A court battle could be on the cards after a deal between CZ Electronics and Seemahale Telecoms to design and develop South African-manufactured smartphones and tablets collapsed last week. CZ Electronics, which owns a hi-tech manufacturing facility on Johannesburg’s East Rand, announced on Friday that a company
Is the traditional desktop living on borrowed time? It is, if South African company Cloudware gets its way. The Johannesburg-based company has developed the CloudGate Desktop hardware device, a low-cost box that runs Android, consumes only 10W of power and fits in the palm of the hand Cloudware’s head of product, Jonathan
Cameroon has offered mobile operator Viettel a year’s monopoly on the operation of the country’s first 3G network. But Viettel is no ordinary operator. It’s owned by the Vietnamese government and operated by its ministry of defence. Readers will recall I wrote about the wholesale network and landing station monopoly enjoyed
As Internet access spread across the globe, a handful of giant American corporations ended up dominating industries. Google in search, Amazon in online shopping and Facebook in social networking. The one market that has proved consistently immune to these titans is China. Now, one of China’s homegrown Internet giants
In the days following this week’s general election – the most interesting since 1994 – the focus will shift to who president Jacob Zuma will name to his new cabinet. Whatever shuffling he decides to do, he should leave the communications portfolio in the hands
We’ve been gone too long, we know. But TechCentral is pleased to announce that its podcast, TalkCentral, is returning from this week with a new voice on the panel, Regardt van der Berg, who joins the editorial team from 1 May. In the first edition of the relaunched show, Van der Berg and co-host Duncan McLeod talk about the snowballing
The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) and its agent, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), are railroading state welfare recipients into using Vodacom Sim cards through an exclusive partnership between the two companies. The partnership has the potential to drive millions of beneficiaries into Vodacom’s arms on the back
British telecommunications giant BT has named former IBM sub-Saharan Africa GM Oliver Fortuin as its new MD following the resignation of Keith Matthews. Fortuin, who was also a former GM of IBM’s PC Company in Africa, takes the top job at BT with immediate effect. Most recently, Fortuin, who has an MBA from Open University
Vodacom has quietly cut its prepaid call rate to 79c/minute on per-second billing, just weeks after MTN did the same. However, the new Vodacom rate is promotional, and expires on 14 July. If Vodacom makes the new 79c rate permanent – by filing the tariff with communications regulator
Pinnacle Holdings has confirmed weekend newspaper reports that it is being investigated by the Financial Services Board (FSB) because of a possible contravention of the Financial Markets Act related to share trading that took place in March 2014. The FSB is probing possible insider trading, Pinnacle said in a statement to
