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The Illusion of Bitcoin and Why It is Dangerous for You – The Online Currency is Volatile

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

First, what is bitcom? It is “money”. Yes, Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software, according to wikipedia.

 

Bitcoin eschews central authorities and issuers, using a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to track transactions. Bitcoin uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can be spent only once per owner and only by the person who owns them.

 

It is simply  a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network. This is the problem.

 

With Bitcoin you have close to the global reserve currency which many economists have called since the financial crises. You buy and sell online anonymously without any control by the government. And the number of Bitcon has also increased at a constant rate which is close to what top economists expect a good currency to posses.

 

But this June, we got a small lesson that may change that perspective.  It nearly lost $9 million of the digital money when a hacker did his thing. The digital currency crashed from $30 to a penny before it rebounded to $16. At $16 it is still up when compared to what it was earlier in the year, $5. Yet, do not gamble with your future. The dollar or Naira has not crashed with that effervescence. Be careful with what the Silicon Valley does in this case.

ARM Tipped by Semicast To Lead The Race of Digital Home

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Preliminary findings from Semicast’s forthcoming report “Opportunities for Embedded Processors in the Digital Home” show ARM increased its position as the leading architecture for embedded processors in digital home applications in 2010, ahead of MIPS, Power Architecture and x86. The report suggests that ARM’s lead over the competition in the digital home is set to increase significantly in the medium term.

 

Semicast judges ARM to have been the leading embedded processing architecture in the digital home for several years, although its research shows ARM and MIPS engaged in a ferocious battle in individual applications such as home networking gear, media players/MP3 players, digital cameras, digital TVs, set-top boxes and DVD recorders. ARM has for now conquered the handheld games market with the two next generation platforms (Nintendo 3DS and Sony Vita) both using ARM. In comparison, Power Architecture has achieved a dominant position in wired games consoles, with design-wins for the Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii (and forthcoming Wii U) and Microsoft Xbox 360. However Semicast forecasts Power Architecture will see limited revenue growth in other areas of the digital home, and its current dominance of games consoles is expected to be challenged by ARM in the next generation Xbox. Semicast therefore sees revenues for Power Architecture in the digital home stalling in the medium term, following a short term boost from production of the next generation of games consoles.

 

Historically, x86 has not had a significant presence in the digital home, with its mix of price, performance and power consumption not best suited to consumer applications. However the emergence of media tablets and netbooks as a high growth category offers an ideal platform for the x86 architecture to establish a presence in the digital home, while strong growth is also forecast for x86 in digital TVs and set-top boxes. On current projections, Semicast is forecasting revenues for x86 in the digital home to pass those for Power Architecture around 2016.

 

Colin Barnden, Principal Analyst at Semicast Research commented “ARM’s future success in the digital home is forecast across most equipment types, but one of the leading areas for growth is set to be ebook readers, media tablets and netbooks. Here, ARM has achieved a significant early lead against its main architectural rivals, with design-wins in products such as the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad/iPad2, Barnes & Noble Nook, BlackBerry Playbook, Motorola Xoom and Sony S1/S2”.

 

In many of these products, ARM’s leadership position comes from multiple design-wins across the spectrum of its silicon partners, for example in the applications processor (Freescale, Nvidia, Samsung, Texas Instruments), baseband processor (Mediatek, Qualcomm, ST-Ericsson), Bluetooth/Wi-Fi communications controller (Broadcom, Marvell) and simple M0/M3 MCU (Fujitsu, NXP, STMicroelectronics).

 

Broadcom and Samsung were the two leading suppliers of embedded processors to digital home applications in 2010, with IBM, Renesas Electronics and Texas Instruments completing the top five. Collectively, the top five suppliers accounted for almost half of the market between them.

 

Adapted from a press release from Semicast Research

The Summit is On – Unbanked Africa Summit 2011 from Mobile Monday

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Africa, home to over 800 million people is still grappling with significant unbanked populations even among the urban populations across cities, semi urban and rural communities.Regulators, innovators, technologist,financial services providers, international developmental organizations and governments are rallying around this significant dilemma of Banking the unbanked African.

 

New exciting technologies like the Mobile and cards are bridging the wide divide with innovative solutions like agency Banking, mobile financial services, community and micro finance Banking.

 

Unlike any other place on the Globe, mobile financial services is ushering a new dawn and hope to millions of unbanked people in Africa. Bringing convenience of banking anytime and anywhere using the mobile phones as a means of authentication for basic financial services. The mobile technologies is proving to be the solution to a century old challenge as a transformational channel for previously unbanked which are accessing services for the first time through the convenience and security of the mobile phone.

