The PC market is going through a time. They're losing market share to the Mac. Losing mind share because of a technology gap that is growing because they are relying on 3rd party suppliers like Intel and AMD. Who better than Yesh Sujoodeen, MD for HP South Africa to explain what the future of the PC looks like.

“I think that during the pandemic era, we had a lot of demand for devices that allowed people to be online, to socialise, to communicate, and to be in touch. So I think it's the right time for people to relook at their options available and to understand that the refresh cycle that's coming may include, a very informed decision.”

“The fact that you're having a product means that you're gonna dive into a lot more of the digital environment. Firstly, you're gonna be using a lot more applications. You're gonna be communicating far more effectively in the digital world. It was inevitable that we needed to have that digitisation and that service level support. We accelerated having better options in terms of how you support it.”

 

“As an IT manager, you just don't wanna respond to the changes, you want to understand what is going on in your environment and be able to address problems before they happen.”

There’s a line in Redemption Song that goes “have no fear for atomic energy” and it speaks to a post-World War II mistrust of science. We’re in the moment right now with AI. GhostDraft has been automating customer communications since 1984 and the current CEO Wayne Toms thinks that 2024 is the year that AI gets elevated above the hype cycle as an integral communications tool. "CCM is essentially the software that automates the production and delivery of all types of written documents, but especially these complex legal or contractual agreements." "It differs from the document automation of the past in several ways, but perhaps most especially in how it can apply quite sophisticated business logic to generate documents on the fly with the appropriate clauses, words, pictures, and so on, in line with the specific customer requirements. And, you know, you might say that in some ways, CCM is becoming the glue between the digital customer And the digital business for these complex financial transactions."

Podcast originally produced for St George's Rod and Staff https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/st-georges-rod-and-staff/id1503957357 Host: Lindsey Schutters Guest: Archdeacon Rodney Whiteman

There were about 14,463 Uber trips made in each minute of 2022 across the 900 cities where you can get an Uber. Uber, however, doesn’t say how many of those trips were in electric vehicles, but does say that it saved over 18 million litres of petrol from the 25,000 EVs in its global fleet. In 2008 Travis Kalanick pitched the idea of Uber to possible investors as the convenience of a cab in New York City plus the experience of a being driven by a professional chauffer. The idea was to marry these things together into a luxury experience in San Francisco – where it’s near impossible to catch a cab. I’m recording this audio in Cape Town, South Africa, though. A million miles away from the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. My last Uber was a Suzuki Espresso and the only Frisco that driver knows is the coffee that comes in the can. That’s why I met up with Uber Southern Africa General Manager Kagiso Khaole at the Africa Green Economy Summit ahead of the Cape Town ePrix, to ask him how Uber is going to revolutionise the way South Africans travel, again. Travis Kalanick sold a dream of convenience, not a product that would save the world. Whichever way you slice it, Uber doesn’t solve traffic problems or reduce emissions. But it could. Those 25,000 EVs currently in the global Uber fleet will be joined by 25,000 more that will flood the streets of India by 2026 allowing the ride hailing pioneers to easily reach its 50,000 goal by 2030. Again, a convenient solution to a real problem. Uber wants to be a technology platform, though. One that connects riders to an interconnected network of mobility solutions But South Africa is still miles away from striking a manufacturing and EV adoption deal like the Indian one, or scaling the Gautrain to operate in other cities. But EVs are beginning to trickle to our shores, and our production lines are slowly making room for more alternative energy transport options. But that’s a story for another day. Thanks addvirtt.com for the constant support.

