On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded Nokia’s debt to near junk status. The share price has been in freefall in the past year, with some analysts painting a bleak future for the Finnish company. Yes, it’s bad. But Nokia is already planting the seeds of its turnaround. There’s no doubt that fortunes are made and lost
Mali’s new prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, is an accomplished astrophysicist who worked on five Nasa missions and became a US citizen, but said he never forgot the Malian town of his birth. He earned degrees from universities in France and the US, where he later taught mechanical and aerospace engineering
Although some US analysts are predicting that Apple’s share price could push past the US$1 000/share barrier in the next 12 months, making it the first $1 trillion company, I believe the more “boring” technology companies such as Dell, Microsoft and Intel offer a more sensible prospect for investors. The market is valuing Apple’s operating
Microsoft has finally shed some light on the different versions of Windows 8 we’ll see upon release and, thankfully, things are much simpler than past versions. This time around, there are only three flavours Microsoft is pushing heavily: Windows 8, the version geared towards most consumers; Windows 8 Pro, for enterprise and
Former Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) chairman Paris Mashile has been appointed to the board of ComUnity, a local mobile-phone development company, as chairman. Mashile is also a director at state-owned broadcasting signal distributor Sentech and is programme director for digital multimedia management
It’s like 1999 all over again. On Monday, Facebook announced it was buying photo-sharing company Instagram for US$1bn, netting the start-up’s cofounder, Kevin Systrom, a cool $400m. It’s paying over the odds, but the deal makes sense for Facebook ahead of its flotation on the stock market. At first glance and based on the
Remember that time in the 1990s when Apple was almost bankrupt and in disrepair? Take note, Yahoo, Apple’s market capitalisation reached the US$600bn mark on Tuesday, the second company in the world to reach the milestone. Apple reached a high of $644/share, reaching a market cap that continues to put space between
While the rest of the world was waiting with bated breath for the release of the new iPad, my company was focusing its efforts a very different direction: building a version of our app for Windows 8’s Consumer Preview. We were cautious about this, as we’d built for the Windows 7 Phone, and initial adoption was undoubtedly disappointing. However, it looks
“Ideas so simple,” reads a cartoon on an elevator door, “that they feel like the completion of a thought,” continues its twin. Similar doodles adorn the walls of HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan, near Taipei, and business cards carried by the smartphone-maker’s staff. John Wang, the chief marketing officer, lays out a set of four: concentric
Internet Explorer has been sliding downhill in market share for the past few years, but recently mined stats show something the critics never expected to see: a small but significant uptick in IE’s numbers since the beginning of 2012. Data from NetMarketShare show that while IE had indeed been in a slump for quite some time
