Spare a thought for Shameel Joosub and Zunaid Bulbulia. The Vodacom and MTN chief executives must feel like they’re being unfairly picked on for running successful, profitable businesses. This week, telecommunications industry regulator Icasa published final regulations that will
Browsing: Opinion
A decade ago, fierce battles were fought to get a number of Africa’s state-owned telecommunications operators into private hands and to strip them of their monopoly privileges. This happened in all but two of what are now sub-Saharan Africa’s most successful economies. The real laggards are
Self-tracking, body hacking, life-logging, wearables, the quantified self — you may have heard these terms being thrown around a lot in the past year thanks to companies such as Fitbit, Nike+ and Jawbone. It was these three companies that were largely
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the phrase that’s launched a thousand editorials, most of them decrying the manifest evils of the insatiable 1%. But a large part of this increased inequality is driven not by greed or manipulation, but by technology
There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
Cameroon’s government is hanging on to its monopoly state telecommunications provider, Camtel, and the result is that the country now has some of the highest international and national wholesale fibre rates on the continent. The country refused World Bank funding because it
The year has not started well for advocates of net neutrality, the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, without discrimination. A US federal court struck down a key part of the Open Internet Order, a set of Federal Communications Commission regulations
We are living through a privacy tipping point. Technology is changing dramatically what is possible in terms of surveillance, monitoring, persistence, analysis. We are cracking open the lid of Pandora’s Box. We still don’t really know what’s in the box. Maybe the benefits of the
Biological viruses are among the most rapidly evolving organisms on our planet. The same is true of computer viruses, except that malevolent human organisations are driving this evolution, not natural selection. The most recent strains of these digital pathogens are evidence that virus
In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate to meet a range of really smart South African entrepreneurs who are doing incredibly exciting stuff in the technology space, often with relatively few resources. Despite all the doom and gloom that is our politics, and despite the poor state of