EXCITING Seacom Goes Live - Get Ready Africa - Collaboration and Connectivity are Here

Post by