The Payment Pebble, the mobile phone point-of-sale device developed by Thumbzup and announced in November 2012, has been delayed by regulatory hurdles, says Absa, the bank partner that will launch the product. Absa had said the product would be launched in the first half of 2013, but was unable
Browsing: Stafford Masie
Imagine being able to direct people to your home, your office, your current location or anywhere else on the planet with a single word rather than a lengthy address or set of GPS coordinates. A three-year-old South African company called Waytag is doing just that. Perhaps the easiest
Three weeks ago, in mid-April, Absa became the last of South Africa’s big banks to launch a mobile transactional banking application for smartphones and tablets, beating at the finish line by First National Bank, Standard Bank, Nedbank and Investec. But Absa, South Africa’s
Seacom, the company behind the undersea cable of the same name, has launched a new company, called Pamoja, to offer small and medium-sized enterprises the ability to provide cloud computing-based services to their customers without the capital outlay such services usually require
Banking group Nedbank has launched a mobile point-of-sale (POS) device, called the PocketPOS, that accepts both magnetic and chip-and-Pin credit and debit cards. The device connects to a smartphone using Bluetooth and is operated by means of a mobile application. The PocketPOS
Technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie spent two-and-a-half years working on the Payment Pebble smartphone payment device before it was unveiled last week by retail banking giant Absa. The device was engineered and built by Masie’s Centurion-based company Thumbzup, which he wants
Absa is launching a new piece of hardware called the Pebble that can be used to accept payments from chip-and-pin or magnetic credit and debit cards using a mobile phone, tablet computer or PC. The retail-banking group has introduced the product, which is similar
First National Bank this week lifted the lid on a new payment mechanism that uses the GPS feature in modern smartphones. It won’t result in the much-hyped cashless society, but it could greatly reduce South Africans’ reliance on cash over time. The new payment feature, which is included in an update to
Well-known entrepreneur and investor and former Google SA boss Stafford Masie believes near-field communication (NFC) technology will fail as a mainstream transactional platform and local banks’ attempts to implement systems based on it are “farcical” and offer “no value”. NFC is a set of standards that
Stafford Masie, just 37, has had a highly eventful career, having been the first SA country manager for Google and working for multinational corporations like Novell. He’s now dabbling in numerous start-ups and technology businesses. TechCentral’s Craig Wilson