You know the just energy transition South African president Cyril Ramaphosa is always talking about? It’s going to cost an estimated one and a half trillion Rand to get started. Of course the bulk of that money will be spent on overhauling the electricity sector, but it is an ENERGY transition, which means changing how we do all fuels that power our economy. One of those fuels is Hydrogen. One out of every five rands spent on the Just Energy Transition will be put towards kickstarting the Green Hydrogen economy. What is Green Hydrogen? Well, it’s hydrogen extracted using energy from renewable sources. You know what has a lot of hydrogen in it? Water. Yes, we’ll be zapping H2O with electricity from solar or wind to split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Do you know which part of South Africa has a lot of sun, but is constantly plagued by water shortages? The Northern Cape. Of course, that would be the logical place to establish a green hydrogen plant… RIGHT? To be specific, the plant will be established just outside Vanrhynsdorp, a town you may have heard of in recent weeks because the residents were protesting after going six days without water. Poor maintenance and loadshedding knocked out the main pump that sends water up from Vredendal. This green hydrogen commercial manufacturing plant will have electricity supplied by Keren Energy, and use electrolysis tech developed at the South African Institute for Advanced Materials Chemistry which is based at the University of the Western Cape Doctor Stanford Chidziva is the acting director for the green hydrogen programme at the institute and he is understandably excited. Bottom line is that the real winners in the green hydrogen economy are the big industries that can use it to decarbonise operations, and not necessarily the residents of Vanrhynsdorp who now need share water rations with a hydrogen plant. Oh, and there’s another El Nino coming that will drive droughts in the region too. _ As always, Unencrypted is supported by Addvirtt, the Africa’s only virtual sports advertising company that can get your brand on the stadium boards of the world’s biggest sports. Visit addvirtt.com to take your brand out of the frame and into the action.

Microsoft took the fight to its competitors in the consumer space when it added the OpenAI’s GPT engine into its search engine Bing, and its Edge browser and now everyone is in love with a moody chat bot… What a time to be alive. But this isn’t Microsoft’s first rodeo or even its first billion dollar investment into OpenAI. First, the company was founded by a consortium that included Elon Musk and Amazon Web Services. Then it built out those awesome game bots that owned Dota champs, and took a little bit of tech from Google’s machine learning operations and built out a language transformer model. The GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and the Transformer part was developed by Google Labs. On a basic level a language transformer predicts the next word in a sentence after training itself on a data set. GPT-3 is trained on 175 billion parameters and uses its transformer machine learning abilities to take that next word guessing and apply it to other things, like generating code from a natural language text query. Microsoft invested its first billion into OpenAI in 2020, it exclusively licensed the GPT model and set about deploying AI at scale on Azure. And then it baked it into its client-facing products as an easy way for non-coder employees to begin creating automations and little apps to make their work easier. Microsoft calls this platform Power, erm, Platform. And Azure customers using this AI infused cloud power are generating an average of 4.5 billion words a day for hundreds of apps in production use across multiple sectors. When Microsoft South Africa gave me the opportunity to sit in on a roundtable discussion with Vahé Torossian, Corporate Vice President for Business Applications, at the end of last year, I jumped at the chance, but sat on this audio until there was a major shift in the AI landscape. Vahé has since announced that he’ll be leaving Microsoft this year, but I’m am very happy that I got to nerd out with him about the transformative moment we’re in right now with AI, before it was cool. There’s a symbiosis that can exist between people and automation, but the path towards human and AI cooperation is unclear right now. Full disclosure: I love Microsoft services and my Microsoft 365 account is something I cherish that has helped me a ton in work and in my personal life. I’m happy that the company is taking the lead in the next technology arms race and will be watching closely as more startups take advantage of these new abilities. But that’s a story for another day. Unencrypted is powered by Addvirtt, the only sports advertising company on the continent that can put your brand on the virtual advertising boards on the worlds biggest sports fields. Visit addvirtt.com to take your brand out of the frame, and into the action.

Christiano Ramos (or Tiano in the game), the best Call of Duty Mobile player in the country – or the continent, depending on who you’re speaking to – says high refresh rate displays are a massive benefit. Specifically, the ability to lock framerate on a game. If you believe the marketing and the popular youtubers, you’d think that high refresh rate displays on mobile devices are a transformative technology. High framerates make the game play more fluidly and you see every movement. Details like this are important especially in a game where you need to time headshots. But your data connection is equally important to ensure that your controller inputs are relayed in real time. External controllers are banned in international competitions, by the way. Carry1st just did South African players a major solid and invested in local servers in Johannesburg which has more than halved the latency. I managed to get a server response time of 42 milliseconds on WiFi6 from a 100mbps Rain 5G connection. Now Mzansi’s elite COD mobile players aren’t crippled by data connection to the game and that framerate advantage really comes into play. Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com the sports advertising technology company - step out of the frame and into the action.

