When he isn’t talking at technology conferences and seminars, or travelling to them, 49-year-old Steve Song lives and works in Durbanville near Cape Town. He’s perhaps best known for his map of the various submarine cables that have landed in Africa in recent years, and for his passionate advocacy of the use of television white-spaces
Browsing: People
Steven Levy was not interested in technology when he growing up. Rather, he was into music in a big way. Coming of age in the 1960s, he wanted to be a music critic because they were almost like rock stars themselves. But the times were, unfortunately, a-changin’
Twenty years ago, on 11 March 1992, Nathaniel Borenstein sent the world’s first e-mail attachment. Although it created little excitement beyond the small group of people involved with the project, today Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions technology (Mime, for short) is used an estimated trillion times a day
Mike Sharman, 28, is tall, stubble-faced and boasts an incredible cleft in his chin. “I wanted to be an actor,” he says by way of introduction. “But my old man pointed out that might not be the best idea in SA.” Sharman isn’t an actor, though he briefly tried his hand at it despite his father’s remonstrations. Instead, he started a digital agency called Retroviral
MTN SA chief financial officer Zunaid Bulbulia came to the telecommunications industry almost by accident. It was December 1993 and Bulbulia, the son of a shoe salesman, was doing his articles for his CA degree at a Johannesburg accounting firm when he was asked by one of the firm’s senior
Stafford Masie, just 37, has had a highly eventful career, having been the first SA country manager for Google and working for multinational corporations like Novell. He’s now dabbling in numerous start-ups and technology businesses. TechCentral’s Craig Wilson
MTN SA MD Karel Pienaar is a smiling but imposing figure whose name commands respect in the halls of the company’s gleaming 14th Avenue head office in Fairlands, Johannesburg. Impossible as it sounds, having been part of MTN’s bid for a licence in SA, technically the
University of Cape Town alumnus Chris Pinkham has a long and illustrious career in the technology industry. He helped launch SA’s first Internet service provider, Internet Africa; he helped develop Amazon.com’s popular Elastic Compute
Mike Lawrie lives in a pleasant, suburban retirement village outside Pretoria. When he isn’t tending to his collection of succulents, or travelling with his wife, Lawrie keeps track of and contributes to various online forums and mailing lists. What few
Yossi Hasson, MD of open-source software specialist Synaq, is tall, dark, handsome and gifted. Which means my first instinct is to dislike him. However, Hasson proves to be as friendly as he is talented when I meet with him on a