The week in review

At Home

THE telecoms regulator, Icasa, may face stiff challenges to its independence if the Icasa Amendment Bill is promulgated in its current form, according to the Mail & Guardian.

MICROSOFT CEO Steve Ballmer" rel=tag>Steve Ballmer, who was in South Africa last week, pledges free software for all 284 government-backed municipalities.

XANTIUM announces that it will merge with black-owned technology group Motoma in a R90m deal, which will see Xantium change its name to capitalise on its stronger empowerment status.

BUSINESS REPORT notes that MTN has set aside 270 million for a cellphone operating licence in Iran.

SOUTH AFRICA is one of five countries that, according to The Economist, have committed to buying one million laptops as part of a plan hatched at the World Economic Forum in January, to provide a laptop to every schoolchild in poorer parts of the world. The initiative is called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC).

THE SA Communications Union (Sacu) accuses Telkom of flouting accepted practices by suspending some executives, promoting another without advertising the job, and by rewarding its departing CEO with a hefty payout.

ALTECH`S latest figures are released, showing it has put its aborted deal with Econet behind it without losing any focus on its other operations.

ALTRON subsidiary Bytes Technology Group reports a 31% in headline earnings per share. CEO Dave Redshaw says the second half of the year is traditionally better for the company: "We`re hoping to reach an 8% operating margin by then."

NEW technologies and a R22.8 million investment from a private equity fund boost small-cap company Beget, driving a return to profitability for the six months to June this year.

TWO incubation centres, Softstart Incubator near Pretoria and the Bodibeng Technology Incubator in Midrand, announce they will merge in April. The companies were formed to nurse technology start-ups through their early years. The Godisa Trust funds both.

SOUTH AFRICA, together with more than 50 countries globally, celebrates World Space Week in recognition of space sciences and technology (6-10 October).

LABAT says it will sell its Africard business, a licensed MasterCard and Visa security card manufacturer, to Oberthur Card Systems for R20 million. Labat acquired Africard from Allied Technologies last year.

Into Africa

TUNISIA: MTN confirms that it submitted a prequalification application to the authorities in Tunisia to bid for a 35% stake in Tunisie T l com.

KENYA: President Mwai Kibaki says Kenyans will soon enjoy enhanced service delivery by public servants after the implementation of the e-government plan.

KENYA: Kenya is among three African states whose aviation industries are on course to fully embrace electronic ticketing by 2007, reports the EA Standard.

ETHIOPIA: Police have apprehended five suspects during a botched attempt to murder a telecommunications official, using a bomb in a gift pack.

KENYA: Telkom Kenya launched its new prepaid VOIP service last week and other newcomers are expected to roll out soon, according to the Nation. It also noted that detectives are investigating alleged massive fraud at Telkom Kenya, in which the corporation has been losing more than Sh300 million every month.

NIGERIA: The GSM Association says high taxes in many developing countries have made mobile communications unaffordable for hundreds of millions of people, holding back social and economic development.

KENYA: All Value-Added Tax payers must install electronic tax registers before March next year, says the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), but a second judge last week barred the Authority from doing so, reports the EA Standard.

Abroad

SUN AND GOOGLE cozy up. Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com. The companies will also explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite."

DEFACEMENT archive Zone-H reports that a group called IHS (Iran Hackers Sabotage) broke into OpenSUSE.org, wiki.novell.com and forged.novell.com to post a message stating that it was Iran`s right to develop nuclear power. All three sites were defaced in the same way.

BT launches a combined WiFi, 3G and GPRS tariff for road warriors and other business folk on the move. The service - which costs 49 for 4 000 minutes WiFi access via BT Openzone and the chance to download up to 75 meg of information via 3G or GPRS - can also be used overseas.

VIRUS writers have created a Trojan, which uses an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Office to take over Windows PCs. The Hesive Trojan can be disguised as a Microsoft Access file. Once opened in Access, infected .mdb files take advantage of a five-month old buffer overflow flaw in Microsoft`s Jet Database Engine software to seize control of vulnerable machines.

LAWYERS representing BT Ireland have called on the owner of BTIrelandsucks.com to pull the plug on the site claiming it has been registered in "bad faith".

SYMANTEC buys security compliance firm BindView for $209m. The all-cash transaction, which is subject to regulatory and BindView shareholder approvals, is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2006.

SAMSUNG Electronics, the world`s top memory chip maker, announces a $33bn investment plan to add new production lines, aiming to more than treble its chip sales by 2012, reports Reuters.