Telecommunication Technology: Issues and Trends In West Africa

The Fed Reserve bank in US has just raised the interest rate in US. The implications are mixed. On one hand, it is a sign of recovery of the US economy with unemployment rate as low as 5% as at today. The Fed reserved had largely archived   at this working with the US government and had injected as much as over 4T dollars into the US market since Obama came to power through a series of quantitative easing (Printing dollars LOL!) What is of real interest is that the US economy is on a sound footing on recovery. You can’t contemplate telling Nigerian government to print Niara anyway. The clear message however is simple, if you have rising unemployment, you cannot afford to deflate the economy. You can’t squeeze what is already squeezed. What are really the implications for Nigeria? 1.        Foreign investors will pull back their resources and move back to the US economy. Business is all about “Where will my money be safe profitably?” Thes...

  Matthew Talbo Back in August, I visited South Africa and spent some time with a number of BlackBerry’s mobile operator partners, BBM’s advertising and content partners and some payment providers we were considering for partnership opportunities. Having spent many years working with South African mobile operators and banks in past roles, I have always been amazed at the potential of the market there. But on this trip, I learned something new about the value of the BlackBerry and BBM brands both in South Africa in particular and across the entire continent in general. It’s big. That’s particularly exciting because of all the growth we’ve been seeing in this market in the last few years. Leaps and Bounds Africa is clearly a mobile-first market, with the majority of people accessing the internet from mobile rather than desktop devices. We’re also seeing many people coming online for the first time in recent years, so BBM has seen quite a...

Blackberry Limited, the Canadian global mobile communications leader, has announced its intentions to extend its mobile payment option to Africa, starting with Nigeria, then South Africa. Blackberry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) first launched its mobile payment program in June 2014 in Canada with a 3-year deal with EnStream, a joint venture by the three largest wireless service providers in Canada, which gave it access to the credit card details of smartphone users, enabling them to inter-connect them and banks. Later in August 2015, Blackberry introduced BBM Money to BBM users in Canada; that is mobile payment through PayPal. Matthew Talbot, Blackberry’s senior VP for Emerging Solutions wrote in a blog, “we’re excited to announce we’ll be expanding our mobile money initiatives into Africa, commencing in Nigeria. Blackberry has partnered with Interswitch Ltd, Nigeria’s largest payment processor, to enable any Nigerian to transfer money or airtime within BBM as simply as they ...