Makro announced last week that it had entered into a partnership with Sasol to build e-commerce “lockers” on the fuel retailer’s forecourts. The lockers are not a new idea, having been pioneered in the US, UK and elsewhere by retailers such as Amazon and the Walmart-owned Asda, but it is
In the past 20 years, Telkom has lost almost every aspect of the absolute monopoly it once held over South African telecommunications. First, it lost its supremacy over voice communication as cellular rivals challenged it for dominance and won. Today, the cellular operators carry the vast majority of
After years of inaction and delay in resolving some of the big policy bottlenecks holding back South Africa’s communications technology industry – a sector that has the potential to underpin economic growth and even to lift
The leafy Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst, one of the first in South Africa to get high-speed fibre-to-the-home broadband, now looks set to be the scene of a turf war between two competing fixed-line telecommunications providers. It’s a David vs Goliath battle that could also help decide which
Driven by the rise of broadband, the era of linear television broadcasting will draw to a rapid close in the next decade. New media empires will be built on the back of this change. Established broadcasters that don’t adapt will crumble. A revolution is at hand — a revolution that is going
The irony about the Post Office strike, former First National Bank CEO Michael Jordaan tweeted this week, is that the longer it drags on, the more its customers will move to electronic alternatives — never to return. That the Post Office is in crisis
Two of South Africa’s biggest online retailers, Takealot.com and Kalahari.com, surprised just about everyone this week when they announced plans to merge their operations. The proposed deal is surprising because, until now
Was Microsoft really that desperate to distance itself from what commentator Paul Thurrott calls the Windows 8 “Frankenstein’s monster” that one full version number for the next version wasn’t enough? Microsoft announced this week that
Should South Africa’s mobile operators extend their offerings beyond telecommunications and into a broad range of value-added services such as financial services, media and e-commerce, or should they be low-margin “dumb pipes” over
South African couch potatoes have never had it so good. In the past fortnight, two new video-on-demand offerings have been launched, one using broadband connections to deliver entertainment into
