Author: Gugu Lourie
MTN’s Payment Break will enable contract customers to take a subscription fee payment holiday during the frugal months of January and February. by Staff Writer South Africa’s second biggest mobile phone announced on Monday the service, which will be available to customers who sign up on a new 24 month contract. The service provide new customers with a subscription fee payment holiday. Qualifying customers who sign-up in January 2017 will only start making payments towards their contracts subscription from March and those who sign-up in February 2017, will start their subscription payment in April. “MTN is excited to launch Payment Break,…
By Christian Mattmann In today’s data-rich world, companies, governments and individuals want to analyze anything and everything they can get their hands on – and the World Wide Web has loads of information. At present, the most easily indexed material from the web is text. But as much as 89 to 96 percent of the content on the internet is actually something else – images, video, audio, in all thousands of different kinds of nontextual data types. Further, the vast majority of online content isn’t available in a form that’s easily indexed by electronic archiving systems like Google’s. Rather, it requires…
On January 5, 2017 during his CES keynote Nissan chairman of the board and CEO Carlos Ghosn announced several advancements as part of the Nissan Intelligent Mobility blueprint for transforming how cars are driven, powered and integrated into wider society. Highlights included: New Nissan LEAF On stage at CES, Ghosn announced plans to launch a new Nissan LEAF, with ProPILOT technology, enabling autonomous drive functionality for single-lane highway driving. The new LEAF is coming in the near future and represents the next chapter of Nissan Intelligent Power. This new LEAF will build on the company’s leadership in electric vehicles, which…
The new Nokia smartphone has been officially revealed by Finish firm HMD Global, which in late 2016 secured the exclusive Nokia brand licensing rights in mobile phones. The smartphone will be exclusively available in China through JD.com. With over 552 million smartphone users in China in 2016, a figure that is predicted to grow to more than 593 million users by 20171, it is a strategically important market where premium design and quality is highly valued by consumers. “The decision by HMD to launch its first Android smartphone into China is a reflection of the desire to meet the real world…
The ambition of Mercedes-Benz is a car that helps to promote the well-being of its passengers. by Mercedes Benz Mercedes-Benz vehicles of tomorrow will enhance the fitness and well-being of their passengers in an even more individualised way while offering worlds of experience for all the senses. In connection with Mercedes me, Mercedes-Benz is also planning a holistic ecosystem to assist the user with an active and healthy lifestyle also when away from the vehicle. The data that have been authorised by the user will be bundled in the vehicle’s own back-end to provide personalised recommendations for greater well-being and…
If you are one of the majority of people who make New Year’s resolutions, you are also very likely to fail at keeping them. Losing weight and being more active are always in the top 5 resolutions and unfortunately for the majority, the hardest to ever achieve for any significant period of time. No amount of technology or novel psychological approaches will help as we are unfortunately battling with our fundamental programming fuelled by the most primitive of drives. by David Glance Each year, people in countries like the US, UK and Australia are getting heavier and doing no more activity…
German carmaker Audi aims to gain a lead over its rivals, BMW, Ford and Telsa in bringing self-driving cars to its customers. Audi has partnered with NVIDIA and Mobileeye on piloted driving. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Audi is presenting the Audi Q7 deep learning concept, a piloted driving car made possible thanks to collaboration with NVIDIA. The car orients itself by means of a front camera with 2 megapixel resolution, and the camera communicates with an NVIDIA Drive PX 2 processing unit, which in turn controls the steering with high precision. The high-performance controller is specially…
BMW i is the first automotive brand in the world to offer customers an interactive, 3-D augmented reality experience of their products in a pilot programme which is being rolled-out from today. Using Tango, Google’s smartphone augmented reality technology, customers can explore their ideal BMW i3 or i8, as a real-size, interactive visualization. “Our vehicles are emotional products and to get that emotional feeling, you really need to experience them,” said Andrea Castronovo, BMW Group vice president, Sales Strategy and Future Retail. Piloting initially in a double-digit number of sales outlets, selected Product Geniuses will be provided with a consumer…
