TECH NEWS

Paris, France | AFP | It’s official: The Saharan silver ant is the fastest of the world’s 12,000 known ant species, clocking a blistering 855 millimetres — nearly a metre — per second, researchers said Thursday. Measured another way, the six-legged sprinter covers 108 times its own body length per …

Kampala, Uganda | JULIUS BUSINGE | People do not need a stock exchange account but instead need an account to save their money safely and be able to make small transactions. This is what stood out from a speech delivered by Warren Carew, representing Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at …

New York, United States | AFP | Google stepped up its smartphone ambitions Tuesday with updated Pixel handsets, touting a move toward computing with a simple hand wave or spoken command. Pixel 4 models boasting features including gesture and face recognition debuted at a “Made by Google” event showcasing new hardware …

  INSURANCE AND MOBILE PHONES: Policymakers across the region need to implement policies and practices that stimulate growth Kampala, Uganda | ISAAC KHISA | The Sub-Saharan African region is set to be the hotbed for mobile phone services as the young population owns more devices in the next six years. …

Paris, France | AFP |  Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue — even if a universal …

Volkswagen (VW) is testing a new ride-hailing business in Rwanda that it hopes to expand in Africa starting with Ghana and Ethiopia. | THE INDEPENDENT | The ride-hailing service is Volkswagen’s South Africa chief Thomas Schaefer’s Trojan horse for breaking into the new car market. VW’s ride-hailing cars are assembled …

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Africa Information and Communications Technology consortia groups, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology and the Uganda Communication Commission – UCC are lobbying all ICT departments across the African continent to come up with a joint position on global technology. The position agreed upon …

  Paris, France | AFP | Facebook on Tuesday announced the expansion of its third-party fact-checking programme to 10 new African countries in partnership with Agence France-Presse and other media. The programme will be available in Ethiopia, Zambia, Somalia and Burkina Faso in partnership with AFP; in Uganda and Tanzania …

Seoul, South Korea | AFP | Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday it expected operating profits to drop more than 50 percent in the third quarter as it struggles with a long-running slump in the global chip market. Operating profit for July to September was forecast to reach 7.7 trillion won ($6.4 …

Kampala Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) has asked broadcasters NTV, NBS, BBS, Bukedde TV and Radio Sapientia to show cause why the regulator shouldn’t revoke their licenses. The statement comes after UCC released a report of their investigation into an alleged breach of minimum broadcasting …