Samsung widens lead in declining MEA smartphone market
Smartphone shipments in Middle East and Africa (MEA) declined 10% YoY in Q2 2026, a quarter with no sales-driving occasion to support demand. The contraction was not evenly distributed among brands, however: several brands saw their shares decline steeply, while...
South Africans being forced into debt for daily essentials
South Africa’s cost-of-living crisis continues to deepen, with rising reliance on credit driving nearly a third of South Africans to borrow from informal lenders - often just for household essentials – according to Wonga’s annual credit utilisation survey. Surveying 4...
Rise in ransomware targeting ICS systems
In Q2 of 2026, the percentage of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) computers on which malicious objects were blocked continued to decrease but, at the same time, the percentage of these computers targeted by ransomware increased across almost every global region. This...
More women are moving beyond first-time homeownership
For the first time in a decade, repeat home buyers now outnumber first-time buyers among South African women applying for home loans, says FNB, signalling a significant shift from first-time homeownership to long-term property ownership and wealth creation. New FNB...
Musk gets highest Ukraine award for Starlink access
Elon Musk has been awarded one of Ukraine’s highest honours for Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Musk the Order of Freedom for his “outstanding personal merits” in protecting human life and freedom and strengthening...
Smart money: Defining the role of enterprise PCs in financial services
The amount of money that South Africa’s financial services sector spends on technology every year is nothing short of impressive. By Werner Joubert, commercial SYS business director (South Africa and SADC) at ASUS In 2025, South African businesses invested tens of...
Intron brings natural African language mixing to voice AI
Intron, an Africa-centric voice technology platform, has launched Sahara v2.5, African voice AI that enables computers to understand one of the continent's most common ways of communicating: mixing languages within the same sentence and conversation. Across Africa,...
Alphawave’s Saigen and Callbi merge
Specialised South African technology group Alphawave’s businesses Saigen and Callbi have merged into a single operating company trading as Saigen, with Sam Clarke as CEO. The two businesses have operated as closely linked companies for years. Saigen builds AI-powered...
Security governance is not just a leadership problem. It is a personal one
There is a comfortable version of security governance that many boards have already adopted. Name an executive to own the risk. Add cyber to the audit committee agenda. Report annually. Job done. By Hendrik Kruger, chief technology officer (CTO) and CISO, Cloud On...
Google offers students a year of free tools
Google has expanded its AI-powered learning tools across Africa, offering eligible higher education students in 27 countries one year of Google AI Plus at no cost. Eligible students can access 12 months of Google AI Plus, which includes Gemini Omni, two times higher...
Beware of the AI trap in development
AI is transforming every aspect of the software development lifecycle, but because the technology delivers such professional-looking outputs, organisations risk falling into an ‘AI trap’ and overlooking key factors in development. This is according to David Noakes,...
TrendAI ranks first on CyberGym Agentic AI Security Benchmark
The TrendAI agentic exploit-remediation engine, codename AESIR, achieved the top position on CyberGym, an independent evaluation benchmark for AI-driven security tooling. The 97% success rate from TrendAI is nearly 4 percentage points higher than the former leader....