Author: Staff Writer

With the high mortality rate of owls and, as one of the most common wildlife casualties brought into veterinary practices, MTN is launching a conservation partnership with the Owl Rescue Centre to provide safe homes for owls nesting in MTN towers. Today’s launch of the #OwlNetwork project is aimed at securing urban homes for Barn Owls and will see 100 boxes installed in network towers. MTN Barn Owl boxes are being made from recycled materials and the little houses will be installed in high-density areas across Johannesburg North and West, with the other provinces to follow. “MTN has a responsibility…

South Africa recently witnessed civil unrest that led to the destruction of infrastructure, looting, and violence that severely impacted many small and medium businesses and informal traders in parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Telkom has heeded the call to help clean up, rebuild, and grow SA by launching the SME Relief Project. The Telkom SME Relief fund, currently valued at R10 million, is aimed at providing aid to small business owners to rebuild their businesses and to urge South Africans and the private sector to rally behind SMEs. Small enterprises are crucial to SA’s economic growth and employ between 50%…

More than 100 women entrepreneurs have attended the first segment of Huawei South Africa’s Women4Tech digital skills training programme. By the end of the programme, Huawei aims to help women headed SMMEs advance their skills and help them use new technologies to grow, improve, and digitise their businesses. The cloud segment of the training kicked off with an introduction to cloud computing by Michael Langeveld, vice president Huawei Cloud Southern Africa. “Cloud computing is simply a big company taking care of servers in one location and providing capacity as people need them,” he said. He also explained the different types…

Imagine this: The sound of people working is constantly punctuated by the screech-and-scratch of dot matrix printers and the beeping of fax machines. Mobile phones are only just becoming popular and are not yet smart. In fact, professionals are more likely to engage in a quick game of Snake than manage a full productivity suite via their AI-enabled smartphones. Conference calls involve groups huddled around a speaker in a boardroom, instead of teams having discussions in full high-definition via their company-issued laptops. Sound far-fetched? This was the office of the early 2000s, a mere twenty years ago, when the world…

SMEs around the world have been severely affected by the COVID-19-induced economic downturn. Maintaining working capital, a key challenge faced by SMEs has become an even more urgent concern amidst economic uncertainty. Delayed payments, emergency expenditures and incorrect forecasts can easily derail the fine balance between incoming and outgoing funds that small businesses must constantly maintain. As small businesses may not yet have established trust relationships with their suppliers, they’re often obliged to pay for supplies up-front in full, further complicating cash-flow conundrums. Traditional bank-backed lending models, with their sluggish turnaround times, have added to the difficulties faced by SMEs,…

New York-based FinTech player Wahed, the parent company of the halal financial investment platform Wahed Invest, has received a new regulatory license from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), the regulator of the South African financial markets. Launched in 2017, Wahed runs an online investment management platform in the United States which ensures its portfolio does not include investments in companies in restricted sectors such as gambling, firearms and alcohol. Acquiring a new license has been a huge achievement for the FinTech company as it ramps up efforts to deliver investment services in the country. With this regulatory approval, Wahed…

Orderin, South Africa’s pioneering food delivery app, has relaunched as a B2B delivery-as-a-service platform, giving retailers across various industries the power to move online and deliver goods in minutes, without the cost of building and owning all the infrastructure needed to do so. Founded in 2012, Orderin built South Africa’s first food delivery app, paving the way for a robust and competitive sector. Their new model focuses on delivery-as-a-service, as well as providing all the software (SaaS) organisations of varying sizes need to power their on-demand experience – from customer facing technology to delivery fulfilment. With plans of a phased…

Paxful, a global peer-to-peer FinTech platform, announced Transfer to Bank. The service will debut first in South Africa via a partnership with OVEX, the South African-based cryptocurrency exchange platform specializing in over-the-counter (OTC) trading. Utilizing OVEX’s instant cashout mechanism, all Paxful users in South Africa will now be able to convert their Bitcoin directly into local currency (ZAR). This new, completely automated feature will work alongside all banks in South Africa. Paxful plans to open up the service to a handful of other countries in the coming months. Additionally, the company expects to add Ethereum (ETH) and Tether (USDT) to…

Teraco, Africa’s largest vendor-neutral data centre and interconnection services provider, has completed the JB3 data centre facility, located within the Isando Campus in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. This multi-billion-rand facility represents a strategic addition to Platform Teraco, offering enterprises a scalable platform for IT infrastructure deployment while sustaining performance, reliability, security, and the widest network choice. JB3 comprises 45000sqm of building structure, 12000sqm of data hall space, and 29MW of critical power load. When combined with the existing Isando Campus facilities, the critical power load totals 40MW across the campus data centre footprint with room for further growth.…

The Shoprite Group has launched its new ground-breaking digital business hub, ShopriteX which is piloting Checkers Rush, an automated, cashless “no queues, no checkout, no waiting” concept store, where employees can grab products and walk out. Incubated over the past year, ShopriteX is combining data science and technology create more personalised shopping experiences for customers. ShopriteX already delivered two industry-leading innnovations – Xtra Savings, South Africa’s fastest-growing rewards programme with 20 million members to date, and Checkers Sixty60 the first on-demand 60-minute supermarket grocery delivery service in South Africa. “We are serious about being Africa’s most customer-centric retailer, and the launch of ShopriteX represents our investment in fit-for-the-future precision retail, which is increasingly digital and data-led,” said Pieter Engelbrecht, Shoprite Group CEO. The launch is part of Shoprite’s…