Tech trends between 28th March and 4th April

ICYMI here’s everything we covered last week:

• Many Instagram were urging their followers to turn on notifications for their posts but Instagram came through and said they will not be changing the feed anytime soon. They’re working on something and will let us all know when they actually make any changes, so y’all can chill. On Friday morning, Instagram was down for about an hour in many parts of the world. Instagram had not said what happened at the time of publication.

• Developers have been invited to take part in the 2016 Android Experiments I/O Challenge to create or share an ideas or products and win a chance to go to this years’ Google I/O developer conference. All applications should be sent by April 13th, 2016.

• Sometime in 2012, Google purchased a German company called Nik software that specialized in photo editing tools that targeted the amateur to professional photographers.  And Google’s primary intention, was of course to gain a controlling hand over the popular Android/iOS photo editing application Snapseed, but that aside.  Anyway, Google was originally going to offer the Nik Collection for around ZMW1,600, down from around ZMW5,600, but, that has since changed with Google announcing that the collection will now be freely available to download from the Nik Collection page.

• Technology and innovation hub BongoHive closed its location at 9169B Nanshila Road, Kalundu, Lusaka right across the street from the University of Zambia last Thursday, 31st March 2016 and relocated to Plot 16948B Thabo Mbeki Road, Lusaka (see Google Map here) on Tuesday 5th April 2016.

• The Internet Society will bring its annual Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) to Tanzania for the first time. The organisation has partnered with the Tanzania Internet Service Providers Association (TISPA) to hold the seventh annual AfPIF in the country’s capital, Dar es Salaam, 30 August- 1 September, 2016. Serving as a platform to expand Internet infrastructure and services across Africa, the event will bring together key players to address the opportunities in interconnection, peering and traffic exchange on the continent.

• With the Internet of Things (IoT) at our doorstep, the rise of open source hardware is taking on new urgency, so is 2016 the year of open source ? Find out here.

• There’s a new WhatsApp update that allows us to stress our points and even get a little sarcastic when the need arises. The new text formatting allows for italic, strike-through and bold text. Users who have WhatApp installed will automatically get version 2.12.17 for iOS and 2.12.535 for Android to start using the new features. Windows and Blackberry users may never get the ability to emphasis.Read about it here.

• Microsoft has finally announced that Bash scripting will be available in Windows 10 and it won’t run off an emulator or a virtual machine, but off binaries borrowed from Ubuntu and integrated straight into Windows 10.
• Standard Chartered Bank Zambia has partnered with MTN Mobile Money, the leading mobile money provider in Zambia, to launch Straight2Bank Wallet.

• The total number of mobile money services has grown to 271 worldwide, according to a report by the GSMA, and many service providers have initiatives that allow for cross-border remittances to boost trade in regions they are found in. The GSMA accounted for at least 29 cross-border mobile money remittance services amongst 19 countries.

We ended off the week with an Aprils Fools shenanigan telling our readers we’d been bought. Don’t believe everything you read on 1st April.

To more tech and beyond this week!