For all the hours I spend online, I'm bound to come across the odd device that I think is truly brilliant and today I've come across one that struck me with a, "why didn't I think of that?" moment. BlueLounge's Kii is a truly incredible device, how often are you caught without a phone charger cable? Far too often! Well, the Kii is a small keychain that allows you to connect your mobile device to your computer to charge it. Damn useful device! I have a USB keychain that I use quite often and that's really useful, but this takes the cake. &...

I think it's quite clear that social networks are becoming incredibly busy places that require effort to cut through the noise and find useful information. It's for this reason that circles and lists were created, but Twitter wants to take this a step further by offering a mute feature. "Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and ret...

Our world is becoming smaller and smaller through the use of technology. Companies are being formed around the world by members who live across the world from each other. This is making the requirement for remote collaborative work more important and sought after than ever. There are plenty of collaborative tools on the Internet, but a new application called Sqwiggle adds a bit of a change to the mix. In a nutshell, Sqwiggle keeps you passively connected to your team by updating a still image of each team member several times a minute so you can see their face and know they're available. In other words, every 20 seconds or so, the software takes a photograph of you and publishes it to your team mates...

Browser extensions that assist with time and productivity are always at the top of my list. There are two new extensions that I've been using in conjunction with my social media efforts: Instagram for Chrome and Riffle. Instagram for Chrome If you've ever tried to manage more than one account on Instagram you'll know that it's a complete nightmare - signing in and out of accounts is a time waster, especially when you're operating off your mobile device. That being said, the web version of Instagram isn't all that great either. That's where the Instagram ...

Over the months I've come across some interesting applications, some of which I've reviewed: FireChat (I'm not sure this one is going to take off), Hemingway App (still very useful) and 8Tracks (I use this one daily). Today I'm talking about an application which isn't new but has recently been updated with some fantastic new features and it's an application I use on a daily basis: Droplr. Droplr defines itself as the easiest way to share files, but that's not really the way I see it. Dropbox for me is the ultimate fil...

I was updating my social network profiles the other afternoon using multiple screens to ensure that my profiles all look similar in terms of branding. Whilst doing this I noticed that Twitter and Facebook have started to look awfully similar. I was then very interested to see that a friend of mine, Ross, had also noticed this and shared a similar image to the one below. ...

I've emersed myself in technology for over 2 decades and have seen a lot of amazing things along the way. One thing that I've watched quite closely that has always astonished me is the funding of technology ventures that do not have direct revenue models. I'd like to think of myself as a fairly experienced business man and if there's one thing I've learnt, a primary function of a business is to make money. So when it comes to acquisitions and funding rounds that go into the millions of dollars in what I feel are low revenue generating vehicles I just can't understand. I receive the CrunchBase daily newsletter that lists companies that have received funding and it blows my mind away. Not only are a huge number of the companies merely replicas of other companies but most of them I just ca...

I hear a lot of people who have started using Twitter saying that they gave it a go but didn't find much purpose for it. The problem in my opinion is that people often don't know how to turn Twitter usage into value. When I started trading on the stock markets I was hungry for information and when you see how much information is available you literally manic, I know I did. There are 100,000 different books, there are websites such as Moneyweb and Fin24, and then there are millions of websites around the Internet. The problem is that it's really difficult to know what's what and who you can trust, especially when you can't engage with the authors, etc. So I decided to turn to Twitter, I'd create a list and I'd add a maximum of 20 accounts to this list so I could really get to know the pe...

Yesterday I was going on about the new JSE website and how they could have done something really innovative within the financial industry, fortunately tonight I can talk about something in the financial industry that is innovative. Introducing the Fear and Greed Index. When it comes to investing, if you've met a financial planner you'll have heard them talking about the different types of investors. Each financial advisor has different terminology, but at the end of the day it boils down to emotions around fear and greed. The StockShop.co.za describes it well: CNNMoney have come up with their own index ranging from 0-100 that t...

In about 1995 I came across mIRC and this for me changed how I interacted online, more so than I thought would ever be possible. Over the decades I've changed communications platforms a number of times, from mIRC to MSN to GTalk to Skype to Whatsapp (I'm old, MXit never took for me). It has been incredible watching the changes, especially when I was working for a mobile voice over IP company. But, we haven't had anything new for a while now, or have we? Let me tell you about FireChat, this is quite an exciting one. FireChat has been described as a hyperlocal chat network for iOS that makes use of the Multipeer Conne...