 

The ubiquitous mobile phone with the strong compelling needs of Africans, coupled with sheer ingenuity is changing lives and connecting Africans to the global e-commerce ecosystem which is more advanced with formal Banking services.

 

With the wide spread availability of the Mobile phones across regions in Africa, the unbanked African is only an sms away!

 

Plan to attend a one day summit which will proffer practical regulatory, technological, commercial solutions to the challenge of reaching the unbanked in Africa.

 

The summit will examine the following:

  • Reducing cost of reaching the unbanked though technology innovations.
  • Social benefits of banking unbanked populations.
  • Measuring impacts of regulation on the unbanked.
  • Building sustainable commercial propositions.
  • Evaluating cost effective channels, technologies and solutions to reach the unbanked.
  • Improving financial literacy to Africa’s unbanked.
  • KYC methodologies suitable for African market.
  • Examining the cross road between Micro Finance, agency Banking and mobile money.
  • Promoting a sustainable investment climate for financial inclusion.
  • Impact of credit in unleashing the potentials of unbanked.
  • Agency Banking as Cost effective channel to deliver commoditized financial services.
  • Delivering transformational Banking experiences for underserved communities.
  • Technological innovations promoting access to low income segments.

 

Speaker line up:

Dr Sead Muftic – CEO, SETECS MOBILE.
Peter Asolo – Head, Flashmecash,Finbank.
Temitope  Akin- Fadeyi – Head,cards and channels, Oceanic Bank International
Sean Owens -CEO,MobilityPAY Africa
Pieter de Villiers -CEO, Clickatell.
Ellinas  Chris, Regional solutions sales Director, NCR
Derrick Dankyi, -CEO, Glife Financial services,Ghana
Dr Kazeem Durodoye -Chief Consulting Officer at KKD Consulting
Edmund Olotu -CEO, G-PayAfrica
Femi Akinware – CEO, Tagattitude
Rick May – Chairman, GlobalMpay
Praveen Sheety – Nokia, West Africa
Mayank Sharma – VP Africa, Comviva
James Agada -CTO, Computer Warehouse Group.
Thuranira Kinagwi – Craft Sillicon, Kenya

 

Speakers from across the world will deliberate and proffer solutions that will  radically change the present situation and position Africa’s unbanked population to benefit from the growing global economy.

Join solutions providers, technologist, international development experts, regulators, Micro finance experts, financial services providers, mobile money providers, Mobile network providers, agency Bankers and other leading subject matter experts to chart the way forward at the UNBANKED AFRICA SUMMIT – 2011.

 

 

DELEGATE FEE:

Early  Bird Registration:399 usd

Late registration:500 usd

 

Orientals Hotel.

Lekki, Lagos – Nigeria.

July 14,2011.

 

HTC Sensation Review – The First Dual Core Phone from HTC

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

While some people had presumed that the Desire S was to be HTC´s replacement for the 2010 smash hit Desire smartphone, it turned out that the Sensation was to be the company´s flagship device for 2011. The Sensation marks the introduction of some of the latest technological developments into HTC´s highly popular range of Android phones and at the time of its release is only really rivalled in terms of features by the equally impressive Samsung Galaxy S2.

 

Screen and Entertainment

The Sensation is a larger phone than the earlier Desire and more closely resembles the later Desire HD. The Sensation features a spacious 4.3″ Super LCD screen that offers all of the right credentials to make this an ideal phone for all forms of visual entertainment. This is also one of the first smartphones to come with a qHD resolution offering much higher picture quality than earlier WVGA devices.

 

The screen is made from Gorilla Glass for added protection and supports multitouch input. There are also an accelerometer and a gyroscopic sensor providing you with some interesting physical controls for games and apps on the Sensation, and also allowing you to rotate the interface with ease between portrait and landscape.

The Sensation comes with an excellent media player with good support for music and video and the phone also supports the playback of HD video content. Streaming video content is supported from websites like YouTube and with fast data connections you can enjoy these videos without too many interruptions. You can also enjoy video content from the Sensation on a larger screen thanks to the support for DLNA Wi-Fi and the inclusion of an MHL AV link.

 

The phone also comes with good support for music playback and includes an FM radio. A standard headphone socket allows you to listen to music or watch videos on public transport without annoying fellow commuters. The phone can provide you with up to 32GB of storage space for media and other content with 8GB included with the phone.

 

Camera

The Sensation features an excellent 8 megapixel camera which comes with a dual LED flash, touch focus, face detection and features like geo-tagging. This is also one of the first phone cameras to come with 1080p video recording support so that you can record your own HD videos with ease. You can upload these to share with friends online, along with any photos taken on the Sensation, with services such as Facebook and Picasa.

