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For more information about Axxess, click here. |
Neotel customers have the option of purchasing either voice/call time or data packages. These bundles are reasonably priced and all vouchers are valid for six months. Neotel data is charged at 20c per MB. Data bundles range from 2GB to 24GB for Neotel customers. |
To find out more about the Neotel options, click here. |
To some, it might seem like Virgin Mobile has quietened down in South Africa, but that is not the case. All data bundles are valid for 30 days after the date of purchase. The deals that Virgin Mobile offers their customers are much cheaper than that of other popular data brands. |
For more information about the various Virgin Mobile deals, click here. |
ITNT provides customers with a wide variety of different mobile data deals to suit the pocket. Customers are not required to take out a permanent contract with the company. ITNT is a month-to-month data service provider. |
For more information about ITNT and their services, click here. |
Now that you know a bit more about each of the available networks, here is a breakdown of their prices. |
Say what you will about the status of her effort to turn the company around, but Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz certainly has gumption by the truckload. |
Which perhaps is not always such a good thing. |
Yesterday, for example, in an interview with BBC News, the loquacious exec–who often uses a dramatic rolling of the eyes to make a point–slapped at Internet juggernauts Google (GOOG) and Facebook. |
Google, posited Bartz, will be in trouble if it was not successful outside of search. |
Yes, other than collecting that Fort Knox of search earnings! |
As to Facebook, which is hurtling past Yahoo (YHOO) in pretty much every metric these days, Bartz is here to tell us that it is just not all that. |
Actually, social does mean just Facebook if you’re comparing the social networking giant to Yahoo. |
In any case, these are comments BoomTown has heard Bartz make many times of late, including at a gathering of journalists earlier this year on the occasion of Yahoo’s 15th birthday. |
While comparing yourself to the most visionary tech icon in history–how can I put this delicately–is insane, in general, all this trash-talk is no big deal and it is a classic way to throw focus off your own problems. |
That is, except when it comes to yet another meme Bartz recently trotted out about the continuing exodus of execs from the company. |
In Yahoo’s first-quarter earnings call last week, apropos of no question asked, Bartz declared that those who focus too much on Yahoo executive talent, or–actually–the departure of executive talent from the company, were “borderline” obsessive. |
Frankly, Bartz could not be more wrong and there is not nearly enough attention paid to this, since the departures–which, to be fair, have been an issue well before Bartz arrived–are simply not typical of the churn you find at any other tech company in Silicon Valley. |
And while some leavings from Yahoo are not a bad thing, the continuous brain drain is perhaps the company’s most profound dysfunction. |
In the last months alone, Yahoo has lost its chief advertising sales person, its CTO and several other prominent techies, such as Chief Technologist Sam Pullara. |
And, almost like clockwork, Bryan Lamkin, SVP of the Consumer Products group–who was hired by Bartz just one year ago–said goodbye. |
Sources said was due to clashes with Bartz, as well as the recent hiring of former Microsoft (MSFT) exec Blake Irving piece as Chief Product Officer. |
Irving’s arrival is certainly good news for Yahoo, but there simply has to be more of that and soon. Simp;y put, the company needs to show the ever-fickle talent pool inside and outside the company that it means business about innovating and staying relevant. |
While Bartz can pooh-pooh this all she likes, as the professional manager brought in by its board to clean up Yahoo, she has but one serious job: The nurturing of its talent to do great things once again. |
And while a lot of that talent has already scattered across Silicon Valley–a lot to Google and Facebook, in fact, as well as to a spate of interesting start-ups–it’s Yahoo only hope if it expects to thrive. |
While Bartz–who is clearly someone who knows how to cut costs and restructure–can talk all she wants about rivals and the need for critics to wait and see, none of that matters unless she can reignite the innovation business at Yahoo. |
And innovation only comes through a motivated staff that does not have its eye on the door and the next big thing elsewhere. |
So, while Bartz can lecture other companies on a better way to do things–which, of course, she abhors when such practices are turned on her management of Yahoo–it’s pretty much as simple as that. |
'Counterpart' airs Sunday nights on Starz. |
Morgan Freeman, Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell and more answer YOUR questions! |
Toby Kebbell also explains "pasta face." |
The upcoming sword-and-sandals pic stars Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell. |
