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
Browsing: Duncan McLeod
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
Last year proved to be a little quiet on the technology front. Internationally, there were few major developments, at least in consumer electronics. Manufacturers continued to refine their televisions, smartphones, notebooks and tablets rather than cracking
The scene is set for a bruising showdown between Telkom and its regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), over local-loop unbundling. This is after the authority this week said it would disregard the fixed-line operator’s arguments about how much money it’s losing for each
Tensions are growing in South Africa’s mobile telecommunications industry as the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa gets nearer to publishing final regulations that will govern decreases in wholesale inter-network call charges over the next three years
Government should not impose an encryption system based on conditional access in the set-top boxes that taxpayers will subsidise for poorer households to receive digital terrestrial television. When it meets this week, cabinet should reject the idea, which has polarised the broadcasting industry
Government, well intentioned as might be, could be on the verge of committing a serious blunder in its attempts to sort out South Africa’s poor broadband penetration rates — one that could stunt and distort the telecommunications industry for years to come. Communications
It emerged this week, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, that Snapchat, a Californian start-up that develops a smartphone app of the same name popular among teens, recently spurned a US$3bn-plus all-cash offer from Facebook to buy it out. The offer value was at least three times the already
Communications minister Yunus Carrim demonstrated in parliament this week that government may finally be dealing decisively with the impasse over digital terrestrial television that is undermining efforts to get more South Africans connected to broadband. Carrim’s remarks to
Sipho Maseko is a really nice guy – which makes me want to pity him over the challenge he’s taken on at Telkom. Some would say accepting the group CEO position at South Africa’s biggest fixed-line operator is like grabbing a tiger by its tail. Sooner rather than later, you get eaten