20fourLabs

Introducing… the News24 Blackberry application

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 [...]

Women in Leadership

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 [...]

Change

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 [...]

The Technology of Avatar

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 [...]

Letterdash Phase Two

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 [...]

It’s about time

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 [...]

Be smart! Ride hard! Livestrong!

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 [...]

Mobile World Congress 2010

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. The first day of MWC 2010 was quite something, it’s difficult to comprehend the size of [...]

20fourLabs Mobile App update

It’s time for another update on the mobile applications we’ve been working on at 20fourLabs over the last few months. News24 j2me application - now available The News24 j2me application is finally out of beta and now available for download. Users can read the latest news, sport, finance, motoring and entertainment stories on their java phones , access [...]

Why Google Buzz will work, sort of

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. Orkut, its social network, has largely failed to catch the [...]