There is no touching in the metaverse, no floral fragrances in Web3, and DeFi is distinctly flavourless. The promise of the digital world is a stark – because minimalism is encouraged due to development constraints – existence without the comforts of life. But artists like Jan Hendrik Viljoen, better known as Portchie, are bringing beauty to our second lives and making a little bank with Non-Fungible Tokens. Artist Kevin McCoy claims that he was the first person to mint an artwork NFT. The pixelated, colour changing octagon called Quantum was minted on the Namecoin blockchain in May 2014. Anil Dash developed the technical specification and the pair demonstrated the practical application at a Seven on Seven hackathon that connected technologists to artists. The name this pioneering duo chose for their new creation was Monetised Graphics. It obviously didn’t stick, and they didn’t patent their idea. And then, like all things that started with the best intentions, the internet got hold of it. Dash would later right an ode to his bastardised idea in the Atlantic. “If you liked an artwork, would you pay more for it just because someone included its name in a spreadsheet? I probably wouldn’t. But once you leave aside the technical details of NFTs, putting artworks on the blockchain is like listing them in an auction catalog. It adds a measure of certainty about the work being considered.” “By default, copies of a digital image or video are perfect replicas—indistinguishable from the original down to its bits and bytes. Being able to separate an artist’s initial creation from mere copies confers power, and in 2014 it was genuinely new.” Cycling by the Riverside is built on Ethereum, a blockchain that allows artwork creation and ownership to be authenticated and transferred. The NFTs are represented by unique tokens stored on the network and act as a permanent, tamper-proof record of provenance and ownership. Start your NFT journey today! Visit OpenSea Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com the sports advertising technology company - step out of the frame and into the action.

Humans, on average, listen to 18.4 hours of music each week. That’s equivalent to around 368 three minute audio tracks. This is according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry 2021 Engaging with Music report. The 2019 version of this report put that weekly average at 18 hours. Over that time period music streaming listenership increased by 51 percent and now constitutes 23 percent of all music consumed by humans. Radio takes a mere 16 percent of the listening pie, but interestingly only 9 percent of music that people listen to is owned or, in other words, bought. We are buying personal listening devices, though. This year headphone revenue in the US in up to 16.86 billion dollars. With an almost 3 percent annual growth predicted for the next five years. There are many headphone and speaker brands that will sell their quality as being “the way the artist intended” but are absent when you go into the production studio. That’s why I spoke toke Alvin Le Roux, or LAYROO as he is known by his legion of fans, because he is an artist and producer. The whirlwind of tech advancement from transistor radios – first on shelves in 1954 – audio cassettes – an engineering triumph from Philips in 1958, and immortalized by Nina Simone in 1966 – and the CD player released by Sony in 1982 will make your head spin. No wonder the boomers are so eager to jump on the next tech trend. When Steve Jobs first held up the iPod in 2007 he saved the music industry. In one technology generation we went from a reality of physical ownership of actual discs or files to an idea that music can exist seamlessly across devices. We gave up ownership for convenience, just like we offered up the headphone jack for the freedom of living untethered. This isn’t the artist’s intention, but a by-product of a corporate machine. Artists like Lay Roo, thankfully, are still compelled to create.

It’s US CPI data day again, which tanked BTC by 10% last month… Microsoft had an event and there are new Surface machines on the way.

