One of the biggest music festivals every year with great international and local lineups will not happen this year. The Coke Zero Fest is probably the most anticipated rock music event every year, but fans will have to anticipate extra longer this year.

Although there has not been an officially released statement by Coca-Cola South Africa, Dionne Domyan from Penny Stein Promotions confirmed that the Coca Zero Fest will not happen this year.

“The sad news is that there is no Coke Zero Fest this year as Coca-Cola are one of the major sponsors of the Fifa World Cup so all their energy (and resources) have been channeled to this event,” Domyan told Entertainment Africa.

“We are however hoping for an official statement from Coca-Cola in the next few days regarding this,” Domyan continued.

Facebook has been flooded by the news on various groups by fans expressing their disappointment, while some groups have already started suggesting what bands they want to see in the 2011 line up. The list include Paramore, Linkin Park and Red Hot Chili Peppers, right through to Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Slipknot.

Some good news though is that if you were looking forward to one hell of a rock show you can always go rock away at Ramfest IV. Ramfest will be taking place February 26 – 27 at Worcester and for the first time in Gauteng on the 6th of March.

Some of the local bands you will be able to see at Ramfest include Fokofpolisiekar, The Narrow, The Dirty Skirts, Jack Parow, Die Heuwles Fantasties and Taxi Violence just to name a few. This years international act is Pendulum from Australia & UK

I have been putting blogging off for a couple of days due to my latest private project taking all my time. A while ago I read a message by Rafiq owner of Web AddiCT(s); where he asked if anybody was willing to write a Twitter notifications to SMS app.

After some investigation I found 2 current services of which one was closed down and the other one really expensive, almost R1 per sms. This lead me to investigating all the viable methods to send out sms messages from South Africa and having played with the twitter api before stared coding on some basic functionality.

I introduce to you TweSMS, TweSMS will allow you to receive SMS messages for different twitter notifications. Currently TweSMS only supports sending SMS messages for Twitter Direct Messages but will soon have functionality to be able to receive replies and even friend updates via SMS.

I am really proud of this project and would like to thank Web Addict(s); for the inspiration and support with this project aswell as Clickatell. I see big things in the pipeline for TweSMS and we are already testing away on the system.

For more info on TweSMS read the Web Addict(s); post, follow @twesms on twitter or visit www.twesms.com

For long it has been speculated as to when Facebook would get something like Twitters Retweet functionality, and the day has finally arrived. Facebook rolled out its via feature last night that lets you repost another user’s shared content.

It appears the the feature is live to everybody, you can try it out by going to a friends posted item and clicking the share link. Once you posted it, the content will appear your news feed with your a via link pointing to your friends profile.

The feature is currently only available for sharing links, you can’t share statuses at the moment.

We’ll just have to see if this takes off and is as popular as Twitter’s retweet functionality. You can follow me on Twitter here.

A few days ago I showed you how to take screenshots with your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch, doing it on Android is a bit more difficult if you do not have a rooted phone. Here is how to take screenshots with your non rooted Android phone.

1. Start by downloading the Windows USB drivers for your Android phone.

2. On your Android phone go to Settings

3. Select Applications -> Development and check the enable USB Debugging field

4. Now you need to download the Android SDK. Select the Windows version and save the file.

5. Once the download is completed unzip the file to your C:\ drive or somewhere else you would like.

6. After the unzip you will need to download the Java Developers Kit (JDK). Only download the Java SE Development Kit (JDK).

7. Run the JDK installation clicking next all the way through.

8. Now its time to plug in your Android phone via the USB cable.

9. Locate the folder where you unzipped the Android SDK, open the Tools folder and double click ddms.bat

10. A splash screen should pop up for first time users, just click proceed.

11. You should now have the Dalvik Debug Monitor open, select your phone, there should only be 1 listed.

12. After selecting your Android phone go to the device menu at the top and select Screen Capture, or alternatively press Cntr+S

13. The screen capture app should open up and allow you to take screenshots of whatever your Android phone is displaying on the screen.

As you can see it is a whole lot more hassle at first to get this up and running and the drawback is that you can only take screenshots of your Android phone when it is plugged in via USB.

Good news for Android users with rooted phones is that there is several apps available on the Android Market that will enable you to take screenshots without all the hassle as above.

PS. If you don’t own a Android phone, Rafiq over at WebAddict(s) is giving one away.

For long DSTV has been the only Pay TV operator in South Africa and been milking their customers for every cent they have, but this is about to change very soon with the launch of On Digital Media (ODM).

On Digital Media has revealed in an exclusive interview with Fin24 their details about the service they plan to launch in May 2010. ODM’s Pay TV channels bouquets pricing will range from R99 to R249 per month.

The content ODM will be providing will range from local to international with the likes of Fox Entertainment and MGM.

