South Africa has plenty of sunshine, and two Port Elizabeth-based entrepreneurs want to use this to charge the Millbug Vuya Tablet, a device they conceptualised locally. Vuya means “be happy” in isiXhosa. Millbug was founded in 2012 by Sabelo Sibanda, 30, and Thulisile Volwana, 22. It started as an e-commerce company
Last week, Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile operator, made startling revelations about secret wiretaps that allow government agencies to listen into and record live telephone conversations. These revelations come a year after American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of US and UK
Santaco, the South African National Taxi Council, will this Thursday announce plans to provide free Wi-Fi Internet access to minibus taxi commuters and around taxi ranks The taxi council is due to launch the service at an event in Orlando West in Soweto on Thursday morning
Germany has pulled out of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation, a blow to the project that plans to build the world’s largest radio telescope. But while insiders lament Germany’s withdrawal, they do not see it as a death knell for the project. With thousands of antennae spread across South Africa and Australia
Is the PC market set for a comeback or is it a case of a dead cat bouncing? New research from International Data Corp (IDC) suggests that PC sales in the Middle East and Africa (including Turkey) will end a “dismal run” of seven consecutive quarters of year-on-year declines in the second quarter of 2014. According to IDC, PC sales
Spare a thought for Google. In the wake of a ruling by the European court of justice, the Internet search giant has to set up extensive new machinery to deal with requests to take down embarrassing material. It all began when a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, tried to force the website of the newspaper
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated how fines that are set too low create the wrong behaviour. Only if they are set right does the required modification occur. I suspect we have a case of this here in South Africa, with the recent universal service obligations imposed on our leading national telecommunications
Savannah Fund, a seed capital fund specialising in US$25 000 to $500 000 investments in sub-Saharan Africa, has made its first move into South Africa, buying into two Cape Town-based start-ups. The fund, which already has investments in East Africa and West Africa, has invested in e-commerce site
Someone may be reading all your e-mail. At both security agencies and cybercrime enterprises, thousands of geeks are busily sifting through e-mails that they have intercepted. This is happening every second of every day, around the world. Of course it’s highly unlikely that anyone at America’s National
In the mid-1990s, there were fewer telephone connections in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa than there were in Manhattan. What a difference two decades has made: by the end of this year, there will be more than 635m active telephone subscriptions on the sub-continent. That number is twice the population of
