There is a long list of issues newly appointed communications minister Yunus Carrim needs to address with urgency if South Africa is to become the information and communications technology (ICT) leader on the continent, and create the jobs South Africa needs to eradicate poverty and unemployment
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Once upon a time, Sony was Apple. For decades, the Japanese consumer electronics giant was known for its innovation as much as Apple is today. It commercialised the transistor radio with the TR-63 and popularised the console gaming market with the PlayStation. It pioneered
Spare a thought for Edward Snowden. At the time of writing, the former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency (NSA) technical contractor, was holed up in a transit lounge in a Moscow airport trying to figure out where in the world he could travel next to avoid arrest and prosecution by US authorities under the Espionage Act
Anyone who has attended any sort of telecommunications-related presentation in the past couple of years will have come across the World Bank’s finding that a 10% increase in a nation’s broadband penetration equates to a 1,4% increase in GDP in low- and middle-income economies. That statistic makes a
Human beings can be exasperating creatures. We go from amazement to bored entitlement so quickly that even rapidly evolving technology is soon passé. Geosynchronous satellites? Ho hum. Smartphones? Yawn. So it takes something quite special to remind us of the wonders of technology, and Google Loon
For years, Telkom has been like a frog in slowly warming water. It’s kept broadband prices far too high while watching on puzzled as its subscribers abandoned it in favour of mobile alternatives. It has a high cost structure – mainly because it has too many employees – but consumers don’t care about its challenges. And
Mark Shuttleworth certainly isn’t afraid of taking the proverbial bull by the horns. After selling his South African Internet security business Thawte for US$575m at the height of the dot-com bubble, spending $20m and a year in training to become the first South African in space, and launching an operating system
If Apple could pick one word it would most like associated with the announcements it made at its annual developers’ conference on Tuesday, it would probably be “innovative”. It’s been accused of losing the innovation edge in the recent past and, despite the usual grandiose comments by CEO Tim Cook and his
Telkom would have us believe that the only thing holding South Africa back from cost-effective Internet is a technical challenge. In fact, it’s greed, compounded by a lack of will and imagination. For the most part, the really big players in telecommunications don’t want to fix the problem. Why should they when they can charge
South Africa appears to be losing its status as the preferred investment destination on the continent for international technology companies. That honour, increasingly, is going to Kenya, which may be on the cusp of a technology-fuelled era of economic growth. When apartheid ended in