Bad news for the rugby and cricket lovers is that they will have to stick with DSTV for now as ODM will not provide rugby, cricket or PSL football at launch, but would gain rights to niche sporting content such as martial arts. Good news is that ODM would also pursue rights for other sports as the contracts with Multichoice expire and become available.

CEO of ODM Vino Govender, also revealed the following:

• ODM will provide Fox Entertainment, MGM and other international channels for the first time in SA.
• Packages will begin at R99 for a basic package with 30 channels and range up to R249 for a premium package with a full range of channels grouped by genre.
• ODM is in discussions with Multichoice to explore the possibility of acquiring content from DStv.
• Customers will be able to use existing DStv satellite dishes with the ODM service, but the dish will have to be repositioned.
• ODM recommends a 75cm dish and the ODM service has been designed to be more stable in bad weather than DStv.
• ODM’s satellite footprint runs from northern Nigeria to Cape Town.
• ODM decoders are being provided by UEC, a division of the Altech Group.
• ODM plans to launch a PVR decoder within 12 months from launch.
• The electronic programme guide (EPG) for ODM has been designed by the NDS Group, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and is more sophisticated than what is used by Multichoice, according to Govender.

For more in depth details visit Fin24

The Parrot AR.Drone is a helicopter that connects to your iPhone via WiFi and enables you to control the helicopter via the iPhone display. The iPhone display is your controller.

It has built-in cameras and ultrasound sensors that lets you take full control of the helicopter. I doubt that the iPhone will be the only device capable of controlling the helicopter in the future as it only uses WiFi, I think we will see an Android App for this soon, and even a PC App.

We all know the well know SpeedTest.Net website where you can check the performance of your connection, the site allows users to log on and test their connections upload / download speeds and latency. The only drawback was that you had to log into the SpeedTest.Net website to be able to use the service.

Good news for Android users is that there is now a Android App available in the Android Market. Simply search for speedtest on the Android Market and install the SpeedTest.Net App. Fire it up and test your 3G or HSDPA connection speeds. You can also use it over your wifi connection.

It saves all your connection results on the phone for future reference with icons showing if it was conducted over WiFi or GSM network. See screenshot below.

I installed the app and fired it up conducting tests on my HTC Hero over WiFi and GSM on MTN.

Head on over to the Android Market and install the SpeedTest.Net App and post your results here. I got 2Mbps download and 556Kbps upload with 150ms pings on MTN network to a server to Cape Town. Whats your results?

PS: There is also a iPhone App available.

So you just got one hell of a high score on Paper Toss and need to prove it next time when you are with the boys.

Good news is you can take a screenshot of anything that you iPhone or iPod Touch is showing by simply holding the menu button and pushing the power button on top. The screen will flash and your screenshot will be stored with your other pictures.

Android users stay tuned as I will be showing you how to take screenshots tomorrow.

Is Tiger Woods hiding out in South Africa? It was reported earlier this week in Die Burger that sources close to Tiger Woods said that he left the media glare in America and headed off to a friends estate in Africa.

What better place to kick it back away from the paparazzi than at a wine estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa considering that golfer friends Ernie Else and Johann Rupert both have wine estates in the region. To further reinforce the rumors that Tiger Woods was spotted in Stellenbosch, South Africa is student and part time waitron Dinkle Verwey.

“I am sure it could have been Tiger Woods sitting in the corner the other day eating a muffin and drinking rooibos tea,” Dinkle said. “He had a cap on his head and was wearing a T-shirt that read ’14 Down, More to Go’, but at first I did not think it could be him. But when he looked up at me to ask for the bill, there was something about him. At first I thought he was just a normal Cape Coloured as his lips were big. But then I saw his eyes, which were a bit skew. I Googled when I got home, and yes, I am sure it was him. He paid cash, so I did not get chance to see his credit card.”

Expect to see papz cruising the winelands town in search for Tiger Woods.

Vacation time is over and now its time to get back to business. Some of you may recall that just before the Holidays I was lucky enough to get a HTC Hero powered by the great new mobile OS from Google, Google Android.

I have been using the Hero now over the holidays and has gotten quite familiar with the OS and I’m loving it to bits. The HTC Hero is not the only phone currently available in South Africa running the Google Android OS, there is also the HTC Magic, HTC Tattoo and HTC Dream.

There is also the OpenMoko any geeks dream when it comes to phones. Why you ask? Well just because its open source and you can basically run anything on it the cpu and memory is capable of. The OpenMoko works well with Google Android and now you can win one.

Rafiq from WebAddict(s) is now running a competition where you can walk away with a OpenMoko phone capable of running Google Android. All you have to do to win this Google Android phone is to follow the steps on WebAddict(s).