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
Much has been made about green industry being a new vehicle for industrial development in South Africa. It is part of the industrial policy action plan. For now, the focus is mainly on increasing the local content of components, which fall under the renewable energy independent producers’ procurement programme
The years of delays in South Africa’s migration from analogue to digital terrestrial television, caused mainly by political bungling, are starting to have a direct economic impact. South Africa was originally meant to have completed migration from analogue to digital signals in November 2011. Eighteen months later and it’s still not clear
The Press Council has said it is unable to consider a complaint by communications minister Dina Pula’s spokesman, former journalist Wisani Ngobeni, against Sunday Times editor Phylicia Oppelt. Its reasons are intriguing, and worth closer scrutiny, particularly when one keeps in mind the claim that the self-regulatory
Those critical of Apple suggest iOS, its operating system for the iPhone and the iPad, has fallen behind Google’s Android and even Microsoft’s Windows Phone. I’m inclined to agree — and I’m an iPhone user. Though much of the speculation around the upcoming iOS 7 has dealt
Is it 1999 again? The heady days of the dot-com boom are long past and yet Yahoo’s sudden binge of acquisitions – some of them of dubious value – betray the same irrational exuberance and hope. This year so far, Yahoo has snapped up 10 companies. This is not that
Just as the music industry was getting used to the idea of another shift in formats – from compact discs as the distribution mechanism to digital downloads over the Internet – another huge change in the way people listen to music looks set to shake the business to its foundations. A decade after Steve Jobs
Few people remember third place. Whether in sport, science or business, there’s little glory attached to the bronze medal. But two multinational giants, BlackBerry and Microsoft, are straining to be the third player in the burgeoning smart phone market. The latest figures from
It has an arcane name and involves complex communications technology, but there’s every reason you and I should be getting very excited indeed about “television white spaces”, the gaps in spectrum between broadcast television channels. Google and Microsoft are pouring millions of dollars
