Month: October 2018

IBM reveals plans to acquire Red Hat for a record $34 billion

Editor

IBM is acquiring Red Hat, a major distributor of open-source software and technology, in a deal valued around $34 billion, the companies announced on Sunday. According to a joint statement, IBM will pay cash to buy all shares in Red Hat at $190 each. Shares in Red Hat closed at $116.68 on Friday before the deal was announced. The open source, enterprise software maker will become a unit of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud division, with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management team and reporting to CEO Ginni Rometty.…

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Tether burns 500 million Tether coins (USDT) to reduce circulation

Editor

Tether has announced the destruction of 500 million Tether coins (USDT). The cryptocurrency issuer said this week that “Tether has redeemed a significant amount of USDT from the circulating supply of tokens.” “In line with this, Tether will destroy 500m USDT from the Tether treasury wallet and will leave the remaining USDT (approx 466m) in the wallet as a preparatory measures for future USDT issuances,” the company added. Tether said that the coin reserve’s destruction, which is a move not often seen in the cryptocurrency space, is in line with…

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Can Blockchain + Virtual Reality Boost E-commerce In Africa

Dianne Jacobs

eCommerce will be worth $75 billion in Africa’s leading economies, and came into existence as the solution to the stress of beating traffic to get to stores, bringing about a more convenient way of buying and selling. Today, online retail seems to be fast replacing the brick and mortar stores, and warehouses are becoming the one place to order items from. Ventures such as Alibaba, eBay, Payporte, Jumia, and Konga are cashing in big on African’s need to do convenient shopping from the comfort of their homes. While this a…

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Facebook institutional investors want Zuckerberg ousted as chairman

olivia Craig

Amidst increasing incidences of data breaches such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook members used without permission, to Russian sourced posts aimed at influencing the midterm elections, a report from Reuters states that four institutional investors in Facebook are looking to have Zuckerberg replaced by an independent chairman. A similar proposal was defeated by stockholders in 2017. The filing asking for a vote to remove Zuckerberg was made to Facebook’s board by the state treasurers of Illinois, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, who…

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Tech and sports titans pay tribute to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who has passed at 65

Editor

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with fellow billionaire Bill Gates and used the fortune he made from the iconic technology company to invest in professional sports teams, cable TV and real estate, has died. He was 65. Allen, along with Gates, helped create an entire industry selling software for a new breed of smaller, more affordable and widely accessible computers. Allen died on Monday in Seattle from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a statement from Vulcan Inc., his investment firm. Allen’s source for his varied investments and sizable…

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Sophia Bekele honoured with Champion of Development Award at the 2018 AfricaLink Solidarity Awards in Switzerland

Editor

Sophia Bekele, Founder and CEO of DotConnectAfrica Group, has been honoured with Champion of Development Award during the 2018 AfricaLink Solidarity Awards and symposium in Switzerland  for her initiative Miss.Africa Digital Initiative which hundreds of young women and girls have benefited from through training opportunities or applications supported by the Miss.Africa Seed Funding. Three other leaders and two organizations we also awarded during the same ceremony, they are: Mr. Léonard H. Bindzi, Mr. Osvaldo dos Santos Varela, Ms. Claudinah Ntini Ramosepele while the two organisations are Fund for Development and Partnership…

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

Editor
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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Instagram implements artificial intelligence tools to beat cyber bullies

Instagram is betting on artificial intelligence weapons to battle cyber bullying, using AI to scan photos for abusive content at the Facebook-owned service. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri Tuesday said artificial intelligence is being used to detect signs of bullying and then automatically flag content for review by staff from the image-oriented social network. “This change will help us identify and remove significantly more bullying,” Mosseri said in a blog post. ” Online harassment is a big problem, with 40 percent of all people on the internet having reported experiencing some form of…

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17 Canadian federal depts. and agencies failed basic tests for credit card data security

Dianne Jacobs
Facebook

The Canada Revenue Agency, the RCMP, Statistics Canada and more than a dozen other federal departments and agencies have failed an international test of the security of their credit card payment systems. Altogether, half of the 34 federal institutions authorized by the banking system to accept credit-card payments from citizens and others have flunked the test — risking fines and even the revocation of their ability to accept credit and debit payments. Those 17 departments and agencies continue to process payments on Visa, MasterCard, Amex, the Tokyo-based JCB and China…

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Rogue Move? Facebook to start flooding WhatsApp with Ads in 2019

Editor
WhatsApp launches end-to-end encryption on messages for all its users

WhatsApp has been free, but soon users can expect a significant change in their experience of WhatsApp. The Android and iOS chat app, originally released in 2009, will start to embed paid-for content in the app’s Status feature from 2019. The Status feature is similar to Stories on Instagram and Facebook, letting users upload Snapchat-style pics and videos that can be viewed for 24 hours. Facebook wants to interrupt some of these Statuses with short ads, although details are light. WhatsApp’s co-founders were famously against ads, and supportive of encrypted…

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