technology news
Egyptian Fintech Startup Offers Online Payment Platform for Students
Sourced from Innovation Village. Local fintech startups Klickit (previously known in the market as Q-Less) and Paymob are officially enabling digital payments for educational entities affiliated with global advisory and educational management firm GEMS Education. This agreement will allow parents of students in GEMS schools across Egypt to make tuition payments online for over 6,000 students. The model is expected to be rolled out to more countries in the future. The GEMS network includes more than 250 schools in 13 countries, of which four are in Egypt, namely The British School Al-Rehab, Madinaty Language School, Madinaty Integrated Language Schools (MILS) and The British International School Madinaty. “Our partnership with Klickit is driving our digital transformation goals forward. Thr...
Apple Music Slashes Subscription Prices for Kenyan Users
Sourced from the South Africa. Apple Music has reduced its prices by almost half of the original price and increased its trial period by double the initial period in Kenya. The subscription-based music streaming service offers access to over 50-million songs. Initially, individual users would have to pay about KES 1,066 ($9.99), however, this is about to change. According to Apple, the new prices will be as follows: Individuals will now pay KES 319.17 ($2.99) Family package, with up to six members, will cost KES 532.66 ($4.99) University Students in Kenya will now pay KES 159.05 ($1.49) What isn’t clear from the price reduction is whether or not the library of content has also been slashed. It is yet not known whether or not users will have the amount of music available to them also ...
Xiaomi Launches the Redmi Note 9S in South Africa
Xiaomi has launched the Redmi Note 9S – a new mid-range device – which features a powerful processor, striking symmetrical design, an outstanding quad-camera setup and long-lasting battery. The Redmi Note 9S is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 720G chipset, which consists of an octa-core CPU with a 2.3GHz maximum clock speed, Adreno 618 GPU and 8nm process technology. It’s also said to offer an unparalleled user experience through its advanced AI technology and power-efficiency improvements. As the first smartphone in the Redmi Note lineup to feature a Z-axis linear vibration motor, this device enables faster acceleration, resulting in better haptic feedback compared to traditional motors. Its 5020mAh high-capacity battery keeps users fully powered throughout the day, even dur...
StorMagic Acquires Encryption Key Management Company, KeyNexus
Sourced from CSO. Drive Control Corporation (DCC), exclusive StorMagic distributor for the SA and SADC region, has announced StorMagic’s acquisition of KeyNexus, an innovator and designer of encryption key management solutions. StorMagic now extends its portfolio to the channel, meeting organisations’ datacentre and cloud security requirements. The KeyNexus acquisition sees StorMagic bringing the edge and the core closer together, delivering a robust enterprise key management offering. To this end, StorMagic has announced the immediate availability SvKMS, the company’s first enterprise-grade virtualised key management solution for any application that requires encryption in any location, be it the edge, datacentre or the cloud. “StorMagic SvKMS is an affordable, efficient and robust centra...
Facebook and Red Cross Launch #AfricaTogether
Facebook and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement are partnering to launch #AfricaTogether – a digital campaign and two-day festival on June 4th and 5th featuring artists from across Africa to encourage continued vigilance against COVID-19. With more than 100,000 coronavirus cases confirmed on the continent and containment measures easing in many countries, #AfricaTogether combines musical and comedic performances with information from COVID-19 first responders and fact-checkers from across Africa. #AfricaTogether will include a festival with performances by artists such as Aramide, Ayo, Femi Kuti, Ferre Gola, Salatiel, Serge Beynaud, Patoranking, Youssou N’dour amongst many others, as well as a digital awareness campaign with prevention messages developed with Red Cross a...
