Finland’s Nokia wants us to believe it’s set to stage an Apple-sized comeback with its newly announced range of Asha feature phones and Lumia smartphones. That won’t be easy. But what it has done is take the first vital step: it’s started executing on a plan to win back
Thanks to Twitter, the short-message social network that has infiltrated my personal and business life, I now know what FNB stands for. It stands for Friday Night Boys, a pop-punk band from Virginia in the United States, or Food Not Bombs, an activist
Though he’s been widely praised for firing two of his ministers this week, President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle has ruffled the technology industry. There are fears that redeploying communications minister Roy Padayachie will delay crucial projects. Padayachie, in the job
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
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
