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.

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.

With Seacom down and the World Cup approaching its final weekend, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Simon Dingle gather to discuss the Seacom outage, the local-loop barrier for bandwidth, Wired magazine and its device strategy, Google Me, and much, much more

Internet service provider Web Africa has realigned its reseller model, effectively cutting its per-gigabyte fees by R14/GB. The new structure, which it calls “hosting by utilisation”, allows Internet resellers to control up to 20 domains and 20GB of pooled traffic for a monthly fee of R400.

Seacom, the undersea cable, may be offline until 22 July. A Seacom spokesman warned on Friday that repairs may only be finalised much later than initially thought because of various factors, including the depth under the ocean of fault. Seacom went offline on Monday, cutting off broadband users whose service providers buy capacity on exclusively on the Seacom system. The service disruptions have hit MWeb, part of Naspers, and downstream service providers from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions particularly hard.