In a surprising announcement, South African financial bodies the Reserve Bank, and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, issued a warning this week that consumers should beware of "Instant EFT" payment options on Ecommerce sites, calling them fundamentally unsafe and potentially leaving users open to fraud, and without recourse. Offered by many major payment gateway providers, [...]
Twitter made two recent announcements about changes to the platform, one of which was the launch of their new "Fleets" messaging, which allows users to send a series of short messages (text, images or video clips) that disappear after 24 hours. Fleets? Fleets give Twitter users a way of posting an Instagram Stories-like series of [...]
3 months after a major advertiser boycott which led to massive brands such as Coca-Cola, The Hershey Co., Unilever, Verizon, Honda, Birchbox, Ben & Jerry’s, The North Face, REI, and Patagonia among other groups withdrawing their advertising from Facebook in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody, the World Federation of [...]
After a 16 month long investigation, followed by a virtual hearing with the CEO's of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google (Alphabet), the US House Judiciary committee released a 449 page report at the beginning of this month, detailing the results of their investigation into anti-trust allegations against the companies that are commonly seen as the [...]
With the unprecedented shift to remote working at the start of the nationwide lock-down nearly 6 months ago, many companies, and especially large corporate ones, discovered a surprising benefit to working from home. Multiple companies reported an increase in productivity that it is believed has paved the way for a "blended" future model for office [...]
As we all know, online privacy, the security of user data, and the use which that data is put to have become significant issues at this stage of the evolution of our digital environment. As part of efforts to address those concerns, the EU passed the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in 2018, which governed [...]
If you own a small business in South Africa, and have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, you may be eligible for a grant from Facebook of up to R24,482 in cash, and R14,689 in advertising vouchers. As long as you're 18 or older, have between 2 and 50 employees, don't sell alcohol or tobacco [...]
While many, perhaps even most, businesses in South Africa have found themselves struggling under the national lock-down, (one of the harshest in the world), eCommerce in SA has grown by leaps and bounds. Uptake of eCommerce has traditionally lagged behind here for a large number of reasons, including lack of internet penetration, credit issues, and [...]
Although promulgated into law in 2013, the Protection of Personal Information Act, (or POPI Act) has been in only limited effect for the past 7 years, never really going past the point of setting up the office of the Regulator as envisaged in the Act. As a result, although the framework has been there, the [...]
For the first time since eMarketer began estimating ad revenue for Google, the net US digital ad revenue of the search and advertising giant will decline. Combined with continued (although depressed) growth for Facebook and Amazon, this means that their market share has also declined. According to current estimates, which factor in the global pandemic, [...]
