On Monday, AWS experienced an outage that knocked many services offline for a few hours. From Duolingo to Snapchat, the apps and platforms that leverage Amazon’s massive swathe of infrastructure were knocked offline. While ultimately AWS was able to restore services in a somewhat timely fashion, the incident has once again kicked off a conversation about whether one company or even a handful of them controlling most of the internet is a good idea. It’s a pity that conversation is happening on platforms powered by those companies.
Luno says that 6.3 million South Africans are on its platform which sounds impressive until you realise that is just 9.8 percent of the population. A far cry from the revolution cryptocurrency promised in its hey day. Still growth is growth and Luno recently introduced a number of new offerings including tokenised stocks that will likely help it attract more users.
On a lighter note, Pick n Pay has launched COLLECTABOKS cards for locals to collect. For every R500 you spend at Pick n Pay you will receive three cards. There are 30 to collect including a rare gold Rassie card. Pick n Pay will host trading days but we suspect collectors will be comprised of younger kids, trading cards amongst each other during their break times. We suspect this is going to be big. Not Dragon Ball Z tazos big, but big in its own right.
Let’s talk tech!
Get the tech news you want to read. Take our reader survey and tell us how we can help you better.
