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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.”


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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."

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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

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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.

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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.
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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.

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