Author: Toby Shapshak

In another late, come-from-behind victory, the SABC secured the rights to the Cricket World Cup – after the tournament already started. Cricket-loving South Africans will be able to watch the sporting showpiece after yet another 11th-hour agreement between the public broadcaster and MultiChoice, which owns the rights. Whether that means the Proteas will be any good at this event is an entirely different conversation. Unlike the Springboks, the current rugby world champions, the country’s cricketers have an unfortunate habit of choking (yes, the first way to deal with a problem is to admit it). Airing out some dirty linen The SABC aired…

At least we don’t have to pay a TV licence for our smartphones. That’s about the only good thing to take from the new SABC Bill being proposed in parliament. Like the previous attempts at finding a new way to fund the SABC – instead of the absurd licence fees that only a small fraction of people still pay – this bill is out of touch with the current reality. Unlike Planet SABC, the real world doesn’t march to the beat of the ANC’s drum. As the first SABC legislation in 24 years, the SABC Bill is “a huge disappointment,”…

Another World Cup, another SABC broadcast bungle. Or is it another MultiChoice bungle? Just over a month since it resolved the free-to-air rights for the Rugby World Cup, this time the public broadcaster is ensnared in another broadcast rights fight with MultiChoice for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023. It really is hard to say who is at fault, given how these are events that happen regularly every four years, except many South Africans will now miss the Proteas’ usual early exit. MultiChoice released a statement on Tuesday, hitting the negotiations for a six. “After prolonged negotiations, the SABC last…

eMedia, which owns both e.tv and the Openview free-to-air satellite service, has taken MultiChoice to court to get the rights to show the Rugby World Cup. The Springboks beat Tonga on Sunday and are almost certainly through to the quarter-finals, no matter what Scotland do and the numerical conspiracy theories say. Siya Kolisi will captain the world champions against hosts France on Sunday, 15 October, at 21:00 SAST – in one of the most anticipated games of the tournament. After a last-minute contract agreement by the SABC with MultiChoice specifically excluded rights for Openview, eMedia warned in early September that…

Having launched a brand new (and free) banking service for consumers, Bank Zero has turned its attention to business banking. Michael Jordaan, the neobank’s chair, says the company is bringing the “simple, effective and technology-driven approach” to banking for businesses. “Bank Zero is ushering an innovative new approach far from the legacy ‘me-too’ solutions of traditional banks,” he says. “We have completely rethought commercial banking to bring it into the digital age. We’ve built it from the ground up, which means we have no legacy systems that are both cumbersome and costly, leading to inefficiency and high bank charges.” Built…

MTN wants you to use its MoMo service to avoid getting robbed, send remittances to other countries, run your small business with it, and buy pre-paid funeral cover. All with a mobile phone. If you run a spaza shop, MTN wants to replace two point-of-sale (POS) devices (one for accepting card payments, the other for buying airtime, electricity and the lottery) with a single mobile terminal. There are 9 million MoMO registered users in South Africa. The relaunched MTN MoMo SA app offers this functionality, as well as making it easier for someone to sign up for an account. The…

Europe’s war against privacy issues keeps on rolling, with TikTok being the latest social media platform to be fined. This fine – amounting to €345 million or R6.8 billion – was for how it dealt with children’s accounts under the EU’s very strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy legislation. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which oversees TikTok because its European headquarters are in Dublin, found the app’s “public-by-default” settings meant anyone could see what a child posted, whether they were TikTok subscribers or not. The DPC also targeted its “Family Pairing” feature, which allowed an adult’s account to…

​​Steve Jobs would be appalled. Not only were most of the iPhone 15’s new features leaked long before the launch, but the phone has been plagued with problems. As much as the own-goal over its new sustainable fibre phone cover called FineWoven was an avoidable flop, so were the overheating problems and the mangled software to transfer data from older Apple devices. Bloomberg’s peerless Apple watcher Mark Gurman is reporting that iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max owners are “complaining that the new devices get too hot during use or while charging”. This is “a potential setback for the company’s…

PayShap is the biggest thing to happen in banking in South Africa – if it is done right, says TymeBank’s co-founder and group CEO Coen Jonker. The new rapid payment method is a “game changer” and the “key that will unlock the true digitisation of the cash economy,” he tells Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Shapshak on PayShap with another chap Also available on Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google podcasts Now Listen: TymeBank SA CEO Tauriq Keraan on the neo-bank’s international expansion

Amazon is getting into generative AI with a sizable $4 billion investment in Anthropic, a startup founded by several former executives from OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. Microsoft has ploughed $10 billion into OpenAI, while Google has been working on its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. This left Amazon, which made early inroads into the world of voice assistants with Alexa, without meaningful competition in the tech industry’s latest holy grail; AI. Ready Player… Three? Now, Amazon is playing catchup with the help of Antrhopic’s own chatbot (and $4 billion), which launched earlier this year – going by the name…