Unencrypted ep.6: How technology is changing photography (ft. Ian McNaught Davis) Ian is one of the most accomplished photographers I know and not only because of his masters in photography that he achieved abroad, but rather the fact that he has been a photographer in an active war zone. Scratch that, you can’t officially call Ukraine a war zone yet. We’re talking on the morning of the Made By Google event where the big G took the wraps off of the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. The headline photography feature is this thing called Face Unblur where the AI engine inside the new Tensor 2 processor and Google’s own machine learning smarts will try its best to make any blurry picture in your Google Photos library sharper. The camera system – including the Image Signal Processing pipeline – will also go in at the pixel level and upscale individual bits of image file to make zoomed photos clearer. Apple does something similar with the iPhone semantic rendering and Deep Fusion, which used to only kick in during medium to low lighting conditions. As of the iPhone 14 Deep Fusion enters the fray far earlier in the pipeline to enhance textures and details. They call this new pipeline the Photonic Engine While we may seem a long way away from pinhole camera obscura type setups where there’s an artist tracing over the scene projected in a dark room, we kind of aren’t. The artist is just Artificial Intelligence and these systems are being recomposed in near real time on the pixel level. What you see and what your smartphone captures are wildly different ideas of reality and our memories are now truly at the mercy of what the technology manufacturers decide is their particular style. To truly understand photography you need to look at the word “photograph” or, literally, light – photo. drawing – graph. It gets even trippier when you consider photographic terms like exposure also refers to the amount of time you expose the sensor or image to light. Aperture is the literal lens opening. Of course Leonardo Da Vinci was involved with some sketches of camera obscura with glass lenses integrated into the pinhole design, but astronomer Johannes Kepler claims the credit for inventing the word photograph in 1604. Fast forward to 1827 and a chemical experiment results in View from a Window at Le Gras. That process took eight hours to create, which is still shorter than the time it took my parents to have some of my baby pictures developed at a chemist. Crazy, right? Our species used to hand creative control over our memories to complete strangers. Cameras have gotten really good and it seems like we’re on the cusp of a major technology leap. But for now the magic is happening in the processing and companies like Vivo and Oppo are building extra bits of silicon to do the photographic heavy lifting. But that’s a story for another day. Unencrypted is made possible by the good people at Addvirtt, the technology company democratising premium virtual display advertising for Africa. Visit addvirtt.com to request a demo. Additional music by DSTechnician

British pound volatility, the imminent Credit Suisse liquidity crisis and the European gas situation contributed to a 3 percent gain for Bitcoin. The premier crypto has arrived at the $20 000 level again and things could go either way. The shares of one of the widely tracked crypto funds Greyscale Investment’s bitcoin trust - a darling of institutional investors who want exposure to bitcoin without holding any - has dropped into the discount zone, and is now trading 36.2 percent below its net asset value as the institutional appetite for bitcoin slows. Rising energy costs is squeezing bitcoin miners with the hash rate peaking at all time high levels. Big time mining firms carry fixed costs and this trend is putting pressure on profit margins. Public miners are on shaky ground right now and a sharp decline in bitcoin price could topple many operations if revenues can’t cover debts. Ethereum underperformed against its elite coin peers for the fourth week running. September was a rocky month for financial markets with 8 and 9 percent respective declines in S&P 500 and Nasdaq, but gold and bitcoin have remained firm - prompting many hacks to sharpen their “digital gold” pencils. Elsewhere in the tech sphere: Reviewers are saying that you probably should wait before copping an Intel ARC Graphics card. Drivers are the primary force behind the caution and its a problem that the silicon giant can’t brute force its way out of. Son of African soil Elon Musk is pushing ahead with his $44 billion Twitter purchase at 54.20 per share. But all eyes turn to Google with the firm updating its Nest product range and many of its core apps ahead of the Pixel 7 launch event - this software scramble doesn’t divert enough attention for the thick bezels on the upcoming pixel watch, though. Talking about android land, Xiaomi took the covers off of the 12T and 12T Pro - the latter is equipped with the 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP1 camera sensor and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 The 12T (non-Pro), however, opts for the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-Ultra and the 108MP HM6 camera sensor from Samsung. Interestingly that Dimensity SoC brings a superior Bluetooth radio with a 5.3 connection over the 5.2 one in the Pro model. In the Apple world embargoes have lifted on iPhone 14 Plus reviews and it predictably has the best battery life on any iPhone. There’s only a R1200 price difference between the Plus and the Pro in South Africa, though, so you’re gonna really want to need that extra endurance to skip on Dynamic Island and the camera improvements.

