Nigeria plans to double investment in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector from US$25bn to $50bn in the next few years, according to the West African nation’s communication technology minister, Omobola Johnson. Johnson said that her ministry and the Nigerian Communications Commission
I have such a complicated relationship with Google and Facebook that I sometimes find it hard to write about them. I don’t mean complicated in the sense of conflict of interest, although it is true that one of the organisations I do work for now receives funding from Google, so there is that, but what I am really talking about is
On the streets of Lagos and across God-fearing southern Nigeria, it’s not uncommon to see people with a leather-bound Bible in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. But the Good Book’s days could be numbered – in printed form at least – if 25-year-old Kayode Sowole’s idea takes off. The computer science student
The story of Oculus VR is the kind of garage-to-greatness story that geeks usually love. A passionate, self-taught tinkerer barely out of his teens revives a dead technology and two years later, Facebook buys his company for US$2bn. So, why are many of the company’s earliest backers so angry? Oculus VR makes virtual reality headsets
Yookos, a newish social networking site aimed at people across Africa, has signed up 10m users in the three years since its commercial launch and appears set for further strong growth. The network, which began in Nigeria as a Christian-focused site, is now headquartered in Johannesburg and is targeting a broader audience interested in what its founders
The mobile operators are fighting the wrong war, and they’re squaring up to the wrong enemy. They should be fundamentally revising their business models to prepare for Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which are taking aim directly at their voice business. Let us take a step back. For well over a decade, South
The controversial issue of “network neutrality” looks set to become the subject of intense debate in South Africa in coming months after communications regulator Icasa this week raised the idea of introducing regulations that could stop operators from discriminating against traffic carried across their networks
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a blog post on Thursday that he had held a telephone conversation this week with US president Barack Obama in which the Facebook CEO expressed his “frustration over the damage” the US government is “creating for all our future”. Zuckerberg, 29, has become increasingly vocal about the fallout
South Africa, where 80% of the adult population owns a cellphone but the median income is a mere R3 000/month, poses specific challenges to tech companies trying to make inroads into the cellphone market. For many, the solution has come in the form of apps that allow
A month ago, Bloomberg proclaimed the chairman of Tencent, Ma Huateng, to be China’s richest man, with a wealth of US$13bn based on Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed shares, of which he owns 10%. His family name Ma means horse, so the Internet
