Kenyan telecommunications operator Safaricom has increased its market share from about 60% three years ago to over 80% on the back of its M-Pesa cellphone money transfer service. Now Vodacom is hoping to emulate those market share gains in SA. That’s the word from Mark Taylor, newly appointed MD of Vodacom Payment Services, the company that houses the company’s M-Pesa offering.

Could former SABC CEO Dali Mpofu or former Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig be approached to take the reins at listed telecommunications group Telkom? Mpofu and Knott-Craig are two of the high-profile people external to Telkom whose names have been linked to the job in recent weeks.

Vodacom expects to sign up 10m M-Pesa mobile money users within three years. The telecommunications operator’s director in charge of the product’s launch, Romeo Kumalo, revealed the ambitious target during the product’s launch in Midrand, north of Johannesburg, on Tuesday.

Broadcast signal distributor Sentech received a hard rap across the knuckles from members of parliament’s communications portfolio committee on Tuesday for its late distribution of crucial documents. “This is disrespect of the highest order,” ANC MP Eric Kholwane said, after members heard an apology and explanation from Sentech board chairman Quraysh Patel for MPs only receiving copies of his organisation’s revised strategic plan that morning.

Parliament’s portfolio committee on communications called off a meeting it was due to hold with executives from dysfunctional state-owned signal distributor Sentech on Tuesday morning. Sentech flew four company members, including its chairman, Quraysh Patel, to Cape Town this week to present its turnaround strategy to the committee. However, Sentech’s “plan for sustainability” did not reach the parliamentarians until Tuesday morning, giving them no time to review the document ahead of the meeting.

Cell C has finally released a few details about its €240m (R2,2bn) loan agreement with China Development Bank. The money will be used to restructure the company’s debt. TechCentral reported on 24 August that the mobile operator had secured the loan.

By next year, the IT industry will have recovered fully from the global recession and will have regained the US$3,4 trillion value it had in its previous peak year, 2008, says Gartner global research head Peter Sondergaard. He was speaking during a keynote address at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town, which kicked off on Monday.

Last week, well-known casino Piggs Peak shut down its online service after a high court ruling effectively outlawed Internet-based gambling in SA. It was a long battle that dated as far back as 2004 when the Gauteng Gambling Board bemoaned the fact that the company did not have a gambling licence in SA and should therefore not allow South Africans to use its service.

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G, more formally known as the BlackBerry 9105, is Research in Motion’s boldest product since the Bold 9700. BlackBerry devices have always tended to conjure up images of businessmen and women, hacking away at e-mail on practical Qwerty keyboards.

Brett Haggard, Nic Callegari and Simon Dingle talk their way through: DStv On Demand available from more Internet service providers…