SA Government Could Bail Out National Airline to the Tune of $1.2-Billion
Sourced from Shutterstock. The administrator’s running South Africa’s embattled national airlines SAA propositioned the government to provide a R21-billion ($1.2-billion) bailout to help repay debt and resume operations after COVID-19 travel bans are lifted. This new plan includes about R17-billion that will go into repaying South African Airways creditors, according to Bloomberg. Afterwards, as much as R2-billion will be provided for working capital to get operations back and running. The draft plan “is for discussion purposes only and we await comment from the affected persons,” a spokeswoman for the administrators says, adding that the team has until 8 June to finalize a rescue proposal. /* custom css */ .tdi_3_91e.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_3_91e.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 ...
Global IT Spending on Enterprise Software to See First Drop in 10 Years
Sourced from Buyshares.uk As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to impact different sectors of the global economy, spending on the enterprise software segment under the Information Technology (IT) industry is projected to take a plunge. Most sub-segments under the enterprise software umbrella will witness a decline in spending while essential ones might have an increase. Data obtained by Buyshares.co.uk indicates that in 2020, the global spending will reach $426 billion, the first drop in ten years. Last year, the spending reached an all-time high of $458 billion, translating to a drop of about 6.98% when compared to the projected figures for 2020. Cumulatively between 2009 and the estimates of 2020, the spending on enterprise software will stand at $3.94 trillion. The lowest spending in t...
Investment in Drone Industry Grows to $1.2 billion
By the end of 2019, total investment in the drone industry was a record-high of $1.2 billion, a Year-Over-Year growth of 67% – this is according to the data acquired by Finbold.com. The report indicates that venture capital funding stood at $930 million at the end of last year. VC funding accounts for 68.87% of all drone industry investment The data shows how between 2008 and 2019 funding in the sector stood at $4.43 billion while venture capitalists pumped in a total of $3.46 billion by last year. In general, drone investment through VC represented 68.87% of all funding. There was a significant spike in the investment between 2012 ($42 million) and 2013 ($121 million) with a growth of about 188.1%. Venture Capital funding joined the drone sector by only $2 million in 2010, a figure t...
South African Start-up Goes Global Despite Worldwide Lockdowns
Since launching in South Africa in October 2019, myFanPark has been connecting heroes – ranging from TV personalities, movie stars and musicians, to sporting greats, DJs, comedians and social influencers – with their fans through personalised, video-recorded messages. Now, fans in Germany, Switzerland and Austria are connecting with their favourite celebrities through the platform and soon, fans in India and West Africa will get to do so too. Not only was myFanPark the first of its kind in South Africa, but it was also named as one of the top five most exciting startups in the country by Heavy Chef. To date, traffic to the South African website has grown by 492%, orders have increased by 959% and the number of celebs who have signed up has by 172%, bringing the amount of South African cele...
How Using Cloud Can Increase Security for Remote Working During the Pandemic
Sourced from Tapscape The cloud can enable organisations to quickly scale out enhanced security to a suddenly remote workforce, as part of efforts to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery – this is according to Patrick Grillo, Senior Director and Solutions Marketing at Fortinet. The pandemic had created unique challenges for employers and employees across all sectors around the world, with Varun Kukreja, Senior Program Manager – IT Security MEA, IDC Middle East, Africa, & Turkey, saying securing the teleworker had become a top priority, with some 90% of organisations looking to provide staff with secure access to IT services and applications. The pandemic had also accelerated digital transformation, he says, with an IDC Meta survey interim results revealing that some 56% of ...
CIOs Should Embrace the Opportunities of a Post-lockdown Market
As South Africa enters the tenth week of the nationwide lockdown, the business focus has shifted from enabling employees to work remotely to now planning for what the new normal is likely to look like. This requires CIOs to balance existing organisational priorities with ways of becoming more adaptive to the changing environment. Critical to this is decisive decision-making that positions the business for growth. For small to medium-sized businesses that do not have all the skills in-house to transform their IT environments, decision-makers should consider going the outsourcing route. By partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) that can deliver everything from a cloud-readiness audit through to helping identify the technology gaps that exist between the business strategy and what i...
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...
