Skype plans IPO

The international ICT world was quiet last week, with the main news being the planned IPO of Skype, and a handful of acquisitions, including two from IBM. At home, the application to liquidate Beget Holdings and the alleged bribery and corruption activities involving Home Affairs and Lefatshe stole much of the local ICT media space.

* Mixed nine-months numbers from TeleMasters, with revenue up 2.5% but profit down 49.5%.
* Lefatshe's CEO and two Home Affairs executives were arrested over alleged bribery and corruption activities.
* Two organisations have applied to the courts for the liquidation of Beget Holdings.
* Altech intends to make its Internet business, Technology Concepts, a tier-one service provider.

* Good quarterly numbers from Telecom Egypt, with revenue up 24% and profit up 23%.
* A quarterly loss from Orascom Telecom with revenue also down 18%.
* Bharti Airtel acquired Telecom Seychelles for $440.7 million.
* Vodacom Business Africa bought AfriConnect Zambia, a broadband provider.

* Skype made an IPO filing on Nasdaq that could raise up to $100 million.

Worldwide mobile device sales grew 13.8% in Q2 to 325.6 million units.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Google acquired Jambool, a Social Gold payment product, for $55 million.
* IBM bought Datacap, a privately-owned provider of software that enables organisations to transform the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates.
* IBM purchased Unica, a company that provides enterprise marketing management and on-demand marketing solutions to financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunications, and travel and hospitality industries worldwide. The deal was worth $480 million.
* NTT Communications acquired Secure, a security consulting and managed services company.
* Tektronix Communications, a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation, bought Arbor Networks, a provider of software for network and data centre operators.
* Alibaba Group invested in Sohu's search engine. Sohu is China's second largest Internet portal.
* Xinhua, China's official news agency, and China Mobile are to establish a mobile search company.
* Excellent quarterly results from Asustek (back in the black) and Tencent Holdings.
* Very good quarterly figures from Alibaba.com and Cisco.
* Good half-year numbers from Zain.
* Good quarterly figures from Autodesk, Gartner.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from CSC.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Reliance Communications.
* Mixed half-year figures from PCCW (Hong Kong), with revenue down but profit up.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Bharti Airtel, with revenue up but profit down; Trend Micro, with revenue up but profit down; and ViaSat, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from EchoStar Communications, MTNL (India), Nuance Communications and Nvidia.

* International:
* Further developments at HP, including a new CEO.

* South Africa:
* The launch of Broadband Infraco.
* A possible new national fibre backbone network called Fiberco, backed by private equity firm Convergence Partners, whose chairman is Andile Ngcaba.

* Worldwide enterprise spending is on course to grow by 2.9% this year to surpass $2.4 trillion, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide mobile device sales grew 13.8% in Q2 to 325.6 million units, according to Gartner.

* JSE All share index: Down 2.7%
* Nasdaq: Down 5%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (-23.4%), Cape Empowerment (-9.5%), ConvergeNet (-24.1%), Datatec (-6.6%), Dialogue Group (+16.7%), FoneWorx (-6.5%), Huge Group (+6.7%) and Labat Africa (+6.7%)

Fortune magazine has just published its 'Smartest people in technology' listing. Some of the key winners include:

* Smartest CEO: Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
* Smartest founder: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
* Smartest engineer: Christophe Bisciglia, company-founder of Cloudera
* Smartest scientist: Robert Morris, VP, Services Research, of IBM Research
* Smartest Executive: Todd Bradley, EVP of HP Personal Systems Group