Intel gets a beating

The EU fined Intel for anti-trust behaviour, which was a major talking point internationally. At home, Simon Tomlinson resigned as CEO of Faritec, and the financial results from Datatec and Dimension Data stole much of the local ICT media space.

* Mixed year-end numbers from Datatec, with revenue up, but profit down.
* Mixed interim numbers from Dimension Data, with revenue down, but profit up; Paracon, with revenue up 6%, but profit down 30%; and Reunert, with revenue up, but profit down.
* Very poor year-end figures from Ansys, with revenue down marginally, but profit down 85%.
* The suspension of the AltX listing of Celcom, prior to its termination next week.
* Samsung has appointed Rectron as its ICT products distributor for South Africa.
* Siphiwe Nyanda was appointed minister of communications; and Dina Pule was named deputy minister of communications.
* Simon Tomlinson, CEO of Faritec, resigned.

* Satisfactory quarterly numbers from Maroc Telecom Group and Telecom Egypt, with revenue up 6%, but profit up 72%.

Zimbabwe had the highest piracy rates on the African continent in 2008, at 92%.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Frontier Communications acquired the landline assets of Verizon Communications for $8.6 billion. Frontier has annual revenue of about $2.2 billion.
* McAfee bought Solidcore Systems, a provider of security technology, for $33 million.
* Oracle purchased Virtual Iron, a provider of server virtualisation.
* SAP acquired Clear Standards, a provider of enterprise carbon management solutions.
* TI bought Luminary Micro, a supplier of micro-controllers.
* Intel has been fined EUR1.06 billion by the European Commission regarding its anti-trust practices.
* Good quarterly numbers from Tencent (Hong Kong), a company in which Naspers has a significant shareholding.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Nuance Communications (back in the black), Trend Micro and Virgin Mobile USA.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Compuware.
* Mixed quarterly figures from BMC Software (revenue up, but profit down), BT (revenue up, but profit down), CA (revenue down, but profit up), Telefonica (revenue down, but profit up) and Vivendi (revenue up, but profit down).
* Quarterly losses from Borland Software, Hitachi, Intelsat, NEC, NEC Electronics, Nortel Networks, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sony, Tiscali and Toshiba.

* International:
* The final outcome of the sell-offs by BearingPoint and Nortel Networks.
* Africa:
* The winner for a stake in Morocco Meditel, with Etisalat one of the bidders.
* South Africa:
* The IPO of Vodacom on the JSE.

* Zimbabwe had the highest piracy rates on the African continent in 2008, at 92%; with South Africa's rate at 35%, 1% up on 2007, according to Business Software Alliance.

* JSE All share index: Down 0.6%
* Nasdaq: Down 3.4%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (+14.1%), Ansys (+11.1%), Dynamic Cables (-20.6%), Faritec (+16.7%), Labat Africa (-50%), Mustek (-9.4%), TCS (+11.1%) and UCS (+22.1%)

Time magazine recently published its annual '100 Most Influential People' write-up. From a technology perspective, the only names included were Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com and 'The Twitter Guys'.