The Microsoft chairman is looking ahead to the time later this year when he will be focused full-time on fighting disease and poverty, while also trying to do everything he can to help his software company in its battle against Google.

Rwandatel, a landline telephony and Internet Service Provider has signed a US$35million deal with Huawei Technologies based in China to expand network in Rwanda.

Celtel Nigeria may be facing a crisis of its life time after top managers were relieved of their duties amid industry speculation about their future.

Four international communications firms, Messrs Telkom South Africa, Orascom of Egypt, Vodacom and France Telecomm have expressed their interest to take over the running of the crippled national carrier NITEL and its mobile telecoms arm M-TEL following weekend’s revocation of their sale to Transnational Corporation (Transcorp).

To address small businesses increasing need for ROI-driven technology solutions, Maximizer Software, the leading provider of simple, accessible customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, has announced the availability of its Entrepreneur Edition completing the suite of Maximizer CRM10 solutions.

Obsidian has announced that it will soon commence official training for the ‘Ubuntu Certified Professional’ programme. Obsidian has concluded an agreement with Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux that allows for the company to provide training beginning March 2008.

Say “business intelligence” and the average CIO or CEO will think “significant investment required”. However, with its BI Smarts solution, business intelligence specialist Synergy Computing is offering small to medium sized enterprises (SME) the opportunity to affordably deploy a complete BI solution for as little as R5000 – R10 000 per month.

Microsoft solutions specialist i5 has strengthened its capabilities with the recent acquisition of Chameleon Technologies, a Web design studio. On joining i5, Chameleon has been renamed to BlackLight and will specialise in developing web content based on the emerging Microsoft Silverlight technology.

Workgroup’s Symantec division has announced the availability of Norton’s new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard-compatible version of its AntiVirus software.

The McAfee division at Workgroup has announced that McAfee has completed the acquisition of SafeBoot Holding for approximately $350 million in cash.

Microsoft Corp. issued the following statement in response to the announcement by Yahoo! Inc. that its Board of Directors has rejected Microsoft’s previously announced proposal to acquire Yahoo!: It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are [...]