There has been a lot of debate in recent weeks about whether communications minister Yunus Carrim has done the right thing when it comes to South Africa’s new broadcasting policy. To back up a bit, perhaps we should explain what this debate means for ordinary South Africans. At present, televisions in South Africa receive
Jamii Telecom launched a public fibre-to-the-home network in Kenya in early 2011, but except for a few gated communities and pilots, nothing has happened in South Africa on this front. However, 2014 may be the year that changes as the lumbering
Although Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 smartphone is an evolutionary product, there is not enough in it to make people upgrade from the S4. It doesn’t push the envelope in any real way. Indeed, we are in a sort of stasis now when it comes to smartphone innovation. This is not to say that smartphone innovation is finished
On New Year’s Eve in 2011, at one minute before 11pm, a British computer consultant named Stephen Henson finished testing a new version of a popular piece of free security software. With a few keystrokes, he released OpenSSL version 1.0.1 into the public domain. Now, more than two years later, the events of that night have
Korea’s Samsung Electronics this week began selling its latest flagship handset, the highly anticipated Galaxy S5. Early reviews are already in and, although largely positive, some reviewers are asking if the insane pace of innovation in the smartphone industry in
TechCentral’s recent interview with Herman Singh, Commerce is mobile’s fourth wave, is interesting coming in the same week that his employer, Vodacom, was part of a court action to preserve its unreasonably high mobile termination rights arrangement. Vodacom, along with MTN, threw everything it had into
Bewilderment. That’s the word that best described the look on the faces of mobile communications industry executives crammed into a courtroom on the 11th floor of the high court in downtown Johannesburg on Monday afternoon as they listened to judge Haseena Mayat hand down her decision in a key industry battle
Two crucial constituencies have been ignored in communications minister Yunus Carrim’s rather ill-tempered response over the past few weeks to questions about his policy on the digital migration of South African television services. Instead of acknowledging the many deficiencies in the option being pursued by government
On 22 November 2013, the supreme court of appeal (SCA) handed down a rare trademark judgment. It’s marked on the judgment as one that’s not worth reporting in the law reports, which is a great pity given that is of considerable importance. The case pitted international telecommunications operator Orange against a local accounting
The story of Oculus VR is the kind of garage-to-greatness story that geeks usually love. A passionate, self-taught tinkerer barely out of his teens revives a dead technology and two years later, Facebook buys his company for US$2bn. So, why are many of the company’s earliest backers so angry? Oculus VR makes virtual reality headsets
