Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

It’s been a truly awful week for the MTN Group— what with a $5.2 billion fine imposed on MTN Nigeria (the group’s largest and most profitable subsidiary) by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for failing to disconnect unregistered SIM cards timeously, the news of which led to considerable market panic and a subsequent 16% drop in MTN’s share price. This week, MTN also started fielding allegations of engaging in highly sophisticated tax evasion practices such as using transfer pricing to ship profits off to distant tax havens via their off-shore ‘businesses’, namely MTN Dubai and MTN International in Mauritius. Meanwhile, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange has confirmed that they will be investigating MTN for possible insider trading that may have occurred around the whole handling of information regarding the NCC debacle. And so far, the MTN Group’s CEO’s efforts to engage with the Nigerian authorities concerning the unprecedented fine have yet to yield any form of relief. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that MTN would feature in this week’s discussion on the African Tech Round-up. However, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku couldn’t agree on an angle to frame their chat this week. Tefo wanted us to unpack the regulatory challenges large telcos in Africa are facing in trying to innovate and grow their businesses across continent, while Andile was keen to debate the question of whether or not mobile operators like MTN might be obsolete in a few decades if they don’t refresh their legacy business models. So, they decided to let you in on their dignified little skirmish and let you decide whose topic suggestion wins the day. Also in this week’s show, all the biggest digital, tech and innovation news from across the continent— including a progress update on Nigeria’s efforts to meet its 2017 analogue to digital migration deadline, and details on how much Kenya has lost to cybercrime in the last year. Additional Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

This week’s African Tech Round-up is chock-full of important digital, tech and innovation news from across the African continent— not least, the unfortunate rumoured in-fighting and financial distress at Jason Njoku’s media startup, iROKO Partners. Also, we’re happy to have our content producer, Peter “The Enigma” Peele back from a a hectic trip to Dubai where he attended GITEX Technology Week 2015. We managed to convince him to jump on the mic with us this week and share some highlights from his trip. Meanwhile, Tefo Mohapi not only delivered a talk and facilitated a discussion at the the Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute’s Leadership Conference this past week (the dude got to even have dinner with former South African President Thabo Mbeki himself), but also attended the Brand Africa 100 Awards. Be sure to catch him giving us the low-low on all that in this week’s episode. And finally, Andile Masuku's back from a week-long leave of absence due to eye surgery he had done on his left eye. All said, it's been a super-busy week for the team at the African Tech Round-up. Additional Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Last week it was Strive Masiyiwa's Econet Zimbabwe alluding that OTT (over the top) services such as WhatsApp and BBM are the reason they are seeing a drop in voice calls revenue and overall revenue. Now this week, MTN South Africa CEO, Mteto Nyati, has called for South Africa's communications regulator, ICASA, to look into regulating these OTT players because they haven't invested anything in telecoms infrastructure and they are "reaping large profits". Is this a fair call? Isn't it up to us as customers what we use the data we purchase from mobile service providers for? Or do we need to protect African mobile service providers from OTT services reaping profits from their infrastructure investments? Also, this week, Tefo Mohapi (Andile Masuku is on medical leave) covers interesting technology, digital and innovation news from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. Additional Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Tefo Mohapi was invited to speak at Tech4Africa 2015 last week. He shared on the important work that he and his team at iAfrikan are continuing to do in spearheading the ground-breaking Report Xenophobia campaign. While at the event, Tefo was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by Nic Haralambous, who opened his talk with this outlandish statement, "I believe everyone who starts a business is a bit broken." Nic is the founder of Nic Harry— a successful Cape Town-based “luxury men’s sock company” he built from scratch. Nic’s thought-provoking views on the realities of startup life and what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur sparked a great conversation that Tefo and Andile Masuku had on this week’s show. Along with all the week's most important digital, tech and innovation news, do listen in for the low-low on all the cool stuff members of the team at the African Tech Round-up will be getting up to in the final quarter of 2015. Here's what trending this week: -- South African tech firm Altron spills how much they made and mostly lost on the doomed Altech Node video-on-demand device, -- Facebook and Eutelsat set to share the entire broadband payload on Spacecom’s future AMOS-6 satellite, -- Zimbabwean mobile network operator Econet continues a legal bid to overturn the directive by the Posts and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) for mobile companies to lower voice tariffs, and -- South African telecoms giant Telkom Telkom is being criticised for exposing customer personal data. Additional Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

In what is arguably the largest cybercrime scandal affecting cars to date, Volkswagen has admitted to installing software in some of their diesel-powered cars to give out false emission data results during tests. This scandal affects their other brands like Audi, Skoda and SEAT and has seen the South African government, through the departments of Environmental Affairs and Transport as well as the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications, state that it is investigating into Volkswagen South Africa after the parent company admitted to deceiving USA regulators with the software. Apart from this raising concerns around the environment and carbon emissions from cars, we also wonder what this large scale software fraud by Volkswagen means for the future of cars given the move to electric vehicles. As you might be aware, electric vehicles are more reliant on software than cars that have an engine and more so driverless cars. Do we have to worry about cars getting hacked? Can we trust electric vehicle manufacturers too with their specifications since they'll mostly be software based? We also have a special guest on this week's African Tech Round-up, Vije Vijendranath. An engineer, startup founder and a co-founder of two children. Vije gives us his thoughts on the Volkswagen cybercrime scandal as well as on the week's big stories. Be sure to catch all the week's biggest digital, tech and innovation news from across Africa in this week's episode too. Additional Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0