EASSy, the second of nine new undersea telecommunications cables to connect sub-Saharan Africa to the rest of the world by 2011, will make landfall in South Africa tomorrow. But there may well be some unintended consequences. Telkom announced today that the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) would land at Mtunzini — the landing site…
It’s not a pretty sound. The Local Organising Committee for World Cup 2010 whining about the slow pace of ticket sales is a little like football teams complaining that they don’t get enough credit for their attractive style of football, even as they are being relegated to a lower league. The reality is that Fifa,…
Two ads in the latest Sunday Times were seemingly innocuous: six posts advertised for Broadband Infraco and 13 for the Department of Home Affairs. But between the lines, they said so much. To start with, the Home Affairs ad was headlined “Building the New Home Affairs”. That’s a positive sign to start with; an acknowledgement…
It can be enormously confusing when you first set out to liberate yourself. Having a full-featured office that is not an office at all is a contradiction and a challenge — but also an enormously satisfying goal once it is achieved. The first few times you hit the road (or a restaurant, airline or conference)…
It’s difficult today to grasp that just 20 years ago most of us were stuck in the same office set-up that had ruled the business world for a century. In this first of a series of excerpts from my new book, The Mobile Office, the argument goes that even the internet was not the real…
Exclusive: The 12 hours of the Matsepe-Casaburri presidency, revealed through the acting president’s diary September 25, midnight: Yippee!!! I’m the president! No, the President, with a capital P! No one can stop me now! I’m so happy I could change a law! 12.01am: Just heard my first President Matsepe-Casaburri joke from the Internet. Q: What…
The annual Highway Africa conference at Rhodes U in Grahamstown does not so much set the agenda as tap into the agenda of where new media is going. Case in point is the contribution of Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media and global thought leader in citizen journalism. Back in 2003, we both participated…
Today may have seen the beginning of the end of the dreaded monster lurking in the tangled forests of South African telecommunications law. When Justice Norman Davis ruled in the high court this morning that value-added network services (VANS) must be allowed to provide their own networks — and that the regulator is obliged to…
Americans have developed a unique approach to poor nutrition: they drink coffee with a straw so that they can suck the coffee up through a layer of sugar that is deposited at the bottom of the cup and thus sweeten the coffee without using too much sugar. I realise this may seem a trivial conclusion…
Is it only me, or has South Africa fallen off the world map? It’s bad enough we have Eskom, The Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Sport rubbing salt into our wounds every day. Now it seems our power needs are out of step with…