 

The camera also features a new Instant Capture feature that ensures there is no delay between pressing the button and capturing the image. There are many times using older phone cameras when there is a perfect moment that you wish to capture in photographic form only for this moment to have passed by the time the shutter has done its job. Because of this, unless it was a posed photo, you never end up with the image you desired but a blurry and confused image. This new Instant Capture feature ensures that you get the image that you want, when you want it, by removing the delay between the button press and the image capture.

 

OS and Messaging

The Sensation runs on Android Gingerbread and also features an updated version of the HTC Sense interface. With HTC Sense you are provided with excellent threaded SMS and email support as well as integration for social networks such as Facebook. Sense also provides you with Friend Stream which can combine all of your social networking accounts into one easy to use system, providing you with updates from friends and contacts on all of your social networking sites.

In conjunction with the camera on the Sensation you can also easily share photos and videos with these friends. You can share pictures and videos to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and even upload your own videos to YouTube.

 

Connectivity and Online Features

Because of the excellent 3G and Wi-Fi on offer you can make use of these excellent messaging features as well as all of the other online features of the Sensation. The web browser on the Sensation now provides a much more enjoyable web browsing experience with multi-window browsing and smoother video playback thanks to the latest Adobe Flash support. There is also a quick lookup tool to send you straight to Wikipedia or YouTube to find an article or video about something of interest that you may have stumbled across.

The Sensation comes with Google Search to help you find what you are looking for online, and also comes with other Google features like Gmail and YouTube support. You can also chat on instant messaging clients such as Google Talk, Facebook Chat and many other IM apps available from Android Market.

 

Power

The Sensation is one of the most powerful smartphones released by HTC to date in terms of hardware. This is the first dual core phone from HTC and they have bucked the initial trend of dual core 1GHz processors and gone straight to a speedier 1.2GHz processor for their debut dual core. This provides far greater speed and efficiency over the earlier wave of dual core smartphones such as the LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix.

The Sensation comes with 768MB RAM to complement this which doe provide plenty of memory to handle all apps and features with ease, although it is less than the 1GB RAM found on phones like the Samsung Galaxy S2. The Sensation also features Adreno graphics acceleration making it more than capable of handling the most intensive videos and apps that are on offer.

 

Summary

The Sensation is the first dual core phone from HTC and the most highly powered Sense powered smartphone yet released. If you have ever enjoyed using an HTC phone, like the earlier Desire or Legend handsets, then you will enjoy the Sensation as it provides the best that the Taiwanese manufacturer has to offer.

 

Principle highlights include the phenomenal qHD Super LCD screen that gives an unsurpassed level of picture quality for all of the intensive and visual features you would expect from a modern high end smartphone. The updated Google OS and Sense interface also introduce some nice new additions to web browsing and social networking and the Sensation features one of the best phone cameras on offer thanks to its 1080p video recording and Instant Capture feature.

 

Editor’s Note: This review is made possible through a special arrangement with the premium UK  mobile phone contracts site.

Microsoft Imagine Cup 2011, Tekedia is Disappointed: No sub-Sahara African (Black) Judge

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

We are not playing any race card here. Far from it. But we have watched most of the programs organized by Microsoft. They get blacks into the mold just to make governments feel happy to buy Windows. But when it comes to capacity development, Microsoft cares not. For all the noise in this company, it has not done much for Africa. Tekedia is truly disappointed with Microsoft.

 

Microsoft refused to build a lab in Africa even as it sees growth. It is doubling its salesmen daily in Africa while it builds innovation centers in Asia. Till today, Microsoft has no single research center in Africa. They just think we do not have it and we are good to borrow and buy their software.

 

Ok. they spend few thousands to refurbish some labs in East Africa. Yes, that is a university lab. We mean Microsoft lab or design center, Microsoft does not care.

 

Case in point. In the just concluded Imagine Cup final, there is no black sub-Sahara African that could qualify as a judge. No representative from Africa, we mean a black African. In other words, Microsoft never really cares what we do. We usually smile at ISPON members of Nigeria that are largely software merchants but parade themselves as software practitioners. When no black man from Africa is considered qualified enough to travel to judge these kids, that should tell them that selling Microsoft products do not make them experts.

 

Yet, African newspapers will give them free press and they will deceive governments making all think they are adding value.

 

Except Barry Dwolatzky, from South Africa, a white man, no other African made it.

 

This is the list of the judges and that has become how Microsoft operates. But if it to launch one product where they will rake sales revenue, then we will get experts call.

 

But think of Google. They are genuinely interested in building capacity. They use our people and mix them with their people. That way, we get better.  Shame to Microsoft !

 

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