This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Back to the Future movie and one can’t help but feel a bit like Marty McFly when speaking to an animated Michael Ettershank, the “Doc” at Robotscience, a training facility at the University
Browsing: Shuttleworth Foundation
A Cape Town-based print-on-demand service hopes to make all sorts of books available in outlying areas by allowing photocopy shops to print them – legally – from a wide range of publishers. The start-up, called Paperight, already offers an big selection of content from more than 40 publishers
In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, alien species from across the universe communicate using a “small, yellow, leech-like” animal called the Babel fish, which “feeds on brain-wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically
Last week’s national policy colloquium, organised by the department of communications, drew a degree of cynicism from the telecoms industry. The view among many industry players is that it’s the same old rhetoric with no action. Will this time be different? The industry can be forgiven for suffering from “colloquium fatigue”. Politicians
When he isn’t talking at technology conferences and seminars, or travelling to them, 49-year-old Steve Song lives and works in Durbanville near Cape Town. He’s perhaps best known for his map of the various submarine cables that have landed in Africa in recent years, and for his passionate advocacy of the use of television white-spaces
More than 17 years after SA’s first democratic elections, politicians are still indecisive over how to extend connectivity into rural areas and bridge the so-called “digital divide”. Government continues to concoct ideologically confused plans. Instead, it should just get
Yet another undersea cable has been commissioned for the coast of Africa. When it’s built next year, it will bring total capacity encircling the continent to more than 20,2Tbit/s. In the year 2000 Africa’s total international
Sub-Saharan Africa will soon be drowning in international bandwidth. France Telecom’s Orange has announced an extension to the Lower Indian Ocean Network (Lion) cable, adding yet more capacity to the east coast of Africa.
A free telecommunications industry conference, set to take place on 8 September in Midrand, north of Johannesburg, will explore the whether smaller market players can compete effectively with the big incumbent providers. The event, called VoiceSA, will explore how the smaller players can take on the big boys.
Could an electronic “potato” rescue Africa from poorly developed and expensive communications infrastructure? Steve Song, telecommunications fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, thinks it could go a long way in helping. Song is involved in a project that is developing an innovative open-source project called the Mesh Potato, a sub-US$100 device that he says will bring cheap communications access to the continent.