Visa, the world's largest credit and debit card network, has snapped up South African mobile financial services company Fundamo for $110-million in cash.The Cape Town-based Fundamo is a privately-held company which has more than 50 active mobile financial services deployments across 40 countries, including 27 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.The company has been operating since 1999 and has a number of funders which include Cape Town venture capitalists and emerging market investment group PoweredByVC, investment ...

Nokia has watched its global market share dwindle in recent years, and another nail hovered over the mobile giant's coffin on Thursday. Finland's leading daily Helsingin Sanomat reported that Nokia's head of technology has taken a leave of absence and is not coming back after disagreement over a new group strategy."Two independent sources for the Helsingin Sanomat say (Rich) Green will be gone until the end of the year and is unlikely to return to Nokia," the newspaper said.The Finnish ...

Clothing is one of the biggest growth markets for online retail, with more people welcoming the obvious benefits of online clothes shopping: no battling the crowds, saving time and often money; not having to faff around in changing rooms; and the confidence of knowing you can always return it if it doesn’t fit just right. And yet apparel is still one of the most difficult things to sell online — a hard truth not helped by the fact that, for ...

Chinese online media company Sina Corporation is set to launch an English version of its microblogging site Weibo (pronounced Wei-bohr), and it's worth seeing how the site stacks up against Twitter, its Western counterpart.China is often berated for the facsimiles it produces of Western technological innovations. It's no laughing matter. In fact, the Western world can only marvel at the speed and efficiency at which these products are copied, manufactured and then distributed in China — although admittedly the ...

M-Pesa, the world-famous mobile payment system, has effectively become a type of credit card for poor communities in East Africa. The payment system has had unbelievable success in this region and other emerging market regions, prompting interest in it from many sectors in the world.But M-Pesa is much more than a mobile payment system. It's a blueprint for a future mobile-based currency, used by every corner and every community in the world. It's also testament to how emerging market countries ...

Facebook is coming under fire for a feature that uses facial-recognition software to allow members to tag pictures of their friends on the social network.The “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition software to match newly uploaded photos to photos that have been tagged elsewhere and suggests the name of the friend in the photo for tagging. The feature made its debut on Facebook in the US six months ago and has been steadily rolled out in other countries ever since. ...

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba says it has launched a service to help Japanese manufacturers crack the fast-growing Chinese market.The Tokyo-based arm of Alibaba.com said the new service ˜ which uses Taobao, China's largest retail website — would help Japanese consumer goods makers cut through red tape."High-quality Japanese products are popular on the Taobao site, so we have been receiving requests from users to directly buy the products from Japanese firms," said Taobao CEO, Jonathan Lu.Alibaba.com Japan president Makoto Koyama ...

It's like something out of a spy movie: On the 1st of June, Google announced that it had uncovered a "campaign to collect user passwords" that was aimed at the personal Gmail accounts of "senior US government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists." The origin of these activities? Jinan, China.Google outlined the details of the case in a blog post on Thursday, and offered reassurance to its customers along with ...

With the world’s highest rates of HIV and TB, health care provision has to be at the top of most African countries’ agendas -- and innovative use of mobile technologies may be just the salve they are looking for.Misha Kay, who examines cellphone technology for the World Health Organisation (WHO), recently told the Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town that there was a "fairly healthy groudswell of activity" in mobile-health initiatives.There are more than 5-billion mobile phone subscribers in the ...

When auction giant eBay announced this week that it was buying out the well-known ecommerce platform Magento, reaction was varied.In announcing the buyout eBay President and CEO John Donahoe stated that Magento would merge with the company’s own open source, online retailing platform X.Commerce. Precisely how X.Commerce will work, and what part Magento has to play in it will only be revealed in October during eBay’s X.Commerce Innovate Conference.Here’s what some of the web’s commentators had to say:Mashable: ...