The 2nd African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF) successfully concluded. The conference was held from 24-26 September 2013 at the Multimedia University, Nairobi Kenya. The AfIGF conference was organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the IGF Secretariat in cooperation with the Kenyan government among other stakeholders. DCA Registry Services Kenya delegates also attended the conference and contributed to important discussions and pertinent proceedings. In his opening address that was communicated via a recorded video message, Fade Chehade, ICANN’s President & CEO noted that the African IGF…
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IT Security is critically underfinanced by business
53% of South African based IT decision makers feel that not enough time or money is available to develop IT security policies. As a result, barely half of the companies feel that they have highly-organised, systematic processes to deal with threats. These findings emerged from the recent Global Corporate IT Security Risks 2013 survey conducted by B2B International for Kaspersky Lab in 2013 among business representatives around the world. The situation is especially poor in the global educational industry, where only 28% of organisations are confident that they have sufficient investment in…
Read MoreProtecting the open Internet may require defunding the ITU. Here’s how to do it.
In the past week, two senior U.S. officials, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and Republican Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.) were quoted as saying the United States should pull funding from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), at least as a last resort, if the U.N. telecommunications body persists in its attempts to regulate the Internet. What’s the ITU? Why do people want to defund it? And what would it take to do so? Read on to find out. What’s the ITU? The ITU was founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, an organization…
Read More5 things neither side of the broadband debate wants to admit
As I was editing my interview with Jeffrey Eisenach, the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, I had a sense of deja vu. Eisenach’s arguments were thoughtful and cogent. But they were eerily similar to those I encountered when I first started thinking about Internet regulation a decade ago. That’s puzzling because the Internet has changed rapidly. Over the last decade, we’ve gotten Netflix streaming, the iPhone, or FiOS. So why are ideologues on both sides of the broadband debate still making the…
Read MoreICT strategies as business differentiators
Information technology is fast becoming a primary driver of market differentiation. “In this context, the IT agenda is quickly extending outside of the realm of IT executives and into the agenda of the CEO, COO and CMO. It is clear that technology trends are changing the world as we know it, and business leaders who are able to grasp these trends and execute on their implementation will position themselves for future business success,” says Hans Zachar, senior manager of IT strategy at Accenture. In order to gain insight into the…
Read MoreOnline music piracy in the UK drops by a third
In the last year, us Brits downloaded a third fewer pirated music tracks than the year before. According to figures from Ofcom, the number of such songs we snaffled fell from 301 million in March 2012 to 199 million in March this year, the Guardian reports. So maybe we’re less a bunch of Fun Lovin’ Criminals than before. The music industry is said to be on the road to recovery, with total revenues increasing for the first time this year since 1999, although they only went up by 0.3 per…
Read MoreAlcoa, Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America to Be Dropped from Dow Industrials
Alcoa Inc., AA +1.98% Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ +0.38% and Bank of America Corp. BAC +0.83% will be dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average next week, in the biggest shake-up of the 30-stock index in almost a decade. Alcoa, a Dow component for 54 years, will be replaced by athletic gear maker Nike Inc. NKE +0.64% Payments company Visa Inc. V +1.05% will replace H-P, which joined the index in 1997, and securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS +1.77% will supplant Bank of America, which spent five years in the blue-chip benchmark. The changes, which…
Read MoreMicrosoft’s second biggest investment is Africa
Technology giant Microsoft last week announced a partnership with the South African government’s Jobs Fund – an alliance that will provide assistance to small businesses who operate online to expand their companies and help grow the local economy. Microsoft South Africa’s Managing Director Mteto Nyati sat down with ITNewsAfrica to explain why Microsoft has invested so heavily in Africa. Nyati explained that although Microsoft is indeed heavily invested in the African continent, with projects such as the newly-announced BizSpark and Microsoft’s 4Afrika initiative, the company is actually involved in all territories where it has a…
Read MoreA delayed evaluation “pass” score for .Africa competition
– DotConnectAfrica refuses to withdraw before Accountability Hearing The fight for .africa web domain continues as ICANN evaluation scores emerge. Sophia Bekele, whose Company, DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust was one of the contenders for the .africa gTLD web address name, said: “A lot of progress has been registered during the past six years, especially managing a global promotional campaign to raise awareness about .africa and new gTLDs and the work of ICANN in general; and to also explain to people and different organizations how Africa and Africans would benefit from the…
Read MoreDeal Is Easy Part for Microsoft and Nokia
Microsoft Corp. MSFT -4.55% struck a $7 billion bargain with Nokia Corp. NOK1V.HE +1.15% to bolster a mobile future for the software giant. But the odds are long that a deal can reverse the fortunes of two laggards in a cutthroat market. Microsoft Corp. MSFT -4.55% struck a $7 billion bargain with Nokia Corp. NOK1V.HE +1.01% to bolster a mobile future for the software giant. But the odds are long that a deal can reverse the fortunes of two laggards in a cutthroat market. Microsoft is wagering a purchase of Nokia’s phone business will…
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