Mark Robins has told his Coventry City players that they have to grow into the new League Two season. |
The Sky Blues have made a fantastic start to the 2017/18 campaign with back-to-back wins and clean sheets against Notts County and Grimsby Town in a tough and physically demanding division. |
Both games have been against typically big and robust fourth tier outfits on carpet-like surfaces, but Robins has warned things will get harder as the pitches get worse as the season goes on. |
“It was a really hard-fought game and shows us what’s to come,” he said, reflecting on Saturday’s challenge away from home when City came out 2-0 winners at Blundell Park. |
“The weather and pitches are good at the minute so it’s a season we need to grow in to. |
“We have got to look at it and know this is a tough place to come. On the back of last week’s result this is a fantastic result. |
The City boss was almost as pleased with the clean sheet as he was the three points. |
Asked about the shut-out, he said: “Brilliant! |
“I said to the players at half-time that worst case scenario it’s 0-0 but that if they kept probing they’d get chances and a goal, and thankfully we have taken the opportunities because there were times in there where we missed chances or didn’t pull the trigger quickly enough. |
“That will come and I am quite happy for us to keep creating those opportunities and getting into those dangerous areas because they are doing the right things more often than not. |
New job for former manager? |
Demba Ba got life at Chelsea off to a fine start, netting a brace on his debut as the FA Cup holders secured safe passage to the fourth round with a 5-1 win at the expense of Southampton. |
The 27-year-old completed his move from Newcastle to west London on Friday and took just 35 minutes to open his account for the Blues. Rafael Benitez's side had fallen behind to a fine Jay Rodriguez goal but Ba quickly drew his new side level, getting the final touch on a goalbound Juan Mata effort. |
Victor Moses' strike in first-half stoppage time gave Chelsea the lead, with Branislav Ivanovic heading the visitors further ahead seven minutes after the restart. Ba put the tie out of any doubt in the 61st minute, linking up impressively with his new team-mates to slot home past Artur Boruc before Frank Lampard struc... |
After a slow start, which saw both sides waiting patiently for an opener, Southampton took the early initiative. Jason Puncheon sent a fine through ball to Rodriguez, who took a touch before expertly slotting past Ross Turnbull with the outside of his right foot. |
The 22nd-minute strike jolted the visitors into life and Eden Hazard soon came close with a curled effort that went narrowly wide of the far post. |
Ba's link-up play was improving as the half wore on and Saints were having to defend resolutely. However, their resistance only lasted for 35 minutes as the new boy opened his Chelsea account. Hazard played through Mata, whose dink over Boruc was creeping in only for Ba to fire into the roof of the net. |
Chelsea were playing with new-found confidence and took the lead in first-half stoppage time, with Moses collecting a cutback from Ashley Cole to power home a low left-footed strike. |
The Blues continued in the ascendancy after the restart, with Mata seeing a strike deflected wide by Guly do Prado shortly after the restart. The Spaniard was involved yet again in the 52nd minute, sending over a left wing cross that Ivanovic headed home at the near post. |
Nine minutes later Ba capped off a fine move he started, latching onto a pass from Hazard to slot home under pressure from Southampton captain Jose Fonte. The Portuguese defender looked to be badly injured in the challenge and was stretchered off, with Jos Hooiveld coming on in his place. |
Lampard added further gloss to the scoresheet from the spot seven minutes from time after Steven Davis was adjudged to have handled the ball. The 34-year-old sent Boruc the wrong way to equal Bobby Tambling's record of 25 FA Cup goals for Chelsea. |
Can blockchain apps ensure a responsible mineral supply chain? |
Energy I'm a mining and energy journalist. |
Verifying the origins of metals and minerals and ensuring the extraction of these resources are not benefiting warlords has been an ever-increasing concern of mining companies in recent years. |
In 2010, the US passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which in Section 1502 included a requirement for any US firm to ensure that mineral resources they procured, including tin, tantalum, gold, and tungsten, was sourced responsibly and not for the enrichment of anyone involved in armed conflict. |
Though the Trump administration has moved to repeal this measure, it still remains on the books and in effect. |
The EU has also adopted new import regulations on conflict minerals, implemented as of May 2017. The new measures will apply to all EU-based companies from January 2021, requiring them to report their supply chain due diligence obligations on sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold and ensure armed groups can no l... |
