As this week comes to a close we take a look at the stories that resonated most with our readers.
Safaricom sees a new opportunity in Ethiopia, and Lenovo is cooling supercomputers with warm water in Germany.
With the world ever digitizing and becoming more and more contactless as social distancing and other realities of the global pandemic set in, companies and enterprises from Africa and around the world continue to adapt to the new reality of the world.
Find out more about this week’s top articles:
5. Safaricom Eyes an Opportunity to Expand into Ethiopia
With the Ethiopian government’s new policies to open up windows for private companies to buy shares in Ethio Telecom after nearly a century of a state monopoly on telecommunications.
This is one opportunity that Safaricom has been waiting on and one that might grant access to a licence in an economy with more than 100-million people.
A number of other African firms and telecoms like MTN, Orange and Airtel have also expressed interest in access to Ethiopia’s fast-growing mobile phone services market, and millions of prospective customers.
4. How Lenovo is Pursuing Sustainable Supercomputers
Lenovo’s LRZ SuperMUC NG supercomputer array runs quietly as it needs almost no fans for cooling. The massive set of computers continues to function at 100% despite this.
The secret? A focus on sustainability and using warm water to cooling within the datacenter.
With more wattage comes greater heat, which ultimately needs to be removed. This is where the concept of warm water cooling comes in – the idea of pushing water that to us feels warm, but at 45 to 50 degrees Celsius is still cooler than processors running at peak performance. In this way, LRZ is able to remove approximately 90 per cent of heat energy from the SD650 nodes, cleanly and quietly.
3. Cashless and Contactless Payments Beyond COVID-19
Globally, economies are in various stages of development having either started developing, replaced or are busy replacing daily batch payment systems with real-time systems that execute payments in seconds with the flexibility to meet the needs of the future digital economy.
Banks and retailers around the world are responding to COVID-19 fears by raising the limits on their contactless card transactions so that higher value payments can be made without the need to touch the terminal.
2. Is Technology Africa’s Biggest Undiscovered Gold Mine?
There is an undiscovered gold mine and an immense untapped opportunity in ICT to enable Africa’s economic prosperity. Africa has gone a long way in its digitization journey from mobile telephony to broadband – connecting and digitizing entire sectors economies, jobs, education, healthcare, government and societies.
However much of this technology has yet to be used in achieving Africa’s true potential. To kick start a technology-enabled transformation and realize its benefits, policymakers need to take a broader, more coherent policymaking approach.
1. 6 Tech Companies Make Remote Working a Permanent Option
The world has been forever changed by the COVID-19 global pandemic. With most of the workforce heading homewards to continue to work and earn, many companies have begun making this change a permanent fixture – if employees so choose.
Companies like Facebook and Twitter have made the choice for employees to continue remote work for the foreseeable future.
By Luis Monzon
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