Author: Contributor
By Dave Glass, founder and MD of Electrum Every month, South African retailers receive billions of Rands in payments from their customers. Behind the scenes, payments technology plays a critical role at retailers, ensuring a fast and smooth shopping experience for consumers like you. It’s a crucial part of our financial backbone, that most of us take little notice of, even though we interact with it daily at stores, online and on our mobile phones. Here are top retail payments insights: Get ready for new payment methods Tech savvy consumers are demanding quicker, more convenient and more engaging ways to…
By Cameron Beveridge, Director: Cloud, SAP Africa The future of business is in the cloud. That is the message from global analysts as the latest IT sales figures show a marked shift away from hardware. The shift to cloud services and other Digital Business solutions has slashed Gartner’s global IT spending growth forecasts by half: a cut of $67bn for this year alone, with data centre growth predicted at a modest 0.3% in 2017. This is not necessarily bad news, depending on where you are with your digital transformation journey. The same Gartner report expects growth in enterprise software spending…
By Staff Writer The BMW Group has unveiled its vision of zero-emission urban mobility on two wheels: the BMW Motorrad Concept Link at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este 2017. The electric scooter is inspired by the BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100, the design study unites digital connectivity with the demands of urban mobility on two wheels. The new and emphatically function-driven architecture provides a high level of riding pleasure due to the E-drive. The BMW Motorrad Concept Link is ideally suited to meet the requirements of modern urban mobility with fast acceleration and easy handling. Inspired by the BMW Motorrad…
By Staff Writer In a bid to make it easier for customers to access content in the most affordable way, Vodacom is working with YouTube to launch YouTube Smart Offline. This service allows Vodacom’s Android customers to schedule video downloads overnight (between 00:00 and 05:00). With YouTube Smart Offline, customers can save on data costs by purchasing Vodacom’s lower priced ‘Night Owl Bundles’ when downloading their favourite videos. The service is currently available to Prepaid and Hybrid customers with contract bundles expected to launch in the next couple of months. “We have always emphasised that our competitive advantage lies in…
By Vimal J. Naikeny, chief technology officer for Digital & Cloud Business at Huawei Technologies The intelligent world has three defining characteristics: All things are getting digital, gradually getting connected and some are even gaining the ability to sense, that’s how fast ICT is advancing. In an intelligent world, devices are playing the role of the “feelers”, in an all-sensing environment. Networks have started connecting everything, and the cloud is becoming the source of intelligence behind all things. These three elements form an architecture that promotes seamless interaction between devices, information pipes, and the cloud. This is the era of diversification, an…
by Anton van Heerden, MD and executive vice-president of Africa & Middle East at Sage This week (25 May) at BotCon in Cape Town, South African developers and enterprises will showcase some of the ways they’re putting the newest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to work. Some of the latest developments are a little scary, especially for those who have grown up with rogue AIs and robots in science-fiction or have read the headlines about how we’ll lose millions of jobs worldwide to automation by 2020. What does this mean for the average business builder or entrepreneur in South Africa? My…
When Chris Mulder, head of collections at The Unlimited, wanted to automate a simple process, he hit a wall. IT’s plate was overflowing and his project ranked too low in priority to get attention any time soon. Even if there was a spot, he’d have to face the daunting bureaucratic lumbering required: “If you want a technology change, you have to go through the process of business analysis, compiling business requirement documents, have a technical spec drawn up, all with a lot of back and forth. It’s incredibly tedious and, if you aren’t technical, tough to follow.” The slow age…
By Reshaad Sha, CEO at SqwidNet Along with the rest of the world, South Africa is in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, in which the smart use of information and technology is reshaping societies. One of the most apparent ways in which this is happening can be seen is in the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), where smart, connected devices are being deployed in cities and industries globally, to gather data and glean contextual insights which are used to achieve higher levels of efficiency, productivity and utilization of scarce and natural resources. The reach of IoT is…
By Staff Writer The fact that 80% of cellphone users keep their mobile devices within arm’s reach, coupled with growing acceptance of preteen mobile use, means parenting in the age of always-on connectivity has taken on a decidedly digital edge. That’s the word from South Africa’s Wireless Application Service Providers’ Association (WASPA) which adds that the solution and the challenge of protecting children from digital threats are two sides of the same mobile coin. “Parents cannot hope to be ‘always-on’, standing ready to guide their children as they navigate social media, over the top (OTT) messaging platforms and the mobile…
By Hans Geldenhuys, managing sales director at Intelsat Africa is projected to be one of the world’s fastest-growing television markets over the next decade. To cement that position, cable distributors are banking on population surges in some of the continent’s largest cities, and fresh, new content that resonates with the indigenous culture. It goes without saying that viewers are drawn to programming with storylines, characters and even real-life scenarios they can relate to. Intelsat has been part of the television fabric in Africa for many decades. We were the first satellite operator to provide connectivity to educational networks and to…