Welcome to Tech Talk

The smiley face has proved remarkably durable, however, getting a major lift with smartphones, as text messaging became more widespread and the Unicode Consortium, a global standard-setting group for computer text, began adding thousands of new emojis to its catalogue over the past 10 years.

If South Africa is serious about creating jobs and competing in the global economy, we need to do something about boosting our tech skills. Vukani Mngxati, CEO of Accenture in Africa, offers his opinion on the subject.
If I were given a rand every time I heard the phrase “South African jobs crisis” I would be an extremely wealthy man. And I would use that money to refocus national efforts on a rapid deep-rooted technology skills-development programme.

Central banks in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa will conduct a cross border payments trial using different central bank digital currencies (CBDC) to assess if this allows transactions to be settled more cheaply and easily, the banks said on Thursday. Many governments and central banks around the world are exploring the use of CBDCs, which are digital forms of existing currencies.

Vodacom Group has been named a Global Alliance Member of the Earthshot Prize. The Earthshot Prize has been designed to discover and scale the best solutions to repair our planet over the next 10 years. Vodacom is one of the 14 companies and brands that will come together to support and scale the innovative and ground-breaking solutions developed by the soon-to-be-announced fifteen Earthshot Prize Finalists.

WhatsApp announced that it has banned over 3 million Indian accounts in the 46-day period from June 16 to July 31. It received 137 reports for account support, of which one was actioned, and 316 requests to ban accounts, the messaging giant said in its second compliance report under the new Information Technology Rules, 2021.