The surprise resignation of Telkom chief financial officer Peter Nelson could point to deeper problems at the telecommunications group, say analysts. Birgitta Cederstrom Nicholson, technology research head at Frost & Sullivan, says Nelson’s resignation and the early exit of the company’s CEO, Reuben September, is reason for concern.

JSE-listed media group Naspers will fork out R2,9bn and give up its stake in Mail.ru in exchange for a 28,7%…

Telkom’s chief financial officer, Peter Nelson, appears to have quit his job in part because of frustrations with the way the telecommunications group is being led by its board of directors. Telkom surprised the markets on Tuesday afternoon when it announced that Nelson had tendered his resignation just days after CEO Reuben September left the group.

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.