Google finds its Waze

Google's more than $1 billion acquisition of Waze and the fraud charges allegation against the CEO of France Telecom were the top stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, Telkom's disastrous full-year results, its new penalty and its filing of lawsuits regarding Multi-Links were the main local stories.

* Good year-end figures from Mix Telematics, with revenue up 15% and profit up 24.4%.
* A full-year loss from Telkom SA, with revenue down 1.6%.
* A positive trading update from Naspers.
* Orange has signed a partnership with Nashua Mobile that will help expand its presence in this country.
* Telkom SA has agreed to pay R200 million penalty to settle complaints that it used its dominant market position to the detriment of other Internet providers between 2005 and 2007. This is in addition to the R449 million fine already imposed for earlier transgressions.
* Telkom SA has filed a R5 billion lawsuit against Blue Label Telecoms, and another against a former executive regarding the agreement between Telkom's previous Nigerian investment, ie, Multi-Links and Blue Label.
* Rob Sporen was appointed acting chairman of EOH.

* Mixed year-end numbers from Mauritius Telecom, with revenue up 3% but profit down 4.1%.
* Swift Networks (Nigeria) acquired the LTE or 4G business of Direct on PC, a company that provides wireless fibre-based broadband services in the major centres of that country.
* Etisalat has won a 3G and 4G licence in Benin.
* Rwanda has signed a deal with South Korea's KT Corp to provide a high-speed 4G long-term evolution service to most of that state's population within three years.
* Telkom Kenya has signed an agreement with Eaton Towers for the management of its passive network infrastructure in that country.

Look out for further developments regarding Telkom SA, following its extremely poor results.

* Avnet bought the assets of Seamless Technologies, an IT private cloud and data centre automation service provider.
* AVG Technologies purchased the business of LPI Level Platforms, a remote monitoring and management software company.
* Google acquired Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up, for $1.3 billion.
* Software AG bought Progress Software's Apama Solution, a complex event processing solution.
* Tibco purchased StreamBase Systems, a high-performance event processing and real-time analytics software company.
* Vishay Intertechnology acquired MCB Industrie SA, a speciality resistor company.
* Yahoo bought GhostBird, a photo application maker.
* Yahoo also acquired Rondee, an executive conference calling centre.
* Rambus has settled its chip dispute with SK Hynix for $240 million.
* Infineon has settled its patent row with Atmel.
* The US Patent & Trademark office says Apple's rubber-banding patent claim and three others are valid, reversing a ruling in April to the contrary.
* Stephane Richard, CEO of France Telecom, has been placed under formal investigation regarding fraud charges.
* Softbank has raised its offer for Sprint Nextel to $21.6 billion.
* Mixed quarterly figures from MTS (Russia), with revenue up but profit down.
* Robert Philpot was named CEO of Harte-Hanks.
* Larry Franklin retired as CEO of Harte-Hanks.
* A very good IPO on the NYSE by Gigamon, a networking hardware company.

International:
* A bid by Vodafone for Kabel Deutschland, Germany's largest cable company; and for Fastweb, the Italian broadband provider.
* A probe by European authorities regarding Google's Android licensing.
* Further clarification regarding the fate of Dell.
South Africa:
* Further developments regarding Telkom SA, following its extremely poor results that were released on Friday.

* The worldwide security market will grow 8.7% in 2013 to reach $62.7 billion, says Gartner.
* Smart connected devices in emerging markets will surpass the one billion shipments level by 2014, with more than 60% going to BRIC countries, according to IDC.
* Storage software revenue increased 3.2% in Q1 to $3.6 billion, says IDC.
* The EMEA server market declined 10.5% in Q1, according to IDC.
* Over 6.6 billion phones will be in use by the end of 2017, with over 66% being smartphones, according to CCS Insight. This figure is substantially up from the 25% of 2012.
* The worldwide external controller-based disk storage market grew by 0.6% in Q1 to $5.5 billion, says Gartner.

* JSE All share index: Down 1.2%
* Nasdaq: Down 1.3%
* Top SA share movements: Amecor (+11.9%), Ansys (+5.6%), ConvergeNet Holdings (-13.3%), EOH (-5.1%), Gijima (-16.7%), Morvest (-5.6%) Reunert (-5.5%) and SecureData (+9.4%)

IDC recently published its 'black book' Q1 2013 figures. A summary of the numbers for SA follow, showing a slight increase from the figures published for Q4 2012.