Author: Contributor
Liquid Telecom South Africa, part of the leading pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, today announced its partnership with Qorus, a sales and marketing enablement platform for cloud channel partners to increase productivity, growth and revenue. With Qorus Hub means they can connect with relevant people, content and data more quickly than ever before. The Qorus software includes all the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) information that organisations need to grow their businesses. It is used to build high-quality marketing assets and market-ready sales proposals by accessing information directly from Office applications. Qorus enables Liquid Telecom’s partners to locate, create, collaborate, and…
MyBroadband Insights has released its Q4 2019 Mobile Network Quality Report, which shows that MTN has the best mobile network in South Africa. The report is based on 310,649 speed tests which were performed by thousands of MyBroadband Android Speed Test App users across South Africa between 1 October and 31 December 2019. The research shows that South Africa had an average mobile download speed of 26.73Mbps and an average upload speed of 9.53Mbps. MTN had the highest average download speed at 40.64Mbps, followed by Vodacom on 32.23Mbps, Telkom on 21.63Mbps, Rain on 16.44Mbps, and Cell C on 16.48Mbps. Best…
by David Richard Walwyn and Rod Crompton South Africa needs to seriously start thinking about shifting its energy focus. This is for two reasons. The first is that the country’s important exports – coal and platinum – face potential collapse with the imminent shift of global energy markets. A number of factors are driving this. The move away from vehicles powered by petrol and diesel to ones powered by electric batteries is gathering pace. Two-thirds of the demand for platinum depends on combustion engines where it is used for the hardening of spark plug tips and in-vehicle exhaust auto-catalysts. The…
Consumers expect an array of beneficial services from connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch to be a common reality by 2030. The consumer predictions about the Internet of Senses are among the expectations highlighted in the ninth edition of the Ericsson ConsumerLab Hot Consumer Trends report. The Internet of Senses will be enabled by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G and automation. Consumers predict that by 2030 screen-based experiences will increasingly compete with multisensory ones that will be almost inseparable from reality. Based on comprehensive research,…
by Jamie Morgan Cast your mind back a decade or so and consider how the future looked then. A public horizon of Obama-imbued “yes we can” and a high tide of hope and tolerance expressed in the London Olympics provides one narrative theme; underlying austerity-induced pressure another. Neither speaks directly to our current world of divisive partisan politics, toxic social media use, competing facts and readily believed fictions. This should be instructive. The future is made, not discovered, and yet we are constantly confounded by the future as it becomes the present. What we believe, say, do, organise and vote…
by Christoffer Heckman In its annual report, the AI Now Institute, an interdisciplinary research centre studying the societal implications of artificial intelligence, called for a ban on technology designed to recognize people’s emotions in certain cases. Specifically, the researchers said affect recognition technology, also called emotion recognition technology, should not be used in decisions that “impact people’s lives and access to opportunities,” such as hiring decisions or pain assessments, because it is not sufficiently accurate and can lead to biased decisions. What is this technology, which is already being used and marketed, and why is it raising concerns? Outgrowth of…
Luno, South Africa’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, expects to see greater adoption of Bitcoin and altcoins in 2020, continuing the momentum gained in 2019. Cryptocurrencies have slowly become more mainstream with increasing numbers of people investing in this alternative asset class. Marius Reitz, Luno GM for Africa, makes some predictions for 2020. Regulation With the crypto space maturing rapidly, regulators around the world are accelerating efforts to either embrace or regulate cryptocurrencies. The pace escalated in 2019, no doubt motivated by Facebook entering the space with its Libra project. In 2020, we expect to see this continue. The South African Reserve Bank…
by Ola Källenius “Where do we take it from here?” I guess that’s the core question of every CES. And this inner unrest for what’s next is also at the core of our purpose at Mercedes-Benz. Today we would like to show what that means. As a film buff, I spent some time catching up with old and new movies. One of the classics, “Back to the Future,” predicted we would be traveling in flying cars by now. Yes, air taxis exist. One example is the shared “Volocopter” from a great team of entrepreneurs that we are supporting. But it’s…
by Mauro Vallati Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity if it decides we are an obstacle to its goals. This moment is usually referred to as the “AI singularity”. One argument against the possibility of such a supreme, unstoppable and indefinitely growing intelligence is that it would need, by definition, to be able to accurately predict the future. And quantum theory,…
by William Clark Come January, 40% of Americans will make New Years resolutions, and nearly half of them will aim to lose weight or get in shape. But 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February, and gyms will experience a decrease in traffic after the first and second months of the year as those who made New Year’s resolutions to get in shape lose steam. As a lecturer at Binghamton and former Olympic weightlifter, world champion powerlifter and strength coach, much of my life has been spent in training halls and gyms around the country. People often ask me,…