Talk of SOE shake-up welcomed
Minister in the presidency Collins Chabane is next week expected to announce the findings of the long-awaited presidential review of state-owned enterprises and speculation is mounting that communications minister Dina Pule will be the big loser in
Local-loop unbundling in limbo
Whatever happened to cracking open Telkom’s last mile of copper cables into homes and businesses to rival broadband operators? The industry regulator has gone silent on the issue, leaving industry players wondering whether local-loop unbundling has quietly been shelved
Nigeria to issue ID payment cards
Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) will issue 13m MasterCard-branded and payment-enabled national ID smart cards as part of a pilot programme. This programme is the largest ever roll-out of a formal electronic payment solution in Nigeria. In the first phase
Amatole, Icasa back in court soon
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) will face off with Amatole Telecommunication Services, the Eastern Cape company that trades as Easttel, on 29 May. This follows a raid by Icasa on the operator’s facilities on Wednesday that led to an interruption in voice and Internet services
Meet Juliana Rotich, Kenyan tech crusader
Juliana Rotich co-founded Ushahidi, a Kenyan-based nonprofit tech company, in 2008 with the aim of using technology to map reports of violence in the wake of Kenya’s closely contested December 2007 general election. Today, Ushahidi continues to create open-source software
Kenya’s BRCK: all the details
Kickstarter project BRCK, the brainchild of Kenyan nonprofit technology outfit Ushahidi, hopes to raise $125 000 to build a communications device that connects users to the Internet using any means possible, even when the power is out. And it’s well on its way to achieving its first objective. In little more
Adobe play may keep the pirates at bay
Adobe has announced that Creative Suite 6, the most recent collection of its various pieces of creative software that includes popular packages such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Premiere Pro, will be the last packaged products it releases. In their place is Creative Cloud, which uses the software-as-a-service
Kenya’s BRCK gets Kickstarter revved
A new Kickstarter project from a team of Kenyans wanting to build a piece of communications hardware called BRCK has attracted more than 160 backers in its first two days, with funders contributing more than US$22 000 towards a goal of $125 000. BRCK is the brainchild
Epson Moverio: the colander as helmet
Countless books and movies have imagined what immersive, wearable technology might one day look like. Thanks to Google’s Glass project and wearable entertainment systems like Epson’s new Moverio, the picture is slowly starting to come into focus. Let’s be clear upfront
Pule won’t apologise to newspaper
Communications minister Dina Pule “has no intention of apologising to the Sunday Times at this stage”, her spokesman, Siya Qoza, told TechCentral on Monday. In addition, she did not attempt to arrange a meeting with the paper or ask anyone to represent her at such a meeting