On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded Nokia’s debt to near junk status. The share price has been in freefall in the past year, with some analysts painting a bleak future for the Finnish company. Yes, it’s bad. But Nokia is already planting the seeds of its turnaround. There’s no doubt that fortunes are made and lost
It’s like 1999 all over again. On Monday, Facebook announced it was buying photo-sharing company Instagram for US$1bn, netting the start-up’s cofounder, Kevin Systrom, a cool $400m. It’s paying over the odds, but the deal makes sense for Facebook ahead of its flotation on the stock market. At first glance and based on the
Telkom has embarked on a multibillion-rand refresh of its access network into homes and businesses. Investors will probably decry the cost of taking fibre-optic infrastructure closer to and even into homes, but group CEO Nombulelo Moholi is at least leading the fixed-line operator in the right direction
On Monday, Alan Knott-Craig will move into his new office at 150 Rivonia Road. Expectations among industry players and consumers alike about his looming tenure at the helm of Cell C are running high. Can the man who built Vodacom turn the smaller operator
John Holdsworth, the businessman who took on the mobile operators over high wholesale call charges and won, has launched a new business that will take advantage of falling prices and faster mobile data networks. He hopes, in the process, to shake up the mobile
If you believe the claptrap coming out of the Apple camp in the past week, then you’ll accept as gospel that the era of the personal computer is over. Nothing could be further from the truth. The PC is alive and well; it’s just being reinvented. Listening to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s keynote speech at the launch of the iPad 3 (sorry, the “new iPad”) last week
The ANC has proposed a sweeping overhaul of policy governing SA’s technology sector. For the most part, the proposals are reasonably business-friendly and should be welcomed. But the lingering conviction that state intervention will ensure the delivery of services to all is still a cause for concern. The proposals, contained
Broadcasting regulator Icasa is expected to furnish its reasons within the next week for barring TopTV from launching adult channels on its satellite pay-TV platform. However it tries to justify the decision, Icasa deserves to be challenged all the way to the constitutional court
Apple is introducing new features to its Mac OS X operating system that sometimes appear somewhat counterintuitive and are slowly driving this writer to consider alternatives. I admit I was a reluctant convert to Apple, but switched to the Mac platform with the release of Mac OS X 10.5
Telkom came out guns blazing at Competition Tribunal hearings this week, warning that if it were fined the maximum allowed for alleged anticompetitive behaviour last decade, its business could be put in jeopardy. Does the fixed-line operator have a point or is it all just grandstanding? In its closing
