Author: Akin Naphtal

Even as it deals with continued supply constraints and consumers wary of inflation, Apple today reported the best March quarter in its history. The company tallied $97.3 billion in revenue in Q2, up 9 percent over the year-ago quarter. That amounted to a profit of $25 billion, with earnings per share of $1.52. Apple set March quarter revenue records for its iPhone, Mac, and Wearables / Home / Accessories divisions. Apple’s various services grew to a new high of 825 million subscribers. And the Mac continues to surge. “The last seven Mac quarters have now been the top seven quarters…

As part of his pitch to raise funds to acquire Twitter, Elon Musk apparently “floated” the idea of cutting jobs at Twitter to improve its bottom line, according to a Bloomberg report. “While nothing is set in stone — and Musk himself had no access to Twitter’s non-public financials at the time — he specifically mentioned job cuts” during discussions with banks, the report says. The Washington Post reported that Musk discussed making “efficiencies” at the company in the conversations with bankers, “which could include job cuts.” There are still a lot of uncertainties about what Twitter will look like…

TN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana have entered into a partnership to pilot national roaming in the Volta region, and describe the development as a first step to a broader nationwide national roaming alliance. The companies released a statement which affirmed that under the agreement and pilot phase, Vodafone Ghana will expand coverage of its network by leveraging MTN’s network infrastructure. Ghana’s government is prioritising national roaming implementation to facilitate universal access and accelerate the country’s digital economy ambitions. The plan is to establish a full national roaming regime amongst all operators in the country. Patricia Obo-Nai, CEO of Vodafone Ghana…

Prof. Isa Ali Pantami, Minister of Communication and Digital Economy has asked technology company, Huawei, to establish a global ICT centre for the training of Nigerians and Africans. Pantami disclosed this during the kick off of the implementation of the Federal Government and Huawei Memorandum of Understanding aimed at providing ICT skills to Nigerian youths in Abuja. The MoU aims at promoting the partnership between the Ministry of Communication and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. to establish two core ICT projects in Nigeria: the Huawei ICT Academy Project and the Huawei ICT Talent Cultivation Project in line with the Ministry’s National…

Kenyan electric vehicle company Opibus has changed its name to ROAM, with the rebrand coming after the company’s expansion led to a strategic shift in its vision. Founded in 2017, Opibus is the leading provider of electric vehicles designed and manufactured locally. Its vision is to create reliable and cost effective products designed for the pan-African mass market. The company raised US$7.5 million in equity and grant funding late last year to help it scale its operations, and in January it introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya – also the first Africa-designed electric bus ever. It has now changed…

Google has announced that it is submitting its Istio service mesh project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google’s Kubernetes has long been the flagship project for the CNCF and the company recently also brought Knative, a project that aims to make it easier to build and deploy serverless applications on top of Kubernetes, to the CNCF as well. It’s maybe no surprise then that Istio, too, will likely become a CNCF project. There are still some steps to take before that happens, but chances are Google wouldn’t make today’s announcement if those weren’t, for the most part,…

Spotify has announced that it’s launching a Free and Open Source Software Fund to support independent open source projects. The company says the purpose of the fund is to bring attention to independent open source projects and give back to developers. The new fund will start at €100,000. Spotify’s open source tech lead said in a blog post that “this is just a starting amount” and that as with any new program, the company wants to test it before deploying it more broadly. The company will donate the money to different open source projects over the course of the year. The funds will provide…

Zenda, a UAE-based startup looking to change how parents pay school bills, and the way educational institutions manage fee collection, is eyeing Africa as its next frontier for growth. Zenda (formerly nexopay) told TechCrunch it plans to enter the continent through Egypt – its third market after India – in the coming months, as it embarks on a growth drive accelerated by a $9.4 million seed funding it has raised. Through its app, Zenda allows parents to pay fees directly to schools, all while streamlining collections by enabling schools to accept and manage payments online. This means that parents no longer need…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he’s making good on one of the biggest of his musings. Twitter has announced that it has accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the publicly traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $44 billion. Moments after the news broke that Twitter trading was halted, the company issued a press release confirming that it was accepting Musk’s offer to take the social network private. “The Twitter Board conducted…

Biometric Verification Number (BVN) enrolments in Nigeria hit 54,241,963 on April 17. According to data released by Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the body saddled with eliminating bottlenecks in the country’s banking sector, enrolments by bank account owners in the country rose by 2.3 million in the last three months. At the end of December 2021, enrolments for the number stood at 51.9 million. Checks revealed that the BVN database grew by six million in the year. Also, NIBSS data showed that active bank accounts in the country stood at 133.5 million as of December 2021. Across the world, conventional security systems (password and PIN) face…