTaggCode.I have spoken about QR codes on my site a number of times, and while there are a number of formats you can use, QR code has by far been the most popular, around the world. The concept, has never taken off in South Africa, despite the guys from the Sunday Times trying to implement it a couple of years back.

    But there is a catch, you have to download BeeTagg to capture the Photocode code. And, to download BeeTagg, you need to send an SMS which costs R1, which they will then send you a link for a free piece of software. (Thanks to Gerhard, you can go straight to http://cellc.beetagg.com, and download it from there) There are a number of other 2D bar code readers that allow you to capture a variety of codes, but only BeeTagg can capture Photocode.Not only that but brands like Nokia are now including a QR reader in their software as a standard application

    Personally, I really don’t understand the CellC logic behind it, and as Rafiq commented on iMod, “This is like building another mobile IM platform that is network specific to ‘compete’ with the big hairy gorilla in the same space.” I have also, over the years, tested a number of mobile 2D bar code readers, and BeeTagg was by far the slowest of them all.

    It is going to be interesting to see how CellC take this one forward. I personally can’t see it taking off, but maybe, maybe, I will be wrong :)(Ps. Be sure to scan the 2 codes here ;))