Tag: .Africa

Internet Solutions pilots pay-per-use Internet

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Data

Internet Solutions (IS), formerly Access Kenya Group, will offer consumption-based billing for businesses as opposed to the traditional fixed billing. The Internet firm is piloting the service that will see businesses pay as per their usage, cutting down on extra costs experienced during down time and off-peak seasons. “Bandwidth is widely considered a utility like power and water and users want it where and when they need it. “Enterprises are demanding convenience and flexible consumption models that respond to their needs,” Internet Solutions managing director Richard Hechle (pictured). According to…

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e-Commerce in Africa could hit US$75 billion by 2025

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COVID 19 Read consumer

How to capitalise on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and develop an African e-commerce strategy for possible adoption by the Africa Union (AU) dominated discussion at a recent AU conference in Kenya. Jean Bertrand Azapmo, Regional Trade Advisor at the AU Trade & Industry Department, said, “The roadmap provides for the mapping of stakeholders and the creation of Multi-stakeholder Working Group/Platforms so as to provide an opportunity for African SMEs and startups to share experiences and best practices, share ideas; which is crucial for e-commerce development.” e-commerce can…

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

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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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Q&A: Leti Arts bringing authentic Africa to the world through games & digital comics

Dianne Jacobs
Leti Arts

Caption: (inset) Leti Arts Co-founders, Eyram Tawia (Ghana) and Wesley Kirinya (Kenya) Africa is at the verge of global stardom, with the latest box office stunner movie featuring African superheroes in their fictional Kingdom of Wakanda. There is no doubt that Africa is starting to create its own imagery and endearing the world. It is through such that companies like Let Arts are focusing on. The IBCA caught up with Leti Arts to find out just what the founders are working on to bring an authentic Africa to a worldwide…

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Five African tech trends to watch in 2018

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Vivo

The BBC’s Clare Spencer picks five African tech trends to look out for in 2018. Land registry you can’t tamper with The idea: Documentation is often lacking in parts of Africa, leading to land disputes because it isn’t clear who owns the land. Even when there are records, sometimes they have been tampered with. A record that cannot be deleted, using something called blockchain, could be used to prevent these disputes. Blockchain is a method of recording data – a digital ledger of transactions, agreements, contracts – anything that needs…

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Geneva: Miss.Africa Digital Program Named Finalist in the ITU/UN 2017 EQUALSinTech Awards

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ITU and UN Women this week in Geneva, Switzerland announced the Miss.Africa Digital program as one of 15 Finalists and the Winners for the prestigious 2017 EQUALS in Tech Awards. As the flagship event of the EQUALS global network partnership, the annual award event is designed to showcase how ICTs can be used to dramatically improve social, political and economic outcomes for women and girls – and the value that women and girls bring to the technology sectors. This year, there were 293 participants from 72 countries for the EQUALS…

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Q&A with Matt Roberts-Davies, M-Changa; Create Innovative Products That Match Local Culture

Dianne Jacobs

ITBusiness spoke with Matt Roberts-Davies, the Business Development Manager/Experience Director at M-Changa, a fundraiser management platform that provides cutting edge end-to-end management tools to enhance fundraising success. The session is majorly on the tech trends in Africa and the novelty of the internet of things (IoT). 1. How can you define the technology sector in Kenya? There is a lot of buzz around tech in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. One of the main reasons for this is the success of M-Pesa, a digital wallet that has reached mass adoption in…

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Is Africa’s new smartphone a game changer?

Dianne Jacobs

Whether the Onyx phone will actually be the first smartphone manufactured in Africa depends on how you define manufacturing . A South African start-up will next month begin mass producing a $30 smartphone, which it describes as the first of its kind to be manufactured in Africa. According to CNN,  Onyx Connect is gearing up to launch a four-inch entry-level smartphone for about $30 that includes front and rear cameras, 1GB RAM, 8GB ROM, 1.3GHz quad core processor and runs the latest Android 7 Nougat. While most low-cost smartphones come…

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U.S. tech look to Africa for developers

Andela

Tech companies founded in the United States are setting up software development centers in Nigeria and Kenya, where a number of young developers has led to growing tech communities. Microsoft has launched its Microsoft 4 Afrika initiative, aiming to help empower African youth, entrepreneurs, developers and others to make their ideas a reality. Steve Case, the AOL founder, and his wife Jean, Generation Investment Management and Sir Richard Branson have provided $19 million to Kenyan pay-as-you-go energy start-up M-KOPA Solar. Andela, which has attracted $24 million of funding from a scheme led by…

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Africa’s Smartphone shipments rate falls

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hipments of smartphones in Africa fell 5.2% to 23.1 million units in the second quarter of 2016, according to the latest figures from International Data Corporation (IDC). These figures, presented in IDC’s recently published ‘Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker’, indicate that the boom in smartphone sales in Africa is slowing, despite the fact that overall mobile handset shipments were up slightly in Q2 2016, with shipments of basic feature phones rising 31.9% year on year to total 29.8 million units. South Africa and the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, and…

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