Browsing: Opinion

So, the department of trade & industry (DTI) has finally gone ahead and done it. It has caused the government to pass the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Bill (the so-called “Traditional Knowledge Bill”) despite vociferous objections from all

Years after complaints were first lodged, Telkom is finally being called to answer to charges that it abused its monopoly in the telecommunications industry. It could face a huge fine. But the foreign shareholders responsible for the excesses are gone. When SBC

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