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TCS | Quintus de Beer on MTN's plan to win at wholesale
For years, Cell C was the only game in town for brands wanting to launch a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). That’s changing -- fast -- and now MTN has said it is positioning itself as the “go-to network backbone partner” in South Africa. MTN South Africa wholesale executive Quintus…
TCS | Muggie van Staden: Linux fans should learn to trust Microsoft
Muggie van Staden is CEO of one of South Africa's largest and oldest open-source software companies, Obsidian Systems. But ask him what he runs on his desktop, and he'll tell you it's a Mac. And he recently moved to it from ... Microsoft Windows. Van Staden says his desktop computing…
TCS | Calvin Collett on the launch of Melon Mobile
South African Internet entrepreneur Calvin Collett is launching his latest venture, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Melon Mobile, next week, hoping to lure customers looking for a simpler proposition for their telecommunications needs. Collett joined TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) on Thursday to unpack the new…
TCS | MetroFibre CEO on the township broadband opportunity
Jan-Jan Bezuidenhout, CEO of MetroFibre Networx, believes fibre network operators (FNOs) in South Africa will soon find a way to deliver fibre broadband profitably into underserviced areas. Speaking on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Bezuidenhout – who replaced former Absa boss Steve Booysen as CEO of MetroFibre in mid-2022 – said…
TCS | Kalon's Clive Butkow on the state of the VC nation
Clive Butkow is one of South Africa’s leading experts on venture capital investment in technology start-ups. The founder and CEO of Kalon Venture Partners joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about why the VC investment business has changed radically, especially since the world, led by the…
TCS | Pargo CEO Lars Veul on the changing shape of e-commerce logistics
When Dutch colleagues and business partners Lars Veul and Derk Hoekert came to South Africa on assignment with e-commerce marketplace Groupon in 2012, they soon realised there was a problem: up to 30% of local online orders were not getting delivered. This was due to various reasons, including consumers not…
TCS | Michele Gamberini on the criminal assault on MTN's base stations
MTN South Africa hosted a media event in Soweto on Thursday to demonstrate to journalists the severe impact that criminal vandalism is having on its base stations. In this interview, conducted at the site of an MTN base station in Mofolo South in Soweto, the company's chief technology and information…
TCS+ | Why a ‘shift left’ approach to software development matters
The software development process has evolved dramatically in recent years to keep up with the growing demand for delivering high-quality software in the fastest time possible. Unfortunately, in the past security was often tacked on as an afterthought and testing only happened towards the end of the life cycle. And…
TCS+ | Chip maker MediaTek brings next-gen connectivity to Africa
Africa is by no means going to be left behind in technology and connectivity, according to chip developer MediaTek. 5G, it believes, is going to revolutionise the capabilities of mobile handsets, drive home automation and bring feature-rich capabilities to our vehicles. In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral’s James Erasmus spoke…
TCS | Yugen Naidoo on Lenovo and the future of the PC
The PC industry has been through a boom-and-bust cycle in the past few years, with demand first spiking higher due to Covid and work-from-home measures, only to fall back as people returned to the office. Despite this, there’s plenty happening in the PC space, including interesting experimentation with new form…
TCS+ | The need for speed: Braintree's Heath Huxtable on modern IT infrastructure
TCS+ | The need for speed: Braintree's Heath Huxtable on modern IT infrastructure The need to deploy servers and supporting software applications hasn’t changed, but the way these deployments are done has. The days when teams of highly skilled consultants and technicians entered a customer’s environment and made a slew…
TCS | Mastercard’s Robert Brine on the fast changing world of payments
Robert Brine, director of Cyber & Intelligence Solutions at Mastercard in Southern Africa, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to talk about security in the global payments industry. Brine tells TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod about the security challenges in the fintech and financial services space, and what consumers and businesses need to…
TCS Impact Series | Tech leader Trustlink rebrands to 'TechFin', Omnea
Having been at the vanguard of the fintech movement in South Africa, Trustlink is rebranding and repositioning itself as two independent businesses, now called Omnea and Tegra. With this move, the company aims to become omnicompetent, omnipresent and omnichannel with a focused approach for each business entity. Dr Philip Tromp,…
TCS Impact Series | Ricoh SA drives digital transformation with DocuWare
Rifling through filing cabinets in search of the one critical file that has brought your business to a standstill is an arduous and painful task that nobody enjoys. Fortunately, those days are over. Ricoh South Africa is now an expert in the field of electronic records management. In addition, the…
TCS | The inside story of toco, the Stellenbosch-born digital currency
TechCentral on Tuesday broke the news about Toco, a new payments platform and associated digital currency, toco, backed by the founder of Vumatel. Now Toco CEO Paul Rowett joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the project, which aims to fight climate change by “fixing the current economic model…
TCS | How Naked got covered – Alex Thomson unpacks huge funding round
Naked Insurance, the South African digital insurance start-up, announced earlier on Wednesday that it has secured US$17-million (R306-milliomn at the time of writing) in a series-B funding round. Alex Thomson, Naked’s CEO and a co-founder of the company, joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack the investment,…
TCS Impact Series | How to get the better of load shedding
Unreliable power supply due to excessive load shedding has most South Africans worried about the future. However, every consumer can make a difference by using technology. For example, automation can make the job of managing and saving energy less expensive and arduous. Similarly, making use of the internet of things…
TCS | Brandon Doyle on Convergence Partners' new infrastructure fund
Convergence Partners CEO Brandon Doyle joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack the recently announced closing, at $296-million (R5.3-billion), of the private equity company’s new Digital Infrastructure Fund. Convergence Partners, which is chaired by well-known South African technology investor and entrepreneur Andile Ngcaba, unpacks what the fund…
TCS | Pinnacle’s Tim Humphreys-Davies on the state of the IT nation
Tim Humphreys-Davies, CEO of Alviva Holdings-owned technology distributor Pinnacle, believes the worst of the supply-chain challenges that afflicted the global and local tech industries in recent years is largely over. Speaking on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Humphreys-Davies explains that although there are still some challenges in the networking space, the…
TCS | Inside AfriForum's plan to deploy modular nuclear reactors in SA
AfriForum, the vocal Afrikaner civil rights organisation, wants to deploy pebble-bed modular nuclear reactors (PBMRs) in South African communities to help solve the country’s crippling energy woes. But why PBMRs? And how will the project work exactly? It might seem strange for a non-governmental organisation like AfriForum to want to…