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…