Techvoize

PayPal Announces Amendments to Online Payment Protections

PayPal, one of the world’s best known online payments systems, has announced that it will stop protecting certain categories of online payments, effective as of June 26. The firm released notification that it was amending its Payment Protection policy, where it is stated that gambling transactions, payments made to government agencies, and crowdfunding payments will soon cease to be protected.…

Mark Zuckerberg Shows Support For Nigerian Developers, Praises Jobberman Founders

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg yesterday showed support for Nigerian developers following the launch of Free Basics in Lagos, Nigeria. Free Basics by Facebook provides free access to basic internet services to over a billion people around the world. He expressed excitement at the level of success achieved by African developers and praised Jobberman founders, Olalekan Elude, Ayodeji Adewunmi…

Africa Gets Jongla, The World’s Lightest Messaging App

Jongla has officially launched the world’s ‘lightest’ instant messaging service in Nigeria, using less bandwidth and enabling millions of mobile users across Africa to use less data, save money while still enjoying fun instant messaging with friends and family. Speaking at the Mobile West Africa conference taking recently took place in Lagos, Jongla announced that it is launching its fast, open…

Solar Power And SMS Technology Help Fight Maternal Deaths in Rural Cameroon

40 year old Julianna Senze had been in heavy labour for eight hours when she arrived at the Idenau Health Centre in Limbe, on the South West coast of Cameroon. Like many women in the country, she had had no prenatal care, so what should have been a routine delivery was now a high-risk medical procedure. The nurses, looking worn and tired, rushed her to the delivery room. Only a few years ago,…

Artificial Intelligence App To Be Launched At UK Children’s Hospital

IBM Watson has combined with Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool to help develop an AI app that will help doctors and patients work better together. At this early stage, the app is being designed to focus on providing better conditions for patients, and improve the efficiency of hospital staff whilst children are Alder Fey, but in the future the app will most likely develop to be able to…

WhatsApp brings Desktop App for Windows 8 and Mac OS X users

WhatsApp is world’s biggest messaging application with more than 1 billion registered users all over the world. Till date, the company lived mostly on the smartphone app but it is soon going to change as WhatsApp is finally going to launch its desktop app for Mac OS 10.9 and up and on Windows 8 operating systems. The new WhatsApp desktop application is going to sync with the account of the user…

Amazon Launches YouTube competitor service “Amazon Video Direct”

Amazon has now come up with a brand new video service for its users know as “Amazon Video Direct”. This new video service aims to attract the videographers to upload their personal captured videos to the main site and earn money from it. The content uploaded by the users will be displayed alongside professionally studio created movies as well as shows. All these videos can easily be accessed by…

Necessity Breeds Innovation: Nigerian Entrepreneur Builds App To Address Fuel Scarcity

They say necessity is the mother and invention, and that is the case of Subomi Owo-Odusi, a 23-year-old Nigerian who is set to launch his innovative app FueledUp. The app is designed to spare Nigerians the trouble of sleeping in queues while trying to get fuel in times of scarcity, like in the current crisis. As a result of incessant queues and black market activities, there are insane traffic…

Mobile App, Abalobi To Help Manage Small-Scale Fishing In South Africa

A mobile app being piloted in South Africa aims to boost the small-scale fishing sector, writes Sarah Wild. David Shoshola, a traditional fisher in Lamberts Bay, South Africa, holds a list containing 116 names. These are fishers in Lambert’s Bay who have been allocated “interim relief” by the country’s Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.   Access to data and co-management of South…

Meet Winners Of The #IMake4MyCity Orange Foundation Challenge

The #Imake4mycity prizes were awarded to the winners recently in Paris, by several members of the Orange executive committee. The Solidarity FabLabs from Cairo, Tunis, Parthenay and Toulouse were rewarded for their work and will each receive 15,000 euros following this exciting competition for digital and collaborative projects. The challenge and its three prizes are part of the Orange…

Sliide Rewards Nigerians With Free Airtime To Run Mobile Ads On Lock Screen

There have been a number of different attempts to address the mobile data price barrier. In competitive markets data prices are now comparable to the USA and Europe but still not low enough yet to create a really wide African data mass market. Sliide’s pitch is to use content to acquire a mobile audience that it then sells to advertisers. It passes back some of the advertising revenues as free…

Newly Launched Nikon D5 Professional Camera

Nikon launches it’s latest flagship professional Nikon D5 camera at Photography LIVE 2016. The camera bags a 20.8 MegaPixels, 153-point autofocus (AF) system and a stable viewfinder image for tracking moving subjects and a high-speed continuous shooting at approximately 12 fps. At the launch, Takashi Yoshida, Managing Director for Nikon Middle East, expressed satisfaction and promises the D5 will…

M-KOPA Solar Connects 50,000 Ugandan Homes To Pay-As-You-Go Offering

The pay-as-you-go solar company, M-KOPA, Solar has announced it has connected 50,000 off-grid homes in Uganda, as it continues to scale its coverage and scope. M-KOPA Solar raised a total of US$31.45 million in funding last year – making it one of the best-funded startups in Africa, according to Disrupt Africa’s African Tech Startups Funding Report 2015. In February, the company launched its…

PrognoStore Offer Point-of-Sale, Inventory and Analytics Solution To Nigerian Retailers

Launched at a media briefing that took place a few weeks ago, the founders where proud to announce that startup was now open for business in Nigeria. With the Nigerian market full of tremendous opportunity for startups and small businesses, credit to holding the record for one of the fastest growing markets in Africa, this is one opportunity SaaS startup looks to bank on. According to founder,…

M-Pesa Hits 25 Million Active User As Vodafone Eyes New Markets

M-Pesa has hit over 25 million active customers globally, marking another year of accelerated growth for the innovative mobile money transfer service. The platform has experienced a surge in usage across Africa, Asia and Europe, with active customers increasing by 27.1 per cent to 25.3 million in the year ended 31 March 2016. British telecom firm Vodafone, which owns a 40 per cent stake in…

Little Cabs To Emerge Form Easy Taxi’s Kenya Exit

In an interesting twist, Easy Taxi exit from the African market place as scheduled for the end of May 2016 will see another play emerge from its ashes in form of part acquisition and re-branding. The new player, Little Cabs is set to commence business as early as the 1st of June 2016. According to Moses Kambero, a Kenya tech reporter, Easy Taxi had over 3,000 drivers in Nairobi, Nakuru and…

Africa Gets Its First Accelerator Tailored For Women-Led Startups

The classic startup accelerator model has quite a few good points. But it’s not particularly feasible for parents who can’t, say, pick up and leave their families for three months. And it’s even harder in countries where there are cultural biases about young women leaving home. That’s where She Leads Africa (SLA) Accelerator comes in. The 3-month-program, which is accepting applications for its…