Category: featured

2016 Innotribe Startup Challenge Winners Announced

Innotribe

The winners of the 2016 Innotribe Startup Challenge were announced yesterday in Mauritius. The winners were South Africa’s Hello Paisa, a low cost international money transfer solution and The Sun Exchange, which deals with crowd lending for solar energy and Cameroon’s WeCashUp, that deals with mobile money transfer across Africa. The three each received a 10,000 USD cash prize. They also received invitations to attend Sibos, SWIFT’s annual global financial services conference that will take place in Geneva from the 26th to the 29th of September, techmoran reports. Sido Bestani,…

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Bill Gates To Give the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture

Staff Writer
Bill Gates

This year, the Annual Nelson Mandela lecture will be delivered by Bill Gates, the Nelson Mandela Foundation in association with the University of Pretoria has announced. The lecture which will be delivered on July 17th, the eve of Nelson Mandela day, will focus on the theme, “Living Together”. The lecture is one of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s programmes that seek to honor the late Nelson Mandela. In line with this, the lecture seeks to raise topical issues affecting South Africa and the rest of the world. Encouraging dialogue often about…

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New ICANN CEO Göran Marby Will Take Over This Month

Fadi Chehadé’s replacement Göran Marby, will begin his job as the new ICANN CEO and President from May 23, next Monday. He takes over form Fadi Chehadé who was at the helm of ICANN since 2012. Mr. Marby, before his appointment served as CEO and founder of Appgate,  Swedish security software company (now Cryptzone in US), where he grew the organization to a global company with customers in 35 countries and operations in the U.S. He has over 20 years of experience that he brings to ICANN being a senior executive in…

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The 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigative Report (DBIR) Is Out

Staff Writer

10 African countries featured including Kenya and South Africa The 2016 DBIR by Verizon has been released. The report has revealed that there has been a 16% increase in ransomware attacks over the last 12 months, ItNewsAfrica reports. According to the DBIR, 89% of attacks involved financial or espionage motivations. Financial motivations were a clear catalyst. Because of the organizations that are being targeted and how prevalent ransomware has become, ransomware is a hot topic. Businesses have a higher degree of risk attached to them even though every individual is susceptible to…

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Africa Code Week: SAP To Train More Than 150,000 Youth

Staff Writer

SAP has said that it will train more than 150, 000 youth from 30 African countries in a bid to foster digital literacy and equip the continent’s youth through their Africa Code Week. Africa Code Week 2016 is slotted to run from October 15 to October 23rd. It will involve thousands of free coding workshops and online trainings for children between the ages of 8 to 24. The Africa Code Week kick off coincided with The World Economic Forum(WEF) on Africa that is being held in Kigali. The Minister of Youth…

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Vodacom Will Discontinue M-Pesa South Africa From 30th June

Vodacom

  Earlier in the year, Vodacom said that it was reviewing M-Pesa South Africa. The service that was launched in 2010 and re-launched four years later, was expected to have millions of users but it only garnered 76,000 active users. Shameel Joosub, CEO, said in a statement that the decision was based on the fact that the business sustainability of M-Pesa is predicted on achieving a critical mass of users. Their revised projections and the high level of financial inclusion in South Africa meant that there was little prospects of…

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A Greener South Africa Thanks To UberGreen

UberGreen

A new initiative by Uber seeks to make the South African environment cleaner by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In South Africa, 13% of carbon dioxide emissions are on account of the transport industry. Uber through a partnership with BMW and Nissan is seeking to bring that percentage down with UberGreen. UberGreen is a pilot project where Uber users will be able to request Electric vehicles, the BMW or the Nissan LEAF. These vehicles will be operated by drivers at  Uberx prices giving Uber users the satisfaction that they are helping…

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Africa’s banking security in Africa is reaching a tipping point for growing cybercrime risk

banking security

Africa’s relative lack of infrastructure is both a blessing and a curse for banks. While access to traditional services is still a challenge, innovation in technology can offer big opportunities. Mobile has become the de facto means of banking in many parts of Africa and, as mobile penetration – particularly smartphone penetration – increases, this is allowing banks to connect with more of the population than ever before, and to do so in a more targeted, personal way. A study looking at trends in banking in sub-Saharan Africa, released in…

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Cyber Crime Predicted To Reach $2 Trillion By 2019

During the last ten years, our lives have changed. The increased usage of the Internet made blurred some lines between the virtual and the real world making some processes faster. Ordinary people are enjoying this change, as life is becoming much easier for them. Large companies and enterprises experience some negative sides of such changes, though. They are preparing for a huge increase in cyber crime. General Crime Numbers Ginni Rometty, the Chairman of IBM Corp, mentioned in his recent interview that cyber crime wave, as they named it couple…

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31pc of employees consider themselves the biggest threat to cyber security

Hackers Breach Top Wall Street Law Firms, Including Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP

Both companies and employees are aware of the damage cyber-attacks can make, and know that employees are the weakest link in a company’s security chain. Those are the results of two separate studies conducted by security firm WinMagic. During the Cloud Security Expo, it released the studies in which it asked 250 IT managers and 1,000 employees about the importance of IT security in the workplace. The data shows that businesses have taken actions to protect themselves following high-profile data breaches, such as the one which happened to TalkTalk. Almost…

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