New teaser video for BlackBerry 6

Research in Motion (RIM) has released another video for the upcoming BlackBerry 6 operating system. The video clearly displays a touch interface, something which we saw for the first time in April 2010 when the company showed initial glimpses of the new platform at its annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium conference in Florida. I spoke to the company’s CTO David Yach about the interface and he confirmed that touch was a big part of it, but wouldn’t be cornered on what was planned from a hardware perspective. Rumours abound of an announcement of a new device to supersede the Storm platform forthcoming from RIM in the next couple of months. BlackBerry 6 will also be compatible with most of the brand’s current models.

An interview with Mark Shuttleworth

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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS is a major release of the operating system Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical first released in 2004. In this interview with Simon Dingle Shuttleworth discusses the significance of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, competitor operating systems, the move to cloud services, open source advocacy and how it has changed in recent years, application distribution, social networking, smartphones and other topics.

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

Qualcomm unveils augmented reality platform

Qualcomm is throwing its hat into the augmented reality ring with a new SDK for the development of AR applications. The company issued the following press release today; Read more »

Game of the week: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Platform: Wii
Price: R450
Verdict: Next-level Mario.

One of the best days of my life, as a kid, was being 10 years old and using saved up pocket money to buy a Famicom (Japanese NES) 8-bit console. I had enough cash to get two games with it and chose Goonies and Super Mario Brothers. I had played Atari and other early consoles but the NES was a milestone and Super Mario set the stage for a new era in console gaming. Anyone old enough to remember MacGyver, The A Team and Airwolf will likely also have some nostalgia attached to Mario. But you don’t have to be a child of the eighties to appreciate Super Mario Galaxy 2 which once again raises the bar for platform games. Read more »