Facebook acquires Oculus VR

Facebook's acquisition of Oculus and the team behind Ascenta, and Google's deal with Luxottica were the key international ICT stories last week.

At home, the bribery allegations against a director of Pinnacle Holdings and the expected Vodacom/Neotel deal were the centre of attention for the local ICT media.

* A positive trading update from Poynting Holdings.
* Ericsson has sold a 25.1% stake in its South African operation to Ringgold Consortium in a BEE deal.
* The Special Investigating Unit of SA is to invest allegations in respect of the affairs of USAASA.
* Pinnacle Holdings has announced Takalani Tshivhase, one of its executives, has been given a leave of absence following bribery allegations.

* The launch of dotAfrica is now likely to be in May, following the completion of all the relevant paperwork.
* Philips is to establish a research and innovation hub in Kenya.
* The appointments of Victor Kyalo as CEO of the newly restructured Kenya ICT Authority, and Adil El Yousseffi as CEO of Airtel Kenya.
* The departure of Shivan Bhargava, CEO of Airtel Kenya.

Cisco will invest $1 billion over the next two years to enter the cloud services market.

* Disney bought Maker Studios, one of YouTube's largest networks, for $500 million.
* Dropbox acquired Readmill, an e-book reading app.
* Facebook purchased Oculus VR, a maker of virtual reality headsets and the team behind UK-based Ascenta, a tiny drone maker, in a deal worth $2 billion.
* Intel bought Basis Science, a maker of a health-tracking watch, for $100 million.
* Lithium Technologies acquired Klout, a social Web company, for over $100 million.
* Netflix purchased the rights for 'Print the Legend', a 3D printing award-winning documentary.
* Palo Alto Networks bought Cyvera, an Israeli cyber security firm, for $200 million.
* SAP acquired Fieldglass, a cloud services firm.
* Telus (Canada) purchased Enode, an IT security company.
* WPP Digital bought a majority stake in Cognifide, a UK-based digital consultancy.
* Yahoo Japan acquired SoftBank's eAccess, a mobile phone operator, for $3.17 billion.
* Intel invested in Cloudera, a big data start-up.
* ProSieben, a German broadcaster, made a 20% investment in Collective Data Studios, a US online video maker.
* Rostec (Russia) made a 35% investment in Yotaphone, the maker of a smartphone that doubles as an e-reader.
* Tencent made a $500 million (28%) investment in CJ Games, a South Korean games maker.
* The leader of a group that trafficked in pirated Android mobile device apps has pleaded guilty over his role in the scheme.
* The ex-MP3tunes CEO has been hit with an estimated $41 million copyright verdict for infringements of copyrights held by EMI Group.
* Spherix has filed a lawsuit against Cisco over patent infringements involving the latter's switches and routers.
* Dell and Microsoft have signed a royalties deal involving Chrome software.
* Cisco will invest $1 billion over the next two years to enter the cloud services market.
* Google has teamed up with Luxottica, the maker of Ray-Ban spectacles.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Paychex.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Progress Software.
* Mixed year-end figures from ZTE, with revenue down but back in the black.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Accenture, with revenue up but profit down; and Red Hat, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from Asure Software and BlackBerry (also revenue down 64%).
* A full-year loss from Acer.
* The appointments of Brendan Eich, a founder of Mozilla, as CEO of Mozilla; Rick Levin as CEO of Coursera, a start-up that provides students with free online access to hundreds of brand-name college courses; and Edgar Schnorpfeil as CEO of Net Mobile (Germany).
* The resignation of Theodor Niehaus as CEO of Net Mobile (Germany), which is majority owned by Japan's NTT DoCoMo.
* A planned IPO in Sweden by Tobii, a Swedish eye-tracking technology firm that is co-owned by Intel.
* An IPO filing for the NYSE from Box, a provider of a cloud-based platform that allows users to access and share their content from anywhere.
* A good IPO on the NYSE from TriNet Group, a provider of HR services to SMEs.
* Satisfactory IPOs from Aerohive Networks (NYSE), a developer of a cloud-managed network platform; and 2U (Nasdaq), a cloud-based SaaS provider of education software.
* A poor IPO on the NYSE by UK-based King Digital Entertainment, a games maker that includes Candy Crush Saga among its titles.

EMEA/Africa:
* Healthcare providers in EMEA are expected to spend $2.8 billion on IT this year, 2.8% up from 2013, according to Gartner.

Worldwide:
* Worldwide traditional PC, tablet, ultra-mobile and mobile phone shipments are expected to grow 6.9% this year and reach 2.5 billion units, according to Gartner.
* The HPC technical server market declined 7.2% in 2013, although a CAGR of 7.3% is expected over the period 2013 to 2017, with revenue expected to exceed $14 billion, according to IDC.
* The number of devices that will be shipped with Android software will overtake all other mobile and PC operating systems by 2015, according to data from Gartner and compiled by Statista.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.1% (highest-ever weekend close and just below the 48 000 level)
* Nasdaq: Down 2.8%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.1%
* S&P 500: Up 0.5%
* FTSE100: Up 0.9%
* Top SA share movements: Business Connexion (+7.8%), Datacentrix (-10.1%), Mustek (+7.5%), Pinnacle (-30.6%), Reunert (+10.5%) and Telemasters (+17.4%)

International:
* The investment by Tech Mahindra in Simplify360, a social business start-up.
* The outcome of the talks that are happening between Apple and Comcast regarding a streaming TV service.

Africa:
* The sell-off by Bharti Airtel, MTN and Orange of some of their mobile towers in Africa.
* The provision of a mobile licence to Telecom Egypt.

South Africa:
* The finalisation of the $460 million Neotel/Vodacom deal, in a move that could be the first part of the bigger picture that sees Vodacom's parent, Vodafone, buy out Tata Communications, Neotel's parent.

The MIT Technology Review recently released its '50 smartest companies 2014' list. From a technology perspective, the list included the following:
* 3: Google
* 4: Samsung
* 5: Salesforce.com
* 6: Dropbox
* 9: Square
* 10: Amazon
* 11: Tencent
* 12: Snapchat
* 14: Box
* 18: Qualcomm
* 28: Baidu
* 30: Xiaomi

Also on the list are Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, LG Electronics and Qihoo 360 Technology; however, Apple and Facebook are notable by their absence.