South Africa’s cellular operators have been trying for years to crack the mobile commerce code, but haven’t been able to repeat the successes they’ve had in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. MTN, working with Pick n Pay, may just have found the key to success at
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Global mobile data traffic grew by 81% in 2013, according to a recent report by Cisco (the Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update). Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Smartphones and tablets are driving this traffic explosion. A typical
On Friday, Nest Labs – which was acquired by Google in January for US$3,2bn – said it was buying Dropcam, a San Francisco-based company specialising in home-monitoring cameras for US$555m. Things are hotting up in the smart home market and consumers may soon be exposed to hundreds of new hardware devices and
Amazon is not a consumer electronics company. Yes, the e-commerce giant has sold tens of millions of its own devices to customers. And yes, it has just launched a smart phone, but measuring Amazon by Samsung’s or Apple’s standards overlooks the most important thing about its business. When Amazon
It’s been more than six weeks since the election and nearly a month since President Jacob Zuma stunned the information and communications technology industry by dumping his hardworking communications minister, Yunus Carrim, and splitting the communications portfolio in two. Since then, there has been
Regard-van-der-Berg-180Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up everywhere, and access is no longer uncommon in public spaces. Even minibus taxis will soon become Wi-Fi hotspots, with nearly 90% of taxi body Santaco’s fleet earmarked for Wi-Fi deployment over the next three years
Telkom’s share price has risen sharply in the past year on optimism that the new leadership team under CEO Sipho Maseko has what it takes to turn the lumbering telecommunications giant around. Since last June, the share price has gained more than 150%. And since its low point in May last year, it has
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated how fines that are set too low create the wrong behaviour. Only if they are set right does the required modification occur. I suspect we have a case of this here in South Africa, with the recent universal service obligations imposed on our leading national telecommunications
Someone may be reading all your e-mail. At both security agencies and cybercrime enterprises, thousands of geeks are busily sifting through e-mails that they have intercepted. This is happening every second of every day, around the world. Of course it’s highly unlikely that anyone at America’s National
In the mid-1990s, there were fewer telephone connections in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa than there were in Manhattan. What a difference two decades has made: by the end of this year, there will be more than 635m active telephone subscriptions on the sub-continent. That number is twice the population of