Posts

Boosting consumption in East Africa

Experts have been asking East African countries to put an effort on implementing policies that boost consumer demand, arguing that such initiatives would reduce inflationary pressures as the sub Saharan economies continues to grow. Most developing countries in Africa are not well prepared to handle challenges emanating externally. In some countries like Zimbabwe and Sudan there has been continued demand boosting measures that has proved counterproductive and the end result is inflationary pressures. A strong rebound in capital inflows to Africa induced by protracted rounds of quantitative easing in the United States has amplified credit and asset price risks. The good news is that incoming Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has promised not to scale bond buying which means sub Saharan countries will continue to enjoy the growth. The forecasts of the continent’s economies are expected to grow by an average 5% next year. Various studies attributes the steady economic growth ...

Tolerating workplace bullying can be key to retaining a job

A good employer makes his staff realize they have ability than they think they have so that they consistently do better. However, as someone told me yesterday bullying is common in working places and throughout different stages of life. Although Contador Harrison has experienced racism and outright discrimination, he’s not had a single incident of bullying in his life. After having a chat with a bullying victim, I have realized how lucky I’ve been in life. Experts define workplace bullying as the repeated, health destroying mistreatment of an individual or individuals by a person or more persons. The experts also clarifies that If the act is one-off, then it might not be considered bullying and definition largely depends on the victim on the receiving end. The victim has suffered irreversible trauma after being subjected to verbal abuses to sexually harassment from her colleagues. In her experience, bullying is a challenge she’d had to face up to throughout her wor...

Big data has enhanced IT security

At the university, we were taught that computer is communal and when it's more than one user machine, the gray haired professor made it clear that it was important to make sure that password-protected login and logout were enabled all the time. If memory can server me well, the gray haired man also taught us that if a website one is using on a regular basis offers more than one authentication process, it would be ideal to make good use of all procedures. Back then, detection-only defenses conducted inspection at a single and initial and had no memory. I vividly recall how during one of my practical lessons they couldn't recognize threat and even forgot that the file ever existed. Unlike my days in California, modern day malware writers have innovations that were only a dream to their predecessors and a recent research has shown that they have been using a variety of techniques to obscure malware and have made it much harder to detect. In my past posts, I have alway...

Global smartphones tripling to 5.6 billion by 2019

A new study by telecoms hardware maker Ericsson claim that smartphones subscriptions globally expected to triple by 2019 and could end up forcing operators to roll out high-speed networks to cope with surging data traffic according to Ericsson, the world's top mobile network equipment maker. Ericsson said the growth in smartphone devices has now overtaken that of conventional handsets, accounting for 55% of new mobile subscriptions in the first nine months of 2013. The Swedish company estimates there were 4.5 billion people subscribed to a mobile plan during the first three quarters of the year although one person counts as two subscribers if one has two separate subscription plans that help explain the high number. In the third quarter of this year, Ericsson estimates that there were 113 million new subscriptions. The maker expects 5.6 billion smartphone subscriptions globally by the end of 2019, up from 1.9 billion in 2013, as more people in emerging markets buy chea...

Africa’s Telcos are rolling out 4G

African Telecom operators are switching on 4G LTE services in major cities by launching the next-generation mobile network. As I have written before, Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the fourth generation (4G) telecommunications standard and is among the two 4G standards in the world with the other one being WiMAX. With LTE technology, mobile network operators in Africa that are able to manage their data within their networks securely in light of the increased demand will be most successful and most profitable in the long term in this ever changing telecom industry. As for the users’ they should expect fundamental changes to the mobility ecosystem and new capabilities beyond traditional voice and data services. Higher-bandwidth and lower-latency will significantly improve the user experience for bandwidth-hungry content and applications. LTE's all-IP architecture, spectral efficiency, and bandwidth flexibility promise to improve overall network economics. Carrier...