Monday, January 22, 2024

Telefonica nears full ownership of German unit

Telefonica increased its stake in its German subsidiary to 93.1 per cent during a public tender offer to shareholders, spending around €1.5 billion in cash.
The operator stated it raised its stake from approximately 71.8 per cent held when it announced the public acquisition in November 2023, acquiring 630 million shares equating to more than 21 per cent. The offer is expected to be settled on 26 January 2024.
Read more here.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Apple Vision Pro set for US launch in February

Apple announced its $3,499 Vision Pro headset would start shipping across the US on 2 February, marking its much-anticipated entry into the AR/VR market, with advance orders to start on 19 January.

The headset comes with 256GB of storage and delivers more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye. It allows users to switch between AR and VR using a dial located on the side. post only in the specified topic.
Read more here.

Parallel Wireless pushes Africa open RAN progress

RAN vendor Parallel Wireless lauded a milestone of installing equipment in 1,500 sites across various African markets through partnerships with authorities and operators in a number of countries. In a statement, the vendor highlighted deployments in Tanzania, Republic of Guinea, Ghana, South Sudan, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi and Nigeria. Read more here.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Raxio in Ethiopia

Rexio

Raxio Ethiopia has commenced operations in 2023. It is is a carrier-neutral Tier III data centre facility located along the outskirts of Addis Ababa, meeting fast-growing demands for colocation in Ethiopia, home to some of East Africa’s largest software companies and a dynamic SME ecosystem.

Located in the heart of Ethiopia’s economic region Raxio’s newest Tier III certified, data centre will address the growing needs of a growing business and public sector for dependable, always-on IT solutions.

“The launch of our flagship facility in Addis Ababa represents a major milestone in our journey at Raxio, and for our country,” said Bewket Taffere, general manager of Raxio Data Centre in Ethiopia.

“We anticipate that this facility will be a catalyst for increased economic development in Ethiopia, supporting local businesses and government agencies, as well as attracting regional and international service and content providers into Ethiopia.”

For more information visit the Raxio Ethiopia page.

Orange Withdraws from Ethio Telecom Sale Process

Orange Group opted to withdraw from a process to acquire a 45 per cent stake in Ethiopia’s state-owned operator Ethio Telecom, blaming existing market conditions which it claims do not match its strategy.

In a statement to Mobile World Live, the France-based operator group explained it would not move forward with a plan to attempt to acquire a 45 per cent stake in the Ethiopian business, ending interest which first began in 2021.

“After analysis, the group believes the conditions do not allow for the rapid deployment of our strategy and the completion of a project that would create value for the company,” it stated.
Read more from here.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Grand Challenges and Opportunities; Blue Ribbon Panel Report of ETHIOPIA2050

Grand Challenges and Opportunities which is a Blue Ribbon Panel Report of the ETHIOPIA2050 is officially published and submitted to Government of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. This report is prepared by a Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) consisting of an independent group of Ethiopian and Ethiopian-origin experts with diverse professional backgrounds. They bring deep expertise across fields as varied as economics, public health, statistics, education, population dynamics, technology, and urban planning. Together, they have formulated a transformative vision to proactively aid Ethiopia on its journey to a better future.

To proactively address what were identified as “Ten Grand Challenges and Opportunities” associated with this expected generational and historical demographic shift, an Initiative was launched to carefully examine, both the opportunities of demographic dividend and the associated risks. The approach in this Initiative was guided by the consideration of population as a central issue for both the challenges and opportunities side, because it is people who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development.

The BRP rests upon a collective vision that is part of the broader ETHIOPIA 2050 Initiative and focuses on the actions that policymakers can take, with broad support of the public. Their insights were generated after extensive and careful vetting of the transformative new ideas presented at an international conference held on December 19th and 20th, 2019 in Addis Ababa which included 450 Ethiopian/Ethiopian origin participants from 10 countries.

The report presents a series of bold, feasible, and actionable ideas with an execution plan - that will have multi-generational impacts. The report lays out a straightforward and powerful rationale for actions in the areas like, Rapid Urbanization, Water-Food-Health-Energy Nexus, Economic Growth, Institutional and Civic Development and Gender Equality just to list some. The full report is available here.

Saturday, September 26, 2020

First FORTRAN Program Runs in 1954

The first successful FORTRAN program runs September 20, 1954, 66 years ago. FORTRAN, which is an acronym for "FORmula TRANslator," was invented at IBM by a group led by John Backus. FORTRAN's purpose was to simplify the programming process by allowing the programmer ("coder") to use simple algebra-like expressions when writing software. It also took over the task of keeping track of where instructions were kept in memory--a very laborious and error-prone procedure when undertaken by humans. FORTRAN is rarely in use today and used some times in scientific and engineering applications, making it one of the oldest programming languages still in use.