Driving differentiation and innovation through software
It is said that today’s business world is increasingly high on velocity and is software driven. It’s also believed that sooner or later, those two realities will push companies to rethink their potential and reinvent themselves. While some aspects of technology are moving with incredible speed – social, mobile, analytics and cloud as well as wearables, crowd-sourcing and the Internet of Things (IoT) – business processes and applications lag behind.
Industry reports – such as Forrester’s IT Speed: The Crisis and the Saviour of the Enterprise – show that two-thirds of business executives believe their organisations are currently being disrupted by information technology and 72 percent agree that they will be disrupted over the next 12 months.
Click on the link about in the subtitle to find out more.
The Next Einstein Forum
Africa’s global forum for science in Africa launched its second call for applications for the NEF The Next Einstein Forum (NEF) Fellows Programme. This new class will join 15 of Africa’s top young scientists, the NEF’s first Fellows Class, and will present their research and innovations at the NEF Global Gathering 2018, to be held in Kigali, Rwanda, in March 2018.
The applications to the NEF Fellows programme will run from 15 November 2016 to 27 January 2017 and applications can be accessed at http://NEF.org/nef-fellows.
In addition to attending and presenting at the NEF Global Gathering 2018, NEF Fellows will participate in research tours and visiting scientist weeks with partners. NEF Fellows will be facilitated in speaking and publishing globally and supported in their research. The tenure of the NEF Fellows runs until 30 June 2019. The selected NEF Fellows will be announced in June 2017. To meet some of the current NEF Fellows, watch the video.
Vodafone Internet affected by Thunder storms but have you checked out their new developments?
After a successful launch of the #MyVodafoneApp and #Chat+ App on 11th- November at Sheraton Hotel in Kampala, Vodafone Internet went off on Monday 14th- November immediately after the stormy rains.
According to a post on Facebook, that was posted after people took to Social Media to complain about the unavailability of internet; the problem was caused by the thunderstorm that happened that day.
When it was fixed, the internet was back with a gift of 2GB free data to last month – as per the Customer Care conversation I had – to all Vodafone customers. This looks like an addtional indirect apology to customers even if Vodafone has not mentioned it yet.
About the new developments and features on their products to offer good customer care and services, these two bloggers @Nevender and @therisingpage on twitter; wrote on their blogs nevender.com and kirabobyabashaija.wordpress.com and said that the features ‘give power’ and ‘recognize that customer is KING’ respectively.
Click on the link and understand why,.
Dark Web Isn’t All Dark
“Anonymity does not equate criminality, merely a desire for privacy,” wrote Clare Gollnick and Emily Wilson, the authors of the Terbium study.
Drugs, child porn, hit men for hire: The dark web doesn’t have a particularly glowing reputation. When the leader of a illegal-drug marketplace called the Silk Road was arrested in 2013, many were introduced to the hidden side of the internet for the first time as the home of the notorious “eBay for drugs.”
But because of how the dark web is organized—or rather, how it isn’t—it’s nearly impossible to determine the kinds of sites that populate it. By definition, the dark web isn’t searchable by engines like Google, nor is it accessible by normal browsers like Chrome or Safari. Most of the coverage about the dark web focuses on the strange and unusual: marketplaces for stolen Netflix credentials, personal data.
New research from Terbium Labs, a company that analyzes the dark web, took a small snapshot of onion sites—a random collection of 400 sites its web-crawling robots had found in the course of one day in August—and divided up the sites based on their purpose and content. The results suggest that less than half of what goes on beyond the reach of search engines and traditional browsers is illegal.
You can read more about this by clciking on this -> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-safely-access-and-navigate-the-dark-web/
Economist Suggest Bitcoins for Zimbabwe
Bitcoin could be the solution for Zimbabwe’s currency woes suggests economist Philip Haslam, co-author of When Money Destroys Nations, a book about regular people in Zimbabwe who lived through hyperinflation.
Though his assertion is not new, it is one of the first to come from someone who has researched the consequences of money printing as an aspect of the country’s hyperinflation.
‘If Zimbabwe establishes a privatized bitcoin national currency, if the market naturally went to a Bitcoin type currency, as other currencies around the world indicate weakness with money printing happening, you’d have a whole lot of currency flowing into Zimbabwe,” Haslam says in a piece by an Institute of Security Studies ISS Consultant, Simon Allison. “Zimbabwe would transform from a basket case to a global banking center in a stable krypto-currency. And that would be fairly quick.”
Click on this to read more -> http://www.itwebafrica.com/home-page/e-commerce/703-zimbabwe/237060-economist-suggests-bitcoin-for-zimbabwe
MultiChoice enhances Streaming Services
The talk has been on after Netflix launched in Africa, that MultiChoice (DSTV and GoTV) were to lose customers because of the new comer offering people the freedom to watch what they wanted at cost friendly prices.
But last week MultiChoice launched the new DStv Explora 2 decoder from ARRIS International plc to customers in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, that is aimed to make it easy for customers to access MultiChoice’s growing on demand services.
In the future, its HEVC technology that ARRIS brings on board will reduce the bandwidth needed to stream or download shows, helping to lower the data charges that customers incur when streaming or downloading content from one of the DStv services.
Also it’s rumoured that this development will spread out to customers being able to choose which channels they want to watch and spend their money on.
Africa’s mobile application usage report released
Opera released its State of the Mobile Web Africa 2016 Report, highlighting mobile internet trends across the continent, including consumer browsing behavior and app usage. Opera – known for its compression technology and mobile browsers, including Opera Mini – compiles regular, global mobile web reports, shedding light on opportunities and challenges within the digital environment.
Findings reveal that South Africa (SA) ranks number one in Africa in terms of app usage, with a third of its population using mobile applications, followed by 31% in Ghana, 28% in Nigeria, 19% in Kenya and 18% in Uganda.
When you look at the rest of Africa, Ghanaians, Kenyans, Seychellois and Mauritians are the highest data users with an average usage of over 160MB/month, while Nigeria (with 76% of internet traffic going through mobile) is the most “mobilised” country in the world ahead of SA and India. Findings also show that visits to streaming video websites on Opera Mini in Africa have increased by 36% since 2012. Users from Tanzania (22%) are most likely to visit YouTube followed by South Africa (20%) and Ghana (19%).
To access the full report click here
Airtel money slashes money transfer rates
As the festive season draws closer, Airtel Uganda announced a slash in the Person to person money transfer charges in a bid to enable its customers send money affordably throughout the festive season. Money transfer charges have been reduced to as low as UGX 180 – currently one of the lowest rates in the Uganda telecommunications industry.
Next cyber-fraud prevention software unveiled
Click on the subtitle above to read out which software this is.
And a little Gif fun…
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