South Africa appears to be losing its status as the preferred investment destination on the continent for international technology companies. That honour, increasingly, is going to Kenya, which may be on the cusp of a technology-fuelled era of economic growth. When apartheid ended in
Browsing: Duncan McLeod
The years of delays in South Africa’s migration from analogue to digital terrestrial television, caused mainly by political bungling, are starting to have a direct economic impact. South Africa was originally meant to have completed migration from analogue to digital signals in November 2011. Eighteen months later and it’s still not clear
Just as the music industry was getting used to the idea of another shift in formats – from compact discs as the distribution mechanism to digital downloads over the Internet – another huge change in the way people listen to music looks set to shake the business to its foundations. A decade after Steve Jobs
It has an arcane name and involves complex communications technology, but there’s every reason you and I should be getting very excited indeed about “television white spaces”, the gaps in spectrum between broadcast television channels. Google and Microsoft are pouring millions of dollars
A piece on US technology website ZDNet earlier this month, written by columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols, suggested that Windows 8 represents Microsoft’s “New Coke moment”. Others quickly jumped on the idea. The Financial Times led with a story on the subject, saying the fact that Microsoft
TopTV has had not an auspicious start to life. Although it was the only one of five new pay-TV operators licensed five years ago by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa to take on MultiChoice and DStv to actually launch, it was always going to be uphill. The troubled telecaster “celebrated” the end
Parliament’s joint committee on ethics and members’ interests has begun a behind-closed-doors probe into allegations that the communications minister’s alleged boyfriend, Phosane Mngqibisa, benefited financially from the sponsorship of 2012’s ICT Indaba in Cape Town. The committee
Six months after Sprint announced it was in talks to sell 70% of its equity to Japan’s SoftBank for US$20bn, Dish Network Corp, a US direct-to-home satellite pay-TV operator with 14m subscribers, has put in a bid of $25,5bn to buy the wireless communications firm. It’s a move
The under-resourced and often ineffective Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has a reputation for lacking teeth when it comes to enforcing order in the telecommunications sector it regulates. For example, there’s still no clear outcome in the case of the alleged unlawful use by wireless Internet
Telkom is a shadow of the company it once was. As little as 10 years ago, it thoroughly dominated SA’s telecommunications landscape. Today, it’s not even among the top 40 companies listed on the JSE. Its market value has dwindled to such as extent that, at R7,8bn, it’s worth less than 5% of Vodacom, in which it once