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Worldwide Pandemic

Four finalists compete for Time’s Person of the Year for 2020

Time Magazine names its Person of the Year for 2020 on Thursday, choosing the winner from nominees that include healthcare workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial justice movement and two U.S. presidential election winners. The news magazine will reveal at 10 p.m. Eastern its selection for the title that signifies “who affected the news or our lives the most, for better or worse,” Time said on its website. Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg last year became the youngest individual winner of the accolade. The 16-year-old Swede inspired young people to take action in 2019 against climate change, grabbing headlines when she regularly skipped school to demonstrate outside Swedish parliament in a push for her government to curb carbon emissions. The Person of the Year is usually...

Microsoft and LinkedIn to Bring Digital Skills to 25 million People Worldwide

Microsoft has announced a new global skills initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to 25 million people worldwide by the end of the year. The announcement comes in response to the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanded access to digital skills is an important step in accelerating economic recovery, especially for the people hardest hit by job losses. This initiative, detailed on the Official Microsoft Blog, includes immediate steps to help those looking to reskill and pursue an in-demand job and brings together every part of the company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub and Microsoft. This includes: /* custom css */ .tdi_3_d1c.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_3_d1c.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 auto 0 0; } The use of data to ...

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 ...

Mining Sector Set to Lead Economic Recovery in Zambia

Sourced from Lusaka Times. Despite a challenging business environment in many sectors across the globe, Zambia’s wealth of natural resources continues to open the door for new investors and opportunities. As the world begins its recovery and gradual reopening in the face of the pandemic, traditional industries require energy, innovation and reinvention. ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc. – the mining conglomerate whose major shareholder is the Government of the Republic of Zambia – is signalling its intention to take on a leadership role in Zambia’s recovery with its announcement this week that they are partnering with a new strategic mining play – Array Metals. This company has an estimated inferred resource by JORC standards of 3 million tonnes of gold ore in Mumbwa, with 2.53.5grams per ton...

Twitter Allows Staff to Work from Home Indefinitely

Image sourced from Mission Statement Academy Yesterday, CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey sent an email to Twitter staff, notifying employees that they will able to continue working from home as long as they see fit. Dorsey notes in the same email that Twitter was an early adopter of a work-from-home model, however – much like the rest of the world – that has only been accelerated by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Twitter confirmed this decision in an email to Tech Crunch: “We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere. The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from ho...

3 Key Trends for the FMCG Sector Post-Pandemic

Sourced from Footstuffs SA. It’s clear that the Coronavirus has changed the landscape for FMCGs (Fast-moving consumer goods) – in some ways permanently. However, despite its similarities, the impact has not been the same across its subsectors and through the supply chain. Itumeleng Merafe, Head of Interest Rate Structuring at Investec says that “the lockdown has hit the economy hard and despite efforts by the government and Reserve Bank to mitigate the effects, ultimately only a medical solution is likely to provide lasting relief to consumers and businesses servicing those consumers.” The market for fast-moving consumer goods faces considerable changes – impacted by the demand for consumer-packaged goods, changes in household spending, increase in e-commerce and frequency of shop visits. ...

Workplace Health Surveillance Tool Launched in South Africa

Sourced from ISHN.com As more South Africans return to work in May, workplaces are re-designing to combat COVID-19 infection, while simultaneously reassuring workers are the new priority. Fortunately, South African innovation is rising to the challenge of reimagining shared workspaces in the COVID-19 era and a timely example of this is HealthID. Launched this week by a group of Cape Town-based entrepreneurs, HealthID helps employers comply with new government regulations that stipulate they should not only screen employees for signs of COVID-19 infection, but they must specifically create and maintain a database outlining the health status of individual workers. “It’s doubtful any reputable employer would want to incur the wrath of the Department of Labour inspectors by recording something...

Tokyo Game Show 2020 Cancelled due to COVID-19

The organisers of the Tokyo Game Show have announced that this year’s event has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. TGS 2020 was scheduled to take place from 24 to 27 September at the Makuhari Messe convention centre just outside of Tokyo, Japan. Now, the organisers are planning to host an online event instead. The Verge reports that this is the first-ever time TGS has faced cancellation since the convention began in 1996. Sadly, this news won’t come as a surprise to anyone. Almost every in-person gaming event this year has been struck from the calendar, including E3 and Gamescom, the biggest shows in the US and Europe respectively. TGS 2020 was likely to have gained a great deal of attention this year in comparison to an average year because of its status as the last major trade ...

‘Animal Crossing’ Boosts Nintendo’s Profits as Videogame Demand Soars

Sourced from WccfTech. The success of the Nintendo Switch during the worldwide pandemic has propelled Japanese entertainment company to a stand-out year. Nintendo says that it had made 352-billion yen ($3.3-billion) in operating profit for the fiscal year ending in March – a 41% surge from a year ago. Profit in the three months leading to March more than tripled compared with the previous quarter. Sales were driven in a large part to the massive success of the Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons – a game set on an island utopia where players can interact online and visit each other’s island. During the first six weeks of the game’s release, the company sold more than 12-million units of the game. Animal Crossing and the hardware it runs on, the Nintendo Switch game console, have been ...