That’s James McCall, chief sustainability officer at HP. Yes, I’m back in the desert, but this time I’m taking about ocean bound plastics. Specifically the stuff HP is using in 99 percent of its new devices. You see, plastic manufacturing is actually a bit of a scam. On 18 July 2017 the sovereign nation of the People’s Republic of China filed a notification of technical barriers to trade with the World Trade Organisation. This is a routine process and the WTO gets dozens of these a week. No stress, right? Wrong. Because the items listed under the standardized codes were all targeted at things that have polymer in its name. Namely, plastics. Pretty much all plastics cannot be sent to china for recycling. And ever since then the world has been in an arms race to make plastic recycling profitable. The uncomfortable truth of plastic recycling is that new plastic products cannot be made only out recycled plastic. The other truth is that most plastic is not easily recyclable. You know that triangle arrows with a number inside? That’s not a recycling sign, it’s a polymer ID code. South Africa only has the technical capacity to recycle three of the seven polymers within our borders. Well, to be fair we can process the others, but it gets tricky. The codes you should look out for as perfect recycling targets are one, two and four. One (PET) is pretty much all detergent bottles, juice bottles and those blue plastic water bottles. Two (PE-HD) covers milk and shampoo bottles, almost all plastic bottle tops, and all your household container – off brand Tupperware stuff. And plastic crates. Four (PE-LD) is all your packaging bags like milk sachets, bread packets, the plastic covering the 18 pack of toilet paper and the frozen vegetable bags – this is the main stock that our bin bags get made out of. The tech industry, however, is targeting something called ocean bound plastics. Samsung gets even more specific and uses fishing nets, for instance. HP sources its recycled plastic stock from an organization called The Plastic Bank. They’re based in Port Au Prince in Haiti, a nation that didn’t have a functional waste disposal system until a couple of years ago and the waste was just dumped wherever. These guys are fighting crushing poverty and this crazy rubbish problem at the same time. A wrinkle in the grand plan of plastic recycling is that in Haiti the cost of recycled plastic goes down in lock step with the cost of natural gas. In other countries there’s a similar problem where its just easier and cheaper to keep making virgin plastic from oil – it’s a biproduct of fuel refining after all. Samsung partners with a number of smaller organisations across the Indian ocean. But back to China. The about turn in its recycling stance is all about the drag processing the world’s plastic waste was having on the healthcare system. Even when countries sort the waste and then ship it, the energy intensive recycling process is also terrible for the environment and overall human safety. So as it stands only about 10 percent of our plastic that we use actually gets recycled. It’s a bummer and a major economic waste, but it is better than nothing. So kudos to Samsung and HP for leading in respective industries. You know what would be great, though? If these technology giants started making fewer products more thoughtfully. Devices crafted out of more premium materials that are easily recycled numerous times – think metal and glass – and last a really long time. But that’s a story for another day

Bitcoin retreats from $20300 in wake of USD surge and BoE debt counter. XRP was an early winner, but QNT had a spectacular Wednesday. Public BTC miners have lost money. Amazon Kindle Scribe is an e-ink tablet with a stylus - which begs the question: WHO ASKED FOR THIS? Apple does about turn to bring Stage Manager to non-M1 iPads, but it may be a Pro only update when iPadOS 16 finally breaks cover.

Binance is the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and has aggressively entered South Africa. Lindsey Schutters spoke to the local Binance business head Hannes Wessels about the plans for Mzansi and how Binance is going to move crypto into the mainstream. We didn't expect him to have an answer on the second question, but he did. And it's going to blow the roof off of crypto use on the continent. Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com the sports advertising technology company - step out of the frame and into the action.

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Not many tech commentators gave Huawei a chance after the company was hit with sanctions that stripped it of its ability to source from US intellectual property. With no access to Google Mobile Services or even 5G connectivity, and unable to manufacturer its own silicon chips, Huawei fought back with a software response. We will never see the HarmonyOS brand in South Africa, but that doesn’t mean we won’t benefit from the interconnected ecosystem advantages that it brings. And this is how Huawei is mounting its comeback. Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com Akhram Mohamed’s quotes come courtesy of the Reframed podcast, you can listen to me ranting about supply chains over there https://open.spotify.com/episode/03dKzZXkS8qPqHKcCaP0l0?si=D5jA_2EARUyfyoyvv559wA

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Samsung didn’t give much details on how they are reproducing HiFi audio in the Galaxy Buds2 Pro, they’re just trusting that you buy the product and the story. This week Gavin Dudley, editor of TECH magazine, joins Unencrypted to unpack and demystify Bluetooth audio. Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com And recorded at https://www.atkarena.com