In a shock development, Telkom chief financial officer Peter Nelson has resigned from the telecommunications group. The move comes less than a week after the departure of group CEO Reuben September. In a short statement issued to the JSE’s Sens news service on Tuesday afternoon, Telkom says Nelson has informed the board of his resignation as director and chief financial officer with effect from 9 October 2010.
Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, was in SA last week to meet with the software company’s customers and to attend the soccer World Cup final in Johannesburg. TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sat down with Courtois, who is responsible for all of Microsoft’s operations outside the US, for an exclusive media interview and asked him about life at the company after the departure of Bill Gates, cloud computing and the plans for its Bing search engine.
As of Wednesday, South Africans hoping to register a business will have to provide a certified copy of their identity documents to the registration office. The Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro) says all transactions that take place at the office will require company directors to provide their barcoded ID books. Cipro acting CEO Lungile Dukwana says the new process is part of the organisation’s attempt to fight the fraud and corruption that has afflicted the organisation.
Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry range of smartphones, has posted a new video showing off its upcoming BlackBerry 6 operating system software. The company has introduced a new, more fluid user interface. The video demonstrates a few of the new applications and features in BlackBerry 6, including a redesigned home screen.
Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s. To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.
US e-retailer Amazon.com will open a customer service centre in Cape Town in October 2010 that it claims will create more than 600 new jobs in its first two years of operation, with an additional 400 seasonal jobs to be added during the fourth quarter holiday periods. The facility will provide services in English and German and will provide customer support and service to Amazon customers in the US and Germany. Interestingly, it will not serve SA customers at all.
The ministry of communications is confident the board of directors it has selected to manage Sentech will turn around the state-owned business and it will not interfere in the running of the company. This is despite a newspaper report at the weekend that acting CEO Beverly Ngwenya and chief financial officer Mohammed Cassim had resigned and were being charged for “gross negligence” as a result of alleged reckless spending.
A senior telecommunications industry executive on Tuesday warned against the dangers of a price war in international bandwidth capacity in…
Local mobile operators handled booming traffic volumes during the 2010 soccer World Cup. Vodacom enjoyed a 40% increase in SMS…
TalkCentral is SA’s first business technology podcast. Hosted by TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod and deputy editor Candice Jones, TalkCentral is a weekly wrap-up of the big SA technology stories we’ve covered over the past week. Meant as a complementary podcast to the ever-popular ZA Tech Show, the idea is to provide a succinct overview of what we’ve been covering on TechCentral, and to provide analysis behind and opinion about the news.