Our panel this week includes World Wide Worx Strategy’s Steven Ambrose and TechHuman.com’s Brendon Ambrose, with regulars Brett Haggard and Simon Dingle. They discuss the launch of Samsung’s Wave and the Bada operating system, Google’s mobile ecosystem, StarCraft 2, the new Amazon Kindle, and much more
South Africans’ last hope for more competition in the country’s pay-TV market, Walking On Water Television (WowTV), is gearing up to launch a satellite TV service within the next couple of months. TechCentral can reveal that WowTV plans to launch two bouquets of channels, one costing R49/month and the other R99/month. The low prices suggest the company is hoping to appeal to a broad market.
Cell C is like a new company. In a presentation to media on Wednesday morning, CEO Lars Reichelt set out a radical new strategy and unveiled a revitalised brand image for the mobile operator. It may still be SA’s smallest cellular network by market share — Telkom hasn’t launched its mobile business yet — but under Reichelt, who was appointed to the job last year, Cell C is fast becoming the market’s feistiest player.
Cell C’s plan to sell its network of base stations should be concluded within the next four weeks, says CEO Lars Reichelt. In March, TechCentral broke the news that SA’s smallest mobile operator was considering selling parts of its base station network, and then leasing that infrastructure back from the winning bidder.
Cell C’s R5bn broadband mobile network will be launched in about three weeks, says its CEO, Lars Reichelt. The third-generation (3G) network, which is capable of theoretical download speeds of up to 21Mbit/s, will be launched in phases across six cities.
Pay-TV operator Super 5 Media on Tuesday retrenched all of its remaining employees, more than 40 people in all, and is now facing the prospect of liquidation if it isn’t able to pay one of its biggest creditors by the end of the week. TechCentral, which last week broke the news of the problems at the company, has now learnt Super 5 Media is facing a claim of as much as R25m from Rothschild, an international investment advisory company.
Canada’s Research in Motion has unveiled its newest touchscreen device, the BlackBerry Torch, ratcheting up its battle with rivals such Nokia and Apple. The new phone has both a touch screen and a tactile Qwerty keyboard, making it like a hybrid of the company’s popular Storm 2 and Bold 2 handsets.
Telkom sold its controlling stake in Telkom Media, now Super 5 Media, for just R68m, the JSE-listed telecommunications group’s 2010 annual report has revealed. This means Telkom lost a net R403m from the failed venture. It had loaned the business R471m, which it has now written off, according to the report.
Catching up with the incumbent mobile operators, Cell C will finally begin selling the BlackBerry and its services in a move that will better position SA’s smallest mobile operator in the business market. Until now, the Blackberry devices and the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) have only been available from MTN and Vodacom.
Nearly 85% of all e-mail is spam. That’s one of the findings in a new report published by Internet security specialist Kaspersky Lab. According to Kaspersky’s spam report for the second quarter of 2010, 84,4% of the total volume of e-mail traffic online is unsolicited junk mail.