Duncan McLeod is founder and managing editor of TechCentral. With more than 30 years of experience in technology journalism, he has worked for and contributed to a range of publications, including the Financial Mail, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times.
Classifieds website OLX has come top of Google’s list of South African searches in 2012, while the late Whitney Houston was the second most searched term.
The search terms are included in Google’s annual “Zeitgeist” lists, where the Internet company publishes the most searched for terms around the
LinkedIn, the online network for business professionals, says it signed up its two millionth South African user on Tuesday. The US company, which is listed on the Nasdaq in New York with a market capitalisation of US$12bn, says it has 187m members in more 200 countries. It says the three biggest
As has become customary at this time of the year, TechCentral is pleased to present its lists of who it considers the biggest technology newsmakers over the past 12 months, both internationally and in South Africa. We kick it off, as always, with the five people the
Proposed amendments to the Icasa Act, which governs the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, have come under heavy fire, with critics warning the changes hand too much power to communications minister Dina Pule. After two years of inaction, government has revived the Icasa
The opposition Democratic Alliance’s annual report card of the cabinet is in, and communications minister Dina Pule has not emerged well, receiving an “E” for her performance in 2012.
“Pule’s involvement in the ICT Indaba scandal and her hand in the year of missed opportunities at Telkom
Last week, my Android-powered smartphone, which had just been upgraded to Jelly Bean, the latest version of the software, popped up a message warning me that it would take nine minutes longer than normal to get to my next meeting, in Midrand. The reason, it said, was that there was a traffic
It’s been a good year for most technology stocks listed on the JSE. One notable exception is Gijima, whose share price has tumbled by more than two-thirds in the past 12 months as investors fret about the company’s future. It’s lost nearly half its value since it published its annual results in
Ghana’s National Communications Authority has ordered MTN, that country’s largest mobile operator, to stop adding new subscribers to its network because network quality “continues to deteriorate”. MTN Ghana has 11m subscribers in a country of 25m people, according
JSE- and Nasdaq-listed Net1 UEPS Technologies, which earlier this year won a contested multibillion-rand project to roll out a system for the payment of social grants in South Africa, is now facing investigations by US authorities into whether it made corrupt payments to government officials to secure the contract
Struggling telecommunications operator Telkom has suffered another blow after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded its credit rating on Tuesday, warning that the continued decline in its fixed-line business and losses in mobile will result in further profit erosion. S&P cut Telkom’s credit