Imagine, for a moment, the technology of 2017 had existed on Jan. 11, 1964 – the day Luther Terry, surgeon general of the United States, released “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States.” by Donald A. Barclay What would be some likely scenarios? The social media noise machine explodes; conservative websites immediately paint the report as a nanny-government attack on personal freedom and masculinity; the report’s findings are hit with a flood of satirical memes, outraged Facebook posts, attack videos and click-bait fake news stories; Big Tobacco’s publicity machine begins pumping out…
A recently published study on the long-run effects of mobile money on economic outcomes in Kenya provides some valuable insights that will benefit economic development and financial inclusion policies across Africa. by Sarah Logan The study found that increased access to mobile money has reduced poverty in Kenya, particularly among female-headed households. Rapid expansion of mobile money has lifted an estimated 2% of Kenyan households (some 194,000) out of extreme poverty. It has also enabled 185,000 women to move out of subsistence farming and into business or sales occupations. Mobile money is a form of electronic money that allows you to…
The internet may be the most comprehensive source of information ever created but it’s also the biggest distraction. Set out to find an answer on the web and it’s all too easy to find yourself flitting between multiple tabs, wondering how you ended up on a page so seemingly irrelevant to the topic you started on. by Peggy Alexopoulou Past research has shown that we have a very limited capacity to perform two or more tasks at the same time and brainpower suffers when we try. But my new study suggests that some people are better at multitasking online than others.…
By Sonia Livingstone and Mariya Stoilova The internet has reached almost every corner of the globe, but most research on how it is used, particularly among children, focuses on the US and Europe. This is a problem, because according to best estimates one in three children around the world now uses the internet – most of them outside the West. An increasingly global internet requires increasingly international policy decisions – which must rely on global evidence. The report from Global Kids Online is the first stage of an ambitious project to find out which children are using the internet, what they are…
In 2016, self-driving cars went mainstream. Uber’s autonomous vehicles became ubiquitous in neighborhoods where I live in Pittsburgh, and briefly in San Francisco. The U.S. Department of Transportation issued new regulatory guidance for them. By David Danks Countless papers and columns discussed how self-driving cars should solve ethical quandaries when things go wrong. And, unfortunately, 2016 also saw the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle. Autonomous technologies are rapidly spreading beyond the transportation sector, into health care, advanced cyberdefense and even autonomous weapons. In 2017, we’ll have to decide whether we can trust these technologies. That’s going to be much harder…
The transaction provides a scalable platform for further long-term growth, enabling Liquid Telecom to deliver on its vision of a more connected Africa.
Durban’s external perception may be changing as its technology experts command international attention.
South Africa’s retailer Woolworths launches free Wi-Fi access across stores as retailer experiences double-digit growth in online and mobile shopping this festive season.
Deterrence focuses on making potential adversaries think twice about attacking, forcing them to consider the costs of doing so, as well as the consequences that might come from a counterattack.
Prime Video members can also control how much data they use when streaming and downloading video by choosing between Good, Better and Best visual quality settings, all of which utilize Amazon Prime Video’s state of the art video compression technology to use less data without reducing visual quality.
In the very near future, the poorest of the poor will use technology to educate themselves and access financial products and services, anywhere and at any time.
he fight for survival in a digital world will be won by companies who understand what their customers want and who are smart enough give it to them via the device they are most connected to – their phones.
In thinking about the impact of the internet in politics, we usually consider how social media, websites and other online resources are used as a vehicle of political communication. Yet, its impact as a symbol and a powerful narrative is equally strong
We are ready to use the London office as a base to make inroads in the fast-growing global IoT market.
A Car For Free Thinkers Embracing Sustainable Drive To Avoid Petrol Stations.
Researcher who has studied online news for 20 years says people fall for fake news because they don’t value journalistic sources and consider themselves and their friends as credible news sources.
People who think like hackers have some really good ideas about how to protect digital privacy during turbulent times. We can learn from them.