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This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who noted that European women spent more time on social networks than men, sent more text messages and used more location-based services on phones.

Bell said that declining prices and new devices that helped women perform multiple roles - parent, worker, care-giver, social organiser, cleaner, cook and so on - was driving this trend.

Intel SA's head of marketing, Ntombezinhle Modiselle, said this was equally true of South African woman. "If the device is easy to use, women will be the first to try it out and recommend it to their friends, husbands, fathers and sons."

Modiselle pointed out that the trend toward digital confidence in SA was becoming more visible. "Of the 1.1 million South Africans registered on Twitter, just over 400,000 users are actively tweeting from the nation's large cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria."

According to Intel, "As people become increasingly digitally confident, we'll see a rise in creative activities such as people personalising software or even learning to unlock mobile phones".

The chip maker also highlighted two models for people's relationships with technology. The first was characterised by technology that was "needy", namely devices that needed people to provide permissions, passwords and so on. "It's okay if it's your phone, but not if it's your phone, plus your car, your e-reader, your laptop and so on," Intel said.

The other template, it continued, had been informed by over a hundred years of science fiction - intelligent machines taking over the world.

"But we're seeing a rebalancing of our relationship with technology and are moving to a third model. Computers are beginning to anticipate our requirements," Intel said highlighting Siri, the speech-recognition "personal assistant" built into the latest Apple iPhone as a case in point. "It's responsive and is starting to be predictive," the group said. "This trend was all about devices getting smarter, more self-confident and better able to look after us. With the continued advances in technology, devices are finally growing up. Soon we won't have to think about them quite so much because they'll be 'thinking' for themselves," Intel said.

Meanwhile, information technology research and advisory company, Gartner, also revealed its top predictions for IT organisations and users for 2012 and beyond. It said that by 2015, low-cost cloud services would cannibalise up to 15% of top outsourcing players' revenue.

The group also forecast that in 2013, the investment bubble would burst for consumer social networks, and for enterprise social software companies in 2014. "Vendors in the consumer social network space are competing with each other at a rate and pace that are unusually aggressive, even in the technology market. The net result is a large crop of vendors with overlapping features competing for a finite audience. In the enterprise market, many small independent social networking vendors are struggling to reach critical mass at a time when market consolidation is starting, and mega-vendors, such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google and VMware, have made substantial efforts to penetrate the enterprise social networking market.

"While substantial excitement will be raised by private firms going public, valuations of smaller independent vendors will diminish as recognition sets in that the opportunities for market differentiation and fast growth has eroded," Gartner said.

Looking further ahead, the research group said that by 2016, at least 50% of enterprise email users would rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client. The group described the anticipated pace of change over the next four years as "breath-taking".

In the same token, Gartner said that by 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets would outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of four to one.

At year-end 2016, Gartner predicted that more than 50% of global 1,000 companies would have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud, and by 2015, 35% of corporate IT expenditures for most organisations would be managed outside the IT department's budget.

It also warned that through 2016, the financial impact of cybercrime would grow 10% per year, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities.

Interestingly, according to Gartner by 2015, the prices for 80% of cloud services would include a global energy surcharge.

"While cloud operators can make strategic decisions about locations, tax subsidies are no long-term answer to managing costs, and investments in renewable-energy sources remain costly. Some cloud data centre operators already include an energy surcharge in their pricing package, and Gartner analysts believe this trend will rapidly escalate to include the majority of operators - driven by competitive pressures and a "me too" approach. Business and IT leaders and procurement specialists must expect to see energy costs isolated and included as a variable element in future cloud service contracts," Gartner said.