Author: Staff Writer

Evolving technology and the impacts of COVID-19 have resulted in workplaces that are changing faster than ever. To keep pace with the rapid advances in the workplace and avoid skills shortages, almost half of employees will need to be reskilled with critical skills by 2025 As the workplace becomes increasingly more tech-driven, human contributions and soft skills are going to be increasingly sought after. And the best way to ensure these skills are retained within a company will be to reskill, says Jackie Kennedy, Founder of the LeadMe Academy. LeadMe is a cutting-edge, first of its kind learning and development…

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) today announced it has received six applications in respect of the International Mobile Telecommunications spectrum licensing process. ICASA said this marks an important and critical step towards the auctioning of high-demand spectrum in March 2022. The following applications were received by the closing date and time, in the order of submission: 1. Cell C 2. MTN 3. Vodacom 4. Telkom 5. Rain Networks 6. Liquid Telecoms In terms of the published timetable for this licensing process, ICASA said it will announce the qualified bidders on 21 February 2022. ICASA said this will…

Carry1st, Africa’s leading mobile games publisher, CrazyLabs, a global top three hyper-casual games developer and publisher with nearly five billion downloads to date, and Jyväskylä Game Industry Hub from Finland are hosting their first-ever hyper-casual game development jam, ‘The Game of Thrones Jam’. Designed to identify top gaming talent from across South Africa and Finland, the hackathon is taking place between February 3rd and 7th 2022 and will pit teams from South Africa and Finland against each other as they aim to design and develop the best hyper-casual mobile game. The three-and-a-half-day online event is supported by the Digi &…

German software company SAP is making a foray into FinTech through the acquisition of US-based provider of working capital management solutions Taulia. Taulia is a FinTech provider of working capital management solutions headquartered in San Francisco, California. Taulia helps companies access value tied up in their payables, receivables and inventory. A network of more than two million businesses use Taulia’s platform to determine when they want to pay and be paid. Having built their presence up since 2009, Taulia is one of the early movers in the area of working capital management and supply chain finance and processes more than…

Bharti Airtel and Google today announced that they will partner on a long-term, multi-year agreement to accelerate the growth of India’s digital ecosystem. Together, they will work to bring best-in-class end-to-end products to serve customer needs, provide quality customer experience, and bring their expertise to solve problems of affordability, access, and digital inclusion. As part of this partnership, Google intends to invest up to $1 billion or R15.4 billion, as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund, which includes equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, to be identified and agreed on mutually agreeable terms…

The Huawei nova Y9a has just launched in South Africa. It comes loaded with a 64MP quad-camera setup, a 6.63-inch FullView Display, 40W Huawei SuperCharge and 8GB + 128GB of storage. The device’s camera includes a 64MP main camera, an 8MP ultra-wide angle camera, a 2MP depth camera and a 2MP macro camera. Huawei says these four cameras work together to create professional looking photographs with a 34% higher resolution and excellent colour reproduction capabilities. Photos taken on your Huawei nova Y9a can comfortably be printed as large as 3.2m x 2.4m. Low lighting conditions are no match for the…

Acronis, a Swiss cyber protection firm, today launched its Cyber Cloud Data Centre in Johannesburg. The new data centre is one of 111 new data centres being deployed by the company. The centre gives service provider partners access to a full range of cyber protection solutions upon which they can build new services while delivering faster access, constant data availability, and data sovereignty to their clients. Having these capabilities is key for South African service providers today, as cyber threats loom over the business landscape and data accessibility, privacy, and compliance demands grow. “A local presence is a necessity for…

Convergence Partners, owned by ICT industry veteran Andile Ngcaba, has secured $20 million or R305 million in funds from the Mineworkers Provident Fund (MWPF). The investment was done through Convergence Partners Digital Infrastructure Fund. Convergence Partners has backing from several international development finance institutions with the aim of accelerating the digital infrastructure rollout critically needed across the African continent to address the problems of availability, quality and cost of digital infrastructure. The allocation from MWPF will be used to fund several types of infrastructure needed to enable Africa’s active participation in the digital economy. These include communication backbone infrastructure such as…

Searches for electric vehicles (EVs) surged by 110% to half a million in 2021. BMW received a whopping eight million more Consumer Advert Views last year. And over 637 million online vehicle searches were conducted last year. These are just some of the trends to emerge in the latest AutoTrader Car Industry Report. The study – which covers January to December 2021 – is entitled #SwitchedOn. “Following a challenging 2020, which saw the automotive market grinding to a virtual halt, 2021 was a year that forced us to evolve and find products and services that met the change car shoppers…

As of today, MTN prepaid customers will pay only R299 for 30GB for monthly data (down from R349) and R199 for 21GB weekly (down from R249) when purchasing MTN EverydayGigs. MTN has also introduced a new EverydayGig 3-day offer of 1.5GB for R39, a 7-day offer of 3.5GB for R55 and a monthly offer of 15GB for only R179. “We believe in choice and flexible data solutions for all customers. With continuing work and lifestyle changes, and difficulties still faced by many, this is becoming more and more important. We hope that our revised Everyday Gigs pricing will empower more…