North-America

Basketball junkies rejoice: the NBA Development League is headed to YouTube.

The North-America based National Basketball Association (NBA) and YouTube announced on Tuesday that at least 350 games from pro basketball’s minor league will stream LIVE this season via the world’s most popular video-sharing network YouTube. It’s purported to mark the first — but surely not the last — time a pro-sports league has used YouTube as its main outlet to broadcast games.

“As one of the world’s most popular sports with a broad roster of top prospects, the NBA D-League is a perfect fit for the YouTube platform,” Claude Ruibal, YouTube’s global sports director, said in a release. “With our broad global delivery across all platforms and devices, providing live and catch up NBA D-League games and highlights will make this exciting content easily accessible to a whole new generation of basketball fans.”

Fans can catch games live on the D-League YouTube channel, and via a YouTube video player embedded on NBA.com. On-demand replays of finished games will also be available on the league’s channel, as well as individual team websites.

While it’s likely that only hardcore hoop-heads will want to watch a bunch of former college stars with little chance of future NBA stardom, the partnership is an interesting one for non-basketball reasons.

The NBA became YouTube’s first sports-league partner in 2005 and, with more than 966 million total video views, and 980,000 subscribers is its most popular sports channel.

On other social media channels, NBA has at least 14,883,764 Likes on their Facebook Page and 6,298,265 Followers on Twitter.

Source: Mashable

Kampala, Uganda – 20th November, 2012

HiPipo Consulting, Research and Advisory together with HiPipo Digital Media have conducted Uganda’s Midsize Companies Internet Presence Survey, Case Daily Monitor 2011, Top 100 Midsize companies. The survey aimed to establish the rate at which Uganda midsized companies have embraced the web with the minimum requirement being having a functional website. The yearly Daily Monitor Top 100 list of midsize companies was chosen as the case to use since this list is drawn with comprehensive financial research hence is a good representative of the financial health status and operational efficiency of Uganda’s midsize companies.

The results of the Internet Presence Survey, presented in this report, indicate that 60 of the top 100 midsize companies lack functional websites. By functional this survey refers to a website with at least 5 navigable pages. 40 of the companies have Good/Ok websites though most are not updated and many lacked professional look and feel to match their brands. With this sample, we can conclude that even as the internet and web presence is growing, Uganda’ midsized companies still have much to do to fully embrace the web to a level where all the top 100 midsize companies can have functional and well updated websites as a minimum for their online presence.

Of the Daily Monitor, 2011, Top 10 Midsize Companies, only three have Good/Ok websites, two have Poor websites either not developed or lacking at least 5 pages whereas 5 companies including the company that was the number 1 of the top 100 midsize companies list completely lack a website.

Download Uganda’s Midsize Companies Internet Presence Survey Report Here

About HiPipo

Consulting, Research and Advisory

Our Consulting, Research and Advisory focus on Business and Technology that spans web, mobile and social.  We provide proprietary research, consumer and business data, custom consulting, events and online communities with advisory to guide leaders in Business, IT, marketing and strategy. We are responsible for the strategy, design and development of some of the most influential digital experiences such as HiPipo.com. We work with big and small companies to build ongoing, continuous relationships with consumers through effective use of social media and mobile platforms. We host, design and develop web and mobile applications.

In telecom circles, the talk has for long been 3G and now 4G is gaining significant coverage. Less is talked about 2G networks which are still serving the people of Africa diligently. Even as we want to advance to the next generation of networks, reality is that many Africans do not have 3G or 4G capable phones and it may take several years for the majority to acquire these phones. From Africacom Awards being held in South Africa it has been shared that 4% of connections in Africa are Smartphone connections, but growing numbers of people are accessing new services and apps with feature phones. MTN says “You can’t switch off 2G as long as most people can’t afford high end devices” and Google says that “cost and knowledge are the biggest obstacles to African app development”. Applications that can use 3G data will take longer to penetrate the bottom of the pyramid population which cannot afford current generation of smartphones and data packages for content rich applications.

In the US National wireless carrier AT&T plans to move completely past 2G wireless connectivity by 2017, a recent 10-Q filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission revealed. UK based networks are also working on a timeline to switch off 2G though this may not be as fast as the US.

Given the economic status of Africa, it may take several years for real 3G capable phones to sink and hence it may take longer for networks still running 2G technologies together with 3G or 4G to switch off 2G. May be this could be a decade ahead, let’s say 2022! We shall love to hear what the plans and projections of operators in Africa are. Uganda operators such Airtel Uganda and MTN Uganda with large country network coverage should be still largely depending on 2G for voice and some data services whereas the 3G network is deployed for fast data services.  Do they have a plan/projection yet to switch off 2G? 

Nigeria,

Miss Ebube Essien-Garricks has won an AEROPLANE in the MTN Ultimate Wonder Promo.

Data at rest

The inactive data which is physically stored in databases, spreadsheets, data warehouses, mobile devices and the like, can be referred to as ‘data at rest’ for example data residing in hospital database. The loss of such data might result in embarrassment, discrimination in the workplace or even the threat of physical danger for the persons concerned. From an information security viewpoint, data at rest is vulnerable and needs to be protected.
Public sector organisations should take the utmost care that sensitive data such as personal records is protected against brute force attacks with strong encryption for when basic authentication methods like username plus password fails.

Data in transit

Data which is transferred between two nodes in a network is ‘data in transit’. Examples of sensitive public sector data in transit might include confidential emails or video messages being transmitted from one computer to another, which could divulge government secrets; tax returns sent electronically which could result in theft; or even missile codes being sent from HQ to a nuclear submarine.

As a rule of thumb, organisations should assume that the network cannot be trusted. Consequently, all sensitive data must be protected with network encryption, supplemented by supplemented by SSL certificates, Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) and other precautions where relevant.

Data in use

We can use the term ‘data in use’ to refer to that data which is being used in an in-memory state. Google Chrome, for example, loads up websites in-memory that it thinks you might like to look at next so that it operates more quickly. Government employees might keep classified web pages in-memory while browsing. Sensitive ‘data in use’ needs to be protected by application-level encryption and exposed on a need to know basis, encrypted as soon as possible and decrypted only when necessary. Such a selective approach to encryption can only be performed at the application level.

Extract From
When will the public sector grasp basic lessons on information security? by Ross Parsell