Afri Ride mobile app launches in South Africa

Voice App

Afri Ride, a secure ride sharing mobile app with tailor-made solutions for the African traveling community, is now available in South Africa, and will be expanding into other African markets in the near future. Joe Moyo, managing director at the ride sharing app, describes the app as incredibly simple to use. “All that users have to do is, to upload their travel details such as the start and end location, travel date and the number of empty seats that are available, this then allows travelers heading in the same direction…

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The Internet and Mobile taking over the delivery space

Food

For the longest time, restaurants held takeaways as an afterthought. Well, not anymore. The food catering business has gone past the takeout era and has evolved so much that delivery has become the hot trend in Kenya. The great digital revolution, burgeoning e-commerce and the convenience of mobile money which allows buyers to pay for their deliveries right off their phones, has spurred a whole new industry that is today the food delivery market. And Kenyans, enticed by the convenience of ordering online from their favorite local restaurants and having…

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Drivers and travelers connected via app

MTN Rwanda

After completing their university studies in computer science, classmates Ngugi Waithima and Denis Kiprono looked for jobs in vain. In June, the two former students of computer science at Mount Kenya University met in a Nairobi office in a job-hunting mission. Later over a cup of tea, they discussed their challenges in search of non-existent jobs. Their talk shifted to escalating traffic jams in Nairobi and the problems people face when travelling over the festive season. It’s from their traffic discussion that they hit some sort of Eureka moment. They…

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Distribution Is The Real Disruption, Mobile phones game-changing agri-tech in Africa

Farmers

While emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence can capture our imagination, some of the most game-changing innovations for smallholder farmers are more modest. Seeds. Roads. Electricity. While such technologies may seem mundane, they are anything but. Reaching smallholder farmers in rural areas takes a nuanced combination of appropriate innovations, sophisticated distribution systems, and a human touch. One organization celebrated for its approach is One Acre Fund, a non-profit social enterprise working with 600,000 farmers in East Africa. I spoke with Ilana Kessler, Impact Ventures Growth Director, about scaling innovative approaches to help…

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Opera shuts down its Opera Max Service

Opera Max has been the rising star in Opera’s portfolio. The service offered a system-wide data-saving proxy that funnelled all app data through Opera’s servers to compress images and videos. Initially, opening a web page required users to calculate the amount of data that they would spend. Smartphones have been always data hungry and people tried all sorts of ways to save the smallest KiloBytes of data. It is this where Opera’s data saving app came to the rescue. Opera developed some clever algorithms and used in their Opera Max…

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Explore the latest threats to your mobile device security

It is common knowledge that mobile devices are integral to both our personal and business lives. With cyberattacks against individuals, businesses, and government entities increasing in frequency and sophistication, it is no surprise that mobile devices are now considered by threat actors to be one of the weakest links in the IT infrastructure of most enterprises. A decade ago, mobile malware was considered a new and unlikely threat. Many mobile device users even considered themselves immune from such threats.  Currently, more than 1.5 million new incidents of mobile malware have…

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Microsoft just officially listed AI as one of its top priorities

Microsoft just named artificial intelligence as one of its top priorities in a financial filing. The annual report for the company’s 2017 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, now includes six references to AI, up from zero in the previous annual report. And the company has plunked AI into its corporate vision statement, too. “Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI,” the company wrote in the annual report, which was…

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#SheTechsAfrica: Miss.Africa Seed Fund Announces its 2016/17 Prize Winners

Closing the global digital gender divide is a pressing concern. Women are yet to reach their full potential as participants in all aspects of society. Closing this digital gender gap can help empower women and girls to actively participate in governance as civil society members and political leaders. The Miss.Africa digital Program, a Pan-African trust program of DotConnectAfrica (DCA) , is aimed in attracting more young girls and women to the Internet platform to enable them form a sizable demographic of Internet users in Africa, thereby involving them in complementary…

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Report: Smartphone owners use 9 apps per day

Voice App

Mobile’s continued global growth is evident when looking at market-level data.  In 2016, smartphone users downloaded over 90 billion apps on the iOS App Store and Google Play, and they spent nearly 900 billion hours in apps. Now a report shows that smartphone users are spending more time in apps than in years past, and now access over 30 apps on a monthly basis. At first, news that users are accessing nearly 10 apps daily sounds like a notable increase from a report from a couple of years ago, which had…

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New Screen Protectors For Samsung Galaxy S8 Launched

Tech Armor, the leading screen protector and mobile accessory brand, today launched a new screen protection line for the newly released Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus. With its curved edges, the 3D Curved Ballistic Glass Screen Protector for Samsung Galaxy S8 perfectly matches the rounded shape of the Galaxy S8 to cover the full front display for complete edge-to-edge coverage. The Tech Armor HD FlexiClear Film Screen Protector for Samsung Galaxy S8, a more cost-effective solution, offers edge-to-edge protection as well as flexible shock absorption. To align with…

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