Author: Contributor
by MJ (Thinus) Booysen South Africa’s energy crisis has many dimensions, from political and economic to technical and environmental. Recently, the country’s power utility, Eskom, has been generating only about 60% of its capacity and has had to restrict usage to prevent a regional blackout. Eskom’s new chief executive officer has affirmed the importance of demand management to handle the crisis. But his approach of merely “subsidising energy-efficient lightbulbs” won’t cut it. The country needs drastic interventions – and the elements of the fourth industrial revolution are available to make this possible. These are: wireless connectivity, the internet of things,…
Despite the significant upheavals in the Nigerian e-commerce sector amid a series of potential investor apathy-inducing developments in 2019; the industry had a shining light in the activities of a local player, Konga. Co-Chief Executive Officer, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh disclosed that Konga went a long way in restoring investor and customer confidence in the Nigerian e-commerce sector. The Harvard alumni affirmed that Konga, which has undergone a remarkable transformation since it was acquired by the Zinox Group, has been a refreshingly positive source of delightful innovations, and sound corporate governance which have dispelled the negative clouds that hovered over the…
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are becoming more than just buzzwords as South African blue-chip companies start to implement these technologies to solve real-world problems. One of South Africa’s largest retail groups recently contracted Xineoh, a Johannesburg-based company which uses AI to predict consumer behaviour, to assist with the optimisation of its inventory. South African retailers increasingly look at ways to use their data to boost sales and operate more efficiently. Xineoh’s AI algorithm utilises retailers’ raw transaction data to predict who will buy which product at what price. It provides retail clients with the ability to optimise their…
“The next years will also be characterised more than ever by the transformation of our industry, but we intend to maintain our market leadership and set the course for long-term competitiveness with investments in new technologies and customer-centricity.”
Not bot, not beast: scientists create first ever living, programmable organism.
CDC Group, the UK’s development finance institution and impact investor, has committed $15 million (R218 million) to TLcom’s TIDE Africa Fund to support early-stage high-growth start-ups across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). With a presence in the key financial hubs of Lagos and Nairobi, TLcom targets businesses that leverage technology to address African business and consumer challenges in key sectors of the economy such as education, agriculture, transportation & logistics, healthcare, and financial services. The firm has backed some of Africa’s most prominent early-stage companies, including Kobo360, Andela and Twiga Foods, which have collectively raised $250 million to date. The CDC investment…
by Richard Holden There has already been a fair number of jobs lost to automation over recent decades – from factory workers to bank tellers. In the coming decade we might see radically larger numbers of jobs lost to automation, thanks to advances in machine learning and other technologies. Two areas are transport and retail. In transport, tech company TuSimple has for months been testing autonomous trucks for UPS (the world’s largest delivery company). The trucks, hauling freight between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, still have a human behind the wheel for safety, but it’s only a matter of time before…
by Christian Borch In 2019, the world fretted that algorithms now know us better than we know ourselves. No concept captures this better than surveillance capitalism, a term coined by American writer Shoshana Zuboff to describe a bleak new era in which the likes of Facebook and Google provide popular services while their algorithms hawk our digital traces. Surprisingly, Zuboff’s concern doesn’t extend to the algorithms in financial markets that have replaced many of the humans on trading floors. Automated algorithmic trading took off around the beginning of the 21st century, first in the US but soon in Europe as…
Most of us spend hours each day glued to some type of screen for work or play. But is that a bad thing? Has anyone got the data to figure it out? Now is the time for ‘The Human Screenome Project.’
Traditional companies need to embrace high-quality data gathering to avoid being left behind by the next industrial revolution.