Though there has been some debate on the effectiveness of these types of regulations on stemming violent conflict in the region, companies in the mining industry have been faced with another issue: how to ensure their mineral products are responsibly sourced. |
Some entrepreneurs see blockchain-based systems as the way forward to ensure responsible sourcing. |
A new company based in Berlin is hoping to provide a solution. MineSpider, created in 2017, has adapted bitcoin technology in a way that will allow companies to be confident in their sourcing, and be able to report their supply chain due diligence to governments, without disclosing their supply chains to competitors. |
To overcome this issue, he and his team built a layered blockchain system using Ethereum, an open-source platform which aims to replace third-party systems holding complex data on cloud networks. The platform allows developers to create apps and other programs based on blockchain technology. |
Companies can then provide keys to customers and regulators, which will have encrypted access to the data. This creates a system that allows certain recipients to read sensitive data, which allows mining companies to provide receipts that they’ve done their due diligence while also protecting their supply chain details... |
There is competition in this space, as other developers are using technologies similar to Ethereum such as Circulor, Peer Ledger, and others. |
Circulor, a UK-based company, has also created a system based on blockchain that allows mining companies ensure their minerals are responsibly sourced. The company has signed an agreement with the government of Rwanda and the Rwanda Mining Association, and says it is in discussions with Apple. |
Peer Ledger, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has pioneered the MIMOSI product, which was the world's first blockchain for responsible minerals, and tracks gold and other minerals. |
CORRECTIONS: The Dodd-Frank Act was passed in 2010 and regulations finalised in 2012. The article originally stated the act was passed in 2017. |
Peer Ledger is a competitor to Circulor and MineSpider, not Hyperledger. |
KNOX - Anna D. Voreis, 86, died Sunday, March 11. Survivors include her children, Gayla Lemko of Kokomo, Gary Voreis of Atlanta and Gerri Voreis of Fishers; and three granddaughters. Services will be at 11 a.m. Thursday, March 15, in Eagle Creek Church. Friends may call from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday in M.C. Smith Funeral ... |
“EXCUSE me friends I must catch my jet, I’m off to join the Development Set.” There can be few people working in international development who don’t know this satirical poem about aid workers who discuss famine over steaks, spout jargon at endless meetings – and ultimately make little difference to the poor. |
But in many ways the image is unfair. UN, government and private agencies trying to help poorer countries do indeed constitute an industry worth $50 billion a year. But in my experience, they are generally a hard-working, high-minded lot who really do want to help. And science is never more inspiring than when i... |
And yet those impoverished people remain, stubbornly, impoverished. The exceptions, notably in China and India, owe their newfound prosperity to trade, not aid. Some propose, only half jokingly, that we should use that aid money to hand $1 a week to each of the “bottom billion” poorest people. But poor societies... |
In his recent book The Great Escape: Health, wealth, and the origins of inequality, economist Angus Deaton wrote: “We often have such a poor understanding of what they need or want, or of how their societies work, that our clumsy attempts to help on our terms do more harm than good.” He thinks we should aba... |
Development researcher Ben Ramalingam would agree with all but that last bit. In Aid on the Edge of Chaos, he explains his vision of how foreign aid could be fixed. It’s all down to that fashionable buzzword: complexity. |
Ramalingam knows a lot about the development business. His detailed analysis might be too exhaustive for some, as he shows how aid can be more about reinforcing the power and preconceptions of the aid agency than ending poverty. But he also argues that even at its best, aid is a child of 19th-century science, with redu... |
Thus the grain marked “gift of the American people” put African farmers out of business, making everyone poorer. The $50 million meant to build houses in Afghanistan went mostly to intermediaries, and the lumber that did arrive was too big and ended up as firewood. The goats the World Bank gave poor Brazilian fa... |
The mistake in the last example, says Ramalingam, was to regard the farmers as a linear, machine-like system, whose poverty could be sorted with a simple “goats in the machine” fix. (He makes great puns.) When an input doesn’t have the expected output, he says, you are probably faced with a complex system. |
