The only consistent thing about the Internet is its ability to surprise us by changing virtually over night. It’s a Darwinian market that crushes the weak and elevates the strong within months rather than years. That makes investing in online businesses a roller coaster ride
Browsing: Opinion
Attention was focused on the telecommunications regulator last week as it held three days of public hearings on local-loop unbundling, a process to open up Telkom’s copper-cable access network. But the intervention may be coming too late to matter. Local-loop unbundling is a
It’s all too easy to forget how dependent we have become on mobile communications technology. Until it fails. When it does, the knives come out and consumers threaten mass defection to alternative platforms. Canada’s Research in Motion, the maker
The mobile phone industry is a brutal business. There may be gold in them thar hills, but it can be painful to extract. Witness the howls of rage from tens of millions of BlackBerry customers around the world who were cut off from services like BlackBerry Messenger
In recent weeks, it’s been almost impossible not to miss M-Net’s criticism of everything that makes for SA’s broadcast digital migration programme, writes Muzi Makhaye. M-Net’s calls for a cheap “converter box” to replace set-top boxes in the migration are as absurd as
A Sandton hotel played host to a conference last week on “white-spaces spectrum”. For nontechnical people, it was a fairly arcane discussion. But what was being talked about could usher in the biggest revolution in telecoms since the mobile phone
Ten years ago, world-renowned academic and activist Manuel Castells came to SA. It was not long after the publication of his seminal trilogy on the rise of the network society. From Silicon Valley to Yokohama, he had tracked the ways states can
Shortly after 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, a pall was cast over the technology industry. Internet companies ran out of funding and hit the wall, the Nasdaq crashed and is still valued at a fraction of what it was at the height of the
One look at the wild speculation that preceded Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of the iPhone 4S and the latest incarnation of its mobile operating system, iOS 5, is enough to tell you that everyone was expecting more. And with Apple’s share
Telkom did something last week no one thought it ever would: its Internet service provider, TelkomInternet, jumped onto the uncapped broadband bandwagon, adopting a market trend started 18 months ago by its rival, MWeb. The news came as a