Author: Gugu Lourie

Checkers on Friday placed an advert in Australian publication, The Sydney Herald, as well as the UK’s London Evening Standard, highlighting what it called its “value offering”. Africa’s biggest retailers has no stores in either Sydney or London “We want to remind the many South Africans living in both the United Kingdom and Australia, that our country is a great place to live, and Checkers makes living here even better,” says Mike Middleton, Chief Marketing Officer for Checkers.   “Checkers is the country’s number one value supermarket* focused on saving customers money on their daily groceries – and that extends to premium food and…

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Spanish technology company TORSA has launched its pan-African business hub in South Africa with intentions to drastically reduce mining incidents, and most importantly fatalities. “The launch of TORSA’s office in Johannesburg is another step in our goal of taking our technology to all the main mining markets in the world, particularly Africa,” says Gabino de Diego, Director of Business Development at TORSA. “South Africa is a very interesting market, not only because of its mining potential, but also because of its strategic role within the African continent, as well as its current commitment to apply technologies and procedures focused on…

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Microsoft today announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with with OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT. “Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world,” said Microsoft in a blog post. This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies. “We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance…

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Music streaming service Spotify announced today that it will be restructuring the company affecting 600 employees. The music streaming services said the following will apply to all impacted employees: Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees with the average employee receiving approximately 5 months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. PTO: All accrued and unused vacation will be paid out to any departing employee. Healthcare: We will continue to cover healthcare for employees during their severance period. Immigration support: For employees whose immigration status is connected with their employment, HRBPs are…

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Eskom announced today that evening loadshedding will be maintained at Stage 4 daily at 16:00 – 05:00 while Stage 3 loadshedding will be implemented daily at 05:00 – 16:00 until further notice. A further update will be published as soon as any significant changes occur, said Eskom. “Over the past 24 hours two generating units at Tutuka Power Station were taken offline for repairs while two units at the Arnot Power were returned to service,” the power utility added. “Planned maintenance to 6 018MW while breakdowns currently amount to 15 797MW of generating capacity. “Eskom requests members of the public…

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Mercedes-Benz is funding a global fellowship that will provide training and scholarships to thousands of young people from around the world to implement their projects in the areas of environmental sustainability and decarbonization. To provide the seed money for the fellowship, Mercedes-Benz auctioned the world’s most valuable car, a 1955 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé, for a record price of €135 million or R2.5 billion. Mercedes-Benz will donate proceeds from the auction of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé to fund beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship The global fellowship programme will aim to scale up to support up to 1,000 young people per…

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Bitwarden, open source password manager trusted by millions, today announced the acquisition of Passwordless.dev, a European-based open source startup that enables developers to create passkeys and other forms of WebAuthn passwordless experiences quickly. A core part of the FIDO2 specification, WebAuthn is a modern open authentication standard supported by browsers and technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. “Most companies want to invest in passwordless solutions such as Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, and other forms of web authentication to create better user experiences and stronger security” Tweet this This acquisition comes on the heels of a $100M…

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The DA has been reliably informed that the South African Post Office (SAPO) aims to cut staff salaries by 40% as of next month – while their looting of staff medical aid and pension contributions is ongoing. Medical Aid benefits have once again been withdrawn from both staff and pensioners because of non-payment – despite the fact that the staff lose that amount from their salaries and pensions each month. This is despite management assurances to the Communications Portfolio Committee that they would turn things around. “We have also learnt that the current CEO today earns nearly R4 million per…

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JSE and Nasdaq-listed fintech group Lesaka Technologies, formerly known as Net1, today announced the resignation of its chief accounting officer, Alex Smith. The resignation of Smith is effective 1 March 2023. Lesaka said Smith is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. The company added that Smith will assist in consolidating the roles and responsibilities of Chief Accounting Officer (CAO) into the ambit of Lesaka’s highly experienced Finance team. “The past 18 months have been a time of significant transformation for Lesaka,” said Chris Meyer: Group CEO. “While it has been challenging, our focus on execution has resulted in substantial strides…

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South African payments platform Payfast is looking to continue its acquisition spree. In 2021, DPO Group, of which Payfast is a part, was acquired by Network International, a globally renowned digital commerce provider in the Middle East and Africa. The company is now known as DPO by Network. “We are currently exploring a number of partnerships,” said Brendon Williamson, managing director at Payfast, without giving further details. “Even though we have gone through an acquisition phase as DPO Group and now DPO by Network, we will continue that acquisition phase as Payfast supported by Networks. “So there are potential acquisitions…

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