Company News
YouTube’s ‘Chapters’ Roll out on Desktop and Mobile
Sourced from Speechling. YouTube has released its new video chapters feature to all users on desktop, smartphones and tablets. Chapters, the new feature that soft-launched in April, will make it easier to skip to precisely where you want to go in a video, similar to the chapters in a book, or scenes in a movie. Though not to the most ground-breaking or exciting new feature to land on YouTube, they are a welcome, if not overdue quality-of-life feature that will no doubt make the experience easier for many users. On desktop, a video with chapters won’t look different from how videos have always looked. The biggest change is barely noticeable: the red bar used to show video progress will have breaks within it, showing the different chapters, the breaks indicate when the chapters begin and end...
Playfre Expands Music Streaming Service to the Entire African Continent
Playfre has announced that it plans on expands platform across the entire continent. Before this, Playfre – which launched in May 2019 – was limited to only 18 African countries and before that, only to 5 African countries. With a library of over 50 million songs and 2 million artists, Playfre is currently the largest African music streaming service in terms of catalogue size. It has grown steadily in the past few months; averaging around 250 streams per registered user. According to Playfre co-founder and CEO Chika Nwaogu, music isn’t limited only to the just over 20,000 registered users on the platform – it’s freely available to anyone who downloads the app. Although any visitor outside the continent of Africa who tries to use the service is taken to the “Playfre is currently not availab...
Nutanix Appoints New Director of GSI Business
Enterprise cloud computing company, Nutanix has announced that it has appointed Adam Tarbox as Director of Global System Integrator (GSI) Business for the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region. With more than 25 years’ experience in the IT industry, Tarbox moves to Nutanix from NetApp, where he spent more than a decade running the Service Provider, Channel UKI and GSI UK business units. In his new role, Tarbox will be responsible for developing and executing an overarching regional alliance strategy for Nutanix’s GSI partners. He will lead a team distributed across the EMEA region, and be focused on driving go-to-market (GTM) activities with GSIs around joint offerings for both horizontal markets and industry verticals. “GSI partners are a key element of our ability to deliver exa...
SADV ISP Appoints New MD
SA Digital Villages (SADV) ISP has appointed telecommunications industry veteran, Junaid Munshi as its new managing director – effective 01 June 2020. The company recently became a standalone entity after its fibre network division was absorbed by Vumatel in April of this year. SADV ISP says that the appointment signals the company’s focus and commitment to delivering world-class Internet access to its customers. Munshi, who brings more than two decades of experience in telecommunications – spanning four countries, will be instrumental in driving customer uptake and delivering growth across the business Speaking on his new appointment, Munshi says “I am super excited to be joining the team at SADV. I believe that we have a unique opportunity to establish a new digital dawn for all South Af...
Google Launches Website to Help People Avoid Online Scams
Sourced from Google. Ever opened your emails and received a poorly-worded message about a payment that you weren’t expecting? What about one proclaiming that you’ve won a competition you never entered. “Congratulations!” it reads, beneath, a sinister attachment that you probably should not open. This is becoming more and more common, and now Google has unveiled a website to teach people how to spot and avoid online scams. Digital hoaxes, malware and cyberattacks have been surging during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The website – Scamspotter.org – tries to show users how to identify things such as false stimulus checks, fake vaccine offers, or other fake medical information. The site also attempts to make clear certain patterns that are typical of hoaxes, like a romance scammer asking ...
Vodacom is The First Telco to Zero-Rate what3words
The what3words technology, available as an app or online map, has divided the world into a grid of 3m squares, giving each square a unique combination of three words: a what3words address. Vodacom has become the first telco globally to zero-rate the lifesaving addressing technology, what3words, for its more than 43 million subscribers across South Africa. The UN estimates that 75% of countries in the world have a poorly maintained addressing system – or none at all. This is an issue that South Africa knows well, with large parts of the country still lacking spatial planning. This might be an inconvenience when you are expecting a delivery, but it is a far graver issue for locals living in rural areas or informal settlements when it comes to emergencies. Without an address – or in the event...
Entersekt Integrates Digital Banking Software with Huawei Mobile Services
Sourced from Getty Images. Mobile fintech solutions company, Entersekt announced that it has successfully integrated with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS). HMS is Huawei’s alternative to Google Mobile Services, a collection of applications and application programming interfaces that are typically pre-installed on Android phones and tablets. Entersekt fast-tracked work on its mobile software development kit (SDK) to facilitate push messaging and ensure that consumers could continue to bank and transact securely after upgrading to newly manufactured Huawei mobile devices. The fintech provider holds an 80 per cent share of the South African digital banking authentication market and counts major overseas banks as customers too. The updated SDK is now ready for release to app developers across the ...
Enterprise Data Storage ‘business as usual’ with Tintri and Networks Unlimited
As the world grapples with a totally different business dynamic in the wake of the global lockdowns currently in place, the enterprise storage industry must continue showcasing the continuous innovation that enables compelling solutions for its clients. This, however, is not so easy for all players in the current economic downturn. This is according to a recent blog entry by Tintri, which provides AI-enabled intelligent infrastructure, and partners in South Africa with value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa. According to the blog, “Innovation and continuous investment therein are key drivers that enable compelling solutions to reach customers’ data centres. But in these extraordinary times business cannot operate as usual, and some vendors are finding their ability to maintain c...
Spotify Removes its 10,000-Song Library Limit
Sourced from Forbes. Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, now allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries. Fixing an issue that has irritated music-lovers on the service for years. With more than 50-million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own “Your Music” collections on Spotify for easy access. This is no more. After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out. https://t.co/1nSExF5o3V — Felipe O. Carvalho (@_Felipe) May 26, 2020 Users have been requesting ...
How Lenovo is Pursuing Sustainable Supercomputers
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany, contains no ordinary supercomputer. Sure, it has thousands of servers, or nodes, stacked in rows in a windowless vault with technicians working diligently on huge data crunching conundrums for research organisations; running simulations to try and better predict future natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. But it is eerily quiet. Almost too quiet. The familiar whir of hot air being whooshed away by power-hungry computers is almost entirely absent. Where are all the fans? Almost all gone, as it turns out. The LRZ SuperMUC NG, which uses massive arrays of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SD650 servers, requires nearly no fans at all – just those for cooling the power supply units and in the in-row-chillers on every eighth row. As a r...
Ericsson Launches a Digital Learning Programme for Students
In response to how the global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education and learning around the world, Ericsson has joined the UNESCO-led Global Education Coalition by launching Ericsson Educate – a digital programme delivering online learning content focused on improving digital skills for students in secondary schools and universities. Now more than ever, being digitally connected is vital to maintaining a sense of normalcy during the current circumstances. Education is one critical sector particularly affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with around 1.2 billion students and youth around the world unable to attend traditional education institutions. This has placed a huge demand for comprehensive online education programs on governments and education institutions alike. The Ericsson...
6 Tech Companies Make Remote Working a Permanent Option
The world has been changed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Almost all points of what we used to know are in some ways now different. These changes will no doubt last as long as the pandemic, and many will last even longer. In the world of work, the transition from offices to home has been a worldwide reality. Now, six of the world’s largest tech companies have revealed that these advents of working-from-home may be a permanent fixture. At least for the foreseeable future. These tech companies include: Facebook Mark Zuckerberg says that as many as 50% of Facebook employees could be working remotely within the next five to 10 years. Facebook’s CEO pitched the idea as both of a matter of satisfying employee desires and also in an effort to establish a “more broad-based economic prosperit...
