The Geeks on a Plane Africa tour heads for Johannesburg and Cape Town this week, after successful meetings with tech entrepreneurs and startups in Ghana and Nigeria. Beginning Tuesday in Johannesburg, they’ll be visiting the Braamonfontein Cluster tech hub and the Sw7 tech accelerator. More than 20 participants also will…
Within two weeks, German authorities plan to use automated software to analyze speech patterns of asylum seekers to verify their claimed place of origin, according to a Deutsche Welle report. The software is based on similar authentication programs used in the finance and insurance industries to assess speech patterns when…
African businesses and communities will soon be able to choose a “dotAfrica” website, now that the domain names will be available for registration in the global Internet community. The .africa address went live last month after ICANN, the organization responsible for coordinating the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers, launched…
The SKA is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, one that listens to space signals with a sensitivity that’s 100 times greater than any current radio telescope on earth. The project in South Africa just got another big financial boost of USD$5.8 million (R75 million) from…
Top Facebook executive Chris Cox visited Ghana on Wednesday, part of a weeklong visit to three West African nations to connect with tech entrepreneurs. Cox, the Chief Product Officer for Facebook, checked out the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra to share ideas about innovation and business development….
Having trouble logging on to some websites based in the United States? You’re not alone, because Amazon Web Services experienced a massive blackout Tuesday that’s affected many of their own products and a number of clients. While the outage is concentrated on the East Coast of the United States, it’s…
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would intentionally produce 300,000 tsetse flies per week, but that’s exactly what they’re doing at a new facility in Burkina Faso. The country has inaugurated the breeding facility at Bobo-Dioulasso, where radiation is used to make the male flies sterile. They then are released…
A 17-year-old student from Cameroon has become the first African to win the Google Code In contest grand prize. Collins Nji of Bamenda, an artist and graphic designer when he’s not honing his coding skills, was one of 34 teens from across the globe to achieve the honors. There were…
The legal appeal of a United States citizen whose communications were monitored by Ethiopian agents from afar moved forward this week, as the Kidane v. Ethiopia case was heard in a U.S. appeals court in Washington D.C. The case centers on whether Ethiopia, as a foreign government, is accountable for…
The Energy Observer, a recycled catamaran powered entirely by clean energy, is making final preparations to begin a six-year journey around the world that includes ports in 50 countries. The world’s first hydrogen ship, supported by UNESCO to test renewable energy solutions in the real world, is based in Saint…
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been working on how technology can end wildlife crime – and at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) they’re showing guests how thermal imaging is helping to protect elephants and other African animals. Visitors to CES 2017 in Las Vegas had the chance Thursday…
The adoption rate for smartphones across the African continent has swelled to 226 million phones, and that’s expected to nearly triple by 2020. The GSMA, a British industry organization for mobile operators across the world, says much of that is in the advanced markets of Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa –…
The pollsters, the parties, much of the American population – they all thought American presidential candidate Donald J. Trump would never win. But none of them worked at BrandsEye, a South African data firm that analyzed social media posts to make the right call. Jean Pierre Kloppers, CEO of the startup,…
Liberians struggling to connect to the Internet have been dealing with DDoS attacks related to a Mirai malware infection, the same botnet-driven cause of several large-scale Internet access disruptions since the open-source malware code was publicly released. It’s the same type of attack that blocked access to Twitter, Netflix and…
A U.S. citizen whose communications were monitored by Ethiopian agents from afar is appealing his case, on the grounds that Ethiopia must be accountable for illegal spying that relied on state-sponsored malware to infect his home computer. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit focused on defending civil liberties and…