Ramalingam knows enough about complex systems that his book would probably be worth reading as a non-mathematical primer on complexity theory – the science of non-linear, interlocking systems. Some of his best examples come from the way it has already been applied to banking and finance. |
When it comes to using complexity theory to help the poor, he advises working at the “edge of chaos”, where the system is poised between too much rigidity and too much risk. Leading complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman calls this “a compromise between structure and surprise”. |
It all makes perfect, if qualitative, sense. But while it seems plausible that oversimplifying poverty has caused much aid to fail, is a paradigm switch from simple to complex systems the answer? Has such a switch ever rescued a foundering aid operation? |
Ramalingam’s closest example is in Bali. The traditional system used by rice farmers to allocate irrigation water adapted flexibly to complex situations. Then in the 1980s an Asian Development Bank project replaced this with modern high-yield rice, and pesticides and fertilisers were used without the traditional contro... |
This tells us we need to understand what locals are doing and not assume arrogantly that technology which worked elsewhere will work identically everywhere. But is it science? |
Furthermore, if what the locals do is already optimally adapted, why do they need aid? Traditional solutions can certainly falter under modern conditions – bigger populations are a good example. But where classic aid ignored tradition, complexity thinking uses it as a starting point to try improvements. Ramalingam does... |
One way actual complexity science, and not just respect for the complexity of a system, has helped is through the use of networks to reveal fragilities and centres of control in social systems. Ramalingam cites water use in Ghana, humanitarian relief in Mozambique and Haiti, food aid in East Timor, and farm markets in ... |
The Health Foundation, a British think tank, recently evaluated a similar movement to use complexity theory in healthcare. The think tank likes it because it challenges assumptions, focuses on relationships rather than simple cause and effect models, and provides a more complete picture of problems. But it complained t... |
But complexity is an infant science, warns Ramalingam. Using it is more like setting up a process to experiment with solutions than imposing a defined remedy. If some aid workers are now doing that, maybe it is because of a paradigm shift. Or maybe it’s just a realisation that simplistic, externally imposed solutions d... |
But the science still matters. There are plenty of signs that some in the aid business still don’t get all this. If invoking complexity science helps them catch on, good. If one day that science evolves more tested, defined ways to help end poverty, even better. Meanwhile, this book explains an important global activit... |
“The poor ye shall always have with you” goes the cynical last line of The Development Set poem. Maybe not. That’s still a goal at least worth pursuing. |
It probably comes as no surprise that keeping financial secrets can hurt your relationship. But is it enough to wreck a relationship? Would Americans go so far as to consider getting a divorce over lying about money or hiding debt? |
In a recent survey, GOBankingRates surveyed more than 500 adults across the U.S. to find out if they’d consider divorce if their partner kept financial secrets and hid debt from them. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they would indeed divorce their spouse over issues with financial secrecy. And, if their spouse... |
We also asked respondents whether they’ve lied to their partners about money and if they know important details about their partners’ finances. If you want to keep your marriage happy, keep reading to see the biggest financial deal breakers in relationships. |
Americans would be willing to tolerate their partner hiding a relatively large amount of debt from them before considering divorce. Respondents said their partner would have to have hidden $15,050 in debt, on average, before they would consider divorce. |
Women and men seem to be in close agreement over the amount of hidden debt they would tolerate. The survey found that women said their partner would have to have hidden $15,490 from them, on average, before they considered divorce. Men said it would take $14,414, on average. |
Adults ages 25 to 34 are willing to tolerate the most hidden debt — $18,094, on average. And respondents ages 18 to 24 are willing to tolerate the least — $12,001, on average. |
Survey Question: How much debt will your partner have to have hidden from you before you consider getting a divorce? |
Keeping financial secrets is one of the money mistakes that can lead to divorce. However, the survey found that Americans are pretty forgiving when it comes to lying about money. |
Almost 73 percent of respondents said they would not consider divorcing their current or future spouse over issues with financial secrecy. However, 27 percent said they would consider divorce if the partner was keeping financial secrets. |
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