South Africa is taking concrete steps towards introducing digital radio broadcasts using a standard known as DAB+, with a trial planned for 2014. The move will usher in greater competition in the radio sector, with digital eventually likely to replace the familiar FM and AM dials. Radio broadcasters
So, president Jacob Zuma has finally fired the feckless Dina Pule and South Africa has yet another communications minister, Yunus Carrim, the seventh person to hold the portfolio since 1994. Will he be any better than his predecessors? That’s hard to know. But the fact that he’s a card-carrying member
Once upon a time, Sony was Apple. For decades, the Japanese consumer electronics giant was known for its innovation as much as Apple is today. It commercialised the transistor radio with the TR-63 and popularised the console gaming market with the PlayStation. It pioneered
Spare a thought for Edward Snowden. At the time of writing, the former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency (NSA) technical contractor, was holed up in a transit lounge in a Moscow airport trying to figure out where in the world he could travel next to avoid arrest and prosecution by US authorities under the Espionage Act
For years, Telkom has been like a frog in slowly warming water. It’s kept broadband prices far too high while watching on puzzled as its subscribers abandoned it in favour of mobile alternatives. It has a high cost structure – mainly because it has too many employees – but consumers don’t care about its challenges. And
Mark Shuttleworth certainly isn’t afraid of taking the proverbial bull by the horns. After selling his South African Internet security business Thawte for US$575m at the height of the dot-com bubble, spending $20m and a year in training to become the first South African in space, and launching an operating system
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
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
