Category: TECH

Sources Intimate that Rocket Internet is preparing a Jumia IPO

Dianne Jacobs
Banking Crisis

Reuters sources have intimated that German start-up investor Rocket Internet (RKET.DE) is preparing its African online shopping platform Jumia for a possible New York listing in the first quarter of 2019 which could value the firm at about $1 billion. Citi (C.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Berenberg are coordinating the IPO, the sources said. Shares worth up to $250 million may be sold, one of the sources said, adding that no final decision about the timing or metrics of the deal had yet been taken. The investor and the banks…

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Surprise overdue dual-SIM support coming to the iPhones

olivia Craig
Apple

Apple’s introducing letting you embrace your inner duality with your iPhone. At Wednesday’s Apple event, the company announced the launch of dual-SIM support for the iPhone. Both the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max will offer the dual SIM card option. This will allow you to have two different phone numbers and two different carriers on the same phone. The dual SIM support is possible because Apple’s newest iPhones will have an eSIM as well as a regular nano SIM card. The eSIM means you won’t have to swap…

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Fintech Will Contribute $150 Billion to Africa’s GDP by 2022

Dianne Jacobs

The contribution of the financial-technology industry to sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output will increase by at least $40 billion to $150 billion by 2022, according to Financial Sector Deepening Africa, a development-finance organization. The industry currently employs about 3 million people directly and indirectly in the region, FSD Africa Financial Markets Director Evans Osano said in an interview on Thursday. Sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product is about $1.6 trillion, according to data compiled by the International Monetary Fund. “If you look at the value chain, most of that money is coming…

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SEC Suspends Exchange-Traded Bitcoin and Ether Investment Vehicles as market crash continues

olivia Craig

Ether, the second-largest virtual currency, slumped 8.9% from its level at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Bitcoin lost 2.1%, while the market capitalization of digital assets tracked by CoinMarketCap.com shrank to $197 billion — down about $640 billion from its January peak. Cryptocurrencies have declined for five of the past six weeks amid concern that a broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than some had anticipated. That worry was underscored over the weekend after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily…

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Google reportedly paid millions of dollars in secret data deal with Mastercard to track retail sales

Editor
Facebook

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for. The revelation comes amid heightened concern about how much consumer data is consumed by tech companies like Google. Earlier this year, Facebook was criticized when data on as many as 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, raising…

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San Francisco judge orders bail payment in Bitcoin

A federal judge in San Fracisco has ordered a cyber-criminal to pay their bail charges in Bitcoin, inadvertently stimulating cryptocurrency mainstream adoption. The Daily Post – a local Palo Alto newspaper – reports Martin Marisch has been charged with hacking the well-known video games company Electronic Arts, responsible for popular titles like FIFA, The Sims, and Battlefield. Marisch, the Daily Post reports, managed to gain access to EA’s central computer systems, and obtain 25,000 customer records. Had the attack not been caught, Marisch could’ve used this information for substantial financial gain.…

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Bitcoin Sinks Below $6,000 as Almost Every Cryptocurrency face downfall

Bitcoin dropped below $6,000 and dozens of smaller digital tokens tumbled as this month’s selloff in cryptocurrencies showed few signs of letting up. The largest digital currency fell as much as 6.2 percent to $5,887 as of 3:07 p.m. in Hong Kong, the lowest level since June, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Ether sank as much as 13 percent, while all but three of the 100 biggest cryptocurrencies tracked by Coinmarketcap.com recorded declines over the past 24 hours. The total market capitalization of virtual currencies dropped to $192 billion from…

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Miss.Africa Digital Announces the 2018 $7,000 Seed Fund Winners, Kumasi Hive scoops top prize

Editor
Kumasi Hive from Ghana wins the 2018 5,000 USD Grand Prize while, CRNS Tunisia and Eco-Sol Consulting (Full STEM Ahead!) Seychelles will take home the Second category prize of 1,000 USD.

The Pan-African trust program of DotConnectAfrica (DCA) has released the winners of the 2018 Miss.Africa Digital Seed Funding for STEM Programs. The seed fund program is now in its third year Kumasi Hive from Ghana won the 2018 5,000 USD Grand Prize while, INTELLECT-Team at Laboratory of Technologies for Smart Systems (CRNS) Tunisia and Eco-Sol Consulting (Full STEM Ahead!) Seychelles will take home the Second category prize of 1,000 USD. Sophia Bekele, Founder & CEO of DotConnectAfrica Group, and the champion behind Miss.Africa Digital Program complimented the winners saying —…

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Kenya ranks 3rd in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 2018 Global Innovation Index

Editor
Orange

Kenya has won the third place in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2018 coming after South Africa and Mauritius. Kenya achieves high levels of innovation relative to its level of development, a continuous performance since 2011. Strengths for Kenya are access to credit (especially microfinance loans), innovation linkages and exports of creative services, such as R&D financed by abroad, workforce efficiency and printing and other media. Now in its 11th edition, the GII is a detailed quantitative tool that helps global decision makers better understand how to…

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No VC: Facebook is not making any direct investments to African tech startups

Editor
Facebook’s to invest $57 Billion in Africa’s Economy in next five years

Facebook has been scaling up its operations in Africa and engaging more intently with tech startups on the continent, but the company has decided it will not be making any direct investments, Disrupt Africa reports That is according to Julien Decot, director of platform partnerships for EMEA at Facebook, who was speaking at last week’s MEST Africa Summit in Cape Town. He said the decision not to become an investor had come straight from Zuckerberg himself. “That was a Zuckerberg decision. The way Mark thought about it was – “this…

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