Author: Contributor
By David Cosgrave, Customer Intelligence Lead at SAS There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love shopping and those who would rather watch paint dry than step foot into a mall. I fall into the latter group. For me, shopping is a mission. The process usually goes like this: No, thank you. I would much rather shop online, even though it has its own drawbacks: I can’t try on anything I buy and I might have to wait a day or two to receive my order, which is not ideal in an age of instant gratification.…
By Staff Writer Internet Solutions, a pan-African telecommunications service provider, announced today the company’s roadmap to South Africa’s ‘first’ network- and tech-agnostic Internet of Things (IoT) platform to enable the vision of “Hybrid IoT”. The company owned by Dimension Data Group and part of NTT Group said on Tuesday that in partnership with Comsol Networks as the initial network connectivity solutions provider with its low-power wide area network (LoRaWAN) technology, the platform will present local businesses with a low-risk, fast-deployment means of exploring how IoT can make their operations more efficient, responsive and customer-centric. Internet Solutions’ IoT platform will offer intelligent, automated…
By Africa Ranker The most successful companies in Africa are spread across the continent, from north to south, and east to west, though of the largest 25, more than half are based in South Africa. Nigeria has the second highest number of large companies, followed by Morocco and Egypt. In many cases, more traditional companies have been overtaken in size and turnover by telecommunications and internet providers. Telecommunications Cape Town is home to the headquarters of Naspers, founded in 1915, now a multinational public company with 24,000 employees worth $60 billion. It offers internet and communication services, video entertainment and…
By Vincent Chin, Boston Consulting Group’s Senior Partner and MD of South East Asian businesses and operations “Show me the money”- the famous mantra of Jerry Maguire seems to be all too familiar to the African infrastructure industry. Like Jerry, many leaders keep talking about the money problem when they should be acting on the capability problem. The availability of capital is not the fundamental challenge facing Africa’s infrastructure sectors, but a lack of public sector capabilities to support and develop large volumes of high quality transport, energy and water projects. African public sector organisations need to channel their investment…
By Wayne de Nobrega, CEO of Tracker South Africa To most people, Tracker is a Stolen Vehicle Recovery (SVR) company. But while Tracker still has SVR at its core, the business has evolved significantly since its inception in 1996. Today, Tracker is one of the many companies capitalising on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the data provided by connected devices. Tracker’s entire business was essentially built on the connectedness of things. While the company has not relied on the Internet as the primary data network, the principles are the same. Those principles being that a variety of objects –…
by Ben Dickson As internet privacy continues to unravel, it is becoming more and more evident that you’re on your own to protect your data against the many parties that are looking to hoard it. Perhaps one of the most pervasive collectors of data are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the same companies that connect you to the internet. ISPs have a huge stake in collecting data, mostly in selling it to advertisers to serve more targeted ads. And they’re in the best position to do so with wild abandon, without fear of retribution. But a lot more than your preferences…
by Ben Dickson No one will argue that Artificial Intelligence has taken great strides in past years. Thanks to AI we’re getting targeted and personalized ads, becoming better in education, healthcare, agriculture and whatnot. So what’s preventing Artificial Intelligence from taking the next big leap? Maybe it’s intelligence. Fact of the matter is, AI algorithms are becoming very smart and efficient at doing specific tasks, but they’re not smart enough to explain their decisions. And neither can their creators. How does that amount to a problem? It doesn’t, as long as AI is making suggestions and not decisions. So for…
by Brandon Klien, Collaboration.Ai I have been interested in education since I taught my first Sunday School class when I was in 6th grade. Teaching from the book (as I was told) versus helping kids understand and enjoy — always seemed at odds with what I saw and experienced. Well outside of my schooling years now, having had the opportunity to train many hundreds on how to facilitate collaboration better — I realize that I have once again become a student. Daily the evidence builds that our education system, now more than ever, is in need of change. And with three young children for…
By Brett Parker, SAP Africa MD What a difference a century makes. If we stepped back in time to a hundred years ago we’d find a primitive China; a Middle East that had yet to discover the riches of oil and most of Southeast Asia consisted of countries that were barely distinguishable from medieval societies. It was an entirely different world. Roll back two hundred years and many European nations would be far removed from the modern countries they are today. It is an enduring myth that fools us to believe everything has always been like it is today; that the…
As a first-mover into automotive assembly in Sub Saharan Africa, Nissan joined a number of South African-based companies that are creating successful businesses on the continent. Mike Whitfield, MD for Nissan Group of Africa, gives some insights on the company’s strategy from an automotive perspective. Almost four years after Nissan ventured into auto assembly in Nigeria, it fills me with pride when I am asked to comment on our success as an auto company operating in Africa. Especially given that challenges often over-ride opportunities when considering the pros and cons of business expansion on the continent. These are some of…
By Darryl Bernstein, partner in Baker McKenzie’s Disputes and ITC Practice Groups in Johannesburg According to the Gemalto Breach Level Index, released in March 2017, South Africa experienced nine reported security breaches in 2016. Across Africa, 45.2 million records were stolen in 2016, compared with 38.5 million in 2015. Africa had 17 data breaches in total, compared with six in 2015. It was not the rise in security breaches that caused the most alarm, however. Gemalto noted in the survey that the delay in disclosing or identifying security breaches was the most concerning factor. In March 2017 Ster-Kinekor in South Africa announced that its website…
By Ahmed Cassim, MD of Hello Paisa The introduction of new banking, investment, credit and insurance products using established mobile money solutions will be critical in including more Africans into the formal financial system. Currently, most adults in the region mainly use mobile money solutions to either buy airtime or make domestic remittance payments to relatives and friends. However, after achieving great success in providing such a service to a large portion of the South African migrant population, the scope for Hello Paisa to launch a mobile money solution and convert an even larger fraction of the unbanked into not only…
by Ben Dickson As artificial intelligence takes leaps at an increasing pace, there’s fear that robots will conquer the future and put humans out of jobs. While technological unemployment is a worry that has its own merits, there are some fields where there is already a shortage of human experts. One of those fields is healthcare. It takes years of education and hands-on experience to train a decent doctor. And as the figures show, there’s a shortage of physicians everywhere. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help alleviate this problem. AI-powered tools can help healthcare workers and doctors improve…
by Angus Brown, co-founder of eBucks.com and MD of Banking Acumen Have we seen the peak of internet banking in South Africa? Although the banks are quite tight-lipped about their usage numbers, I suspect that the number of customers using a desktop computer to do their banking is declining. We know that the majority of logons come from office workers, but we also know that the number of employed people (including government workers) in South Africa is stagnant. While many up-market homes have a desktop PC or a laptop, and optical fibre services have been introduced in certain suburbs, the growth…
By Brett Parker, Managing Director – SAP Africa at SAP When you want to know the future, acknowledge the past. As citizens of a rapidly accelerated world, we are seduced by the idea that our situation is unique. In many ways, it is – not the least how the workplace is changing. But the change in the workplace itself is not new, nor is the regression invited by companies that do not heed this shift. Technology can rapidly alter how work gets done. When the steam engine started appearing in the late 1700s, many sectors were not enthusiastic. They couldn’t…
by Brett Parker, managing director at SAP Africa “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished,” said the wise Benjamin Franklin. But we don’t need to take his word for it: there are many inspired thoughts that punctuate the role of change in business. The more difficult question is when change should happen. This topic makes business leaders nervous. Change is good, but so is stability. The world does not comprise of only mavericks and trailblazers – and even those often reach their stature through steady determination, not constantly rocking the boat. Timing is important, as is a clear view of what…
When Facebook accidentally listed millions of users as “dead” in an embarrassing glitch it was a reminder that everyone needs to plan for their own digital death.
Many executives are realising that now is the time to start defining their analytics strategies, and start building the tools that enable their organisations to make sense of the masses of data streaming in.
There have been a number of suggestions to explain the slowdown in Netflix’s subscriber growth that resulted in its share price falling by 14.5%. By David Glance Netflix’s own theory is that users were put off by a price rise as Netflix phased out legacy price deals for early subscribers. Certainly, the press covered the impending rise extensively and so this may have caused people to cancel subscriptions. A second theory is that subscribers have abandoned the service because of the lack of content. Netflix has been spending its budget on its own content at the expense of licensing deals with…
In 2014, as part of its traditional April Fool’s pranks, Google released a video in which Google Maps VP Brian McClendon announced a job opening for a Pokémon Master. By Eduardo Velloso and Marcus Carter The video showed candidates travelling around the world, from the tallest mountains to the middle of the ocean in their search for the rarest creatures. Instead of pokéballs, they used their phones to capture them. Google’s prank captured viewers imaginations and became a reality. Fast forward two years and the video that started as a tongue-in-cheek prank became reality with the release of Pokémon GO, a…
Ask around – everyone has an opinion about their email and their inbox, and it’s not always positive. By Esther Milne and Scott Ewing From information overload, zero inbox and leaked email scandals to the much-hyped triumph of workflow software like Slack and Asana, email has certainly had a bad rap recently. Email has been with us for about 45 years, since the first such electronic message was sent in 1971. The death of email was first predicted in 1989. Back then, it was the fax that apparently signalled its ultimate end. Yet despite stories of its demise, virtually every internet user…
By Andy Tattersal To consider how being constantly connected through computers and mobile devices has encroached on our working lives, consider the experiment about the frog in a pan of boiling water. A frog in a pan of cold water that is gently heated will not realise it’s boiling to death if the change is sufficiently gradual. In the same way, the web has affected our attention span and so our productivity – slowly but surely the heat of distraction has increased as decades of internet evolution has added email, websites, instant messaging, forums, social media and video. Striving to…
By Tony Smith, CEO at Oxygen8 Traditional retailers are caught up in an intense battle against the world of online shopping in a desperate fight to save the high street. Right at the forefront of the battle is the mobile phone, and retail marketers and brand owners are just beginning to realise the key role it can play in reversing the trend of reduced store footfall and redressing the odds back in their favour. A key element in this fight back is harnessing the power of location-based marketing. By targetting mobile phones with relevant and personalised offers – location-based services…
With its ultra-dynamic proportions, elegantly sporty lines, low-slung silhouette and innovative design features, the new BMW i8 represents a new generation of sports car. Bringing together hallmark features of the BMW brand with the design language developed specially for BMW i cars creates a progressive aesthetic which faithfully communicates the performance attributes, efficiency and innovative premium character of the plug-in hybrid sports car. The launch of the new BMW i8 sees the world’s first sports car to be purpose-built with sustainability in mind complete its journey from vision to reality. Its unmistakable, emotion-stirring looks can be put down to a prototype design that was first…
To help capture and share more of life’s moments on-the-go, Lenovo today introduced three new exciting devices to the smartphone portfolio: the new VIBE Shot and A7000 smartphones and the Lenovo Pocket Projector. The company said with connectivity and mobility driving consumers to record and share more of life’s moments, it designed the VIBE Shot to help them capture every moment. “Our first 2-in-1 camera smartphone, we developed the Lenovo VIBE Shot to be a true crossover device. It’s first a fabulous camera that shutterbugs will love, and secondly, a performance-laden, standalone smartphone,” the company said. “Our latest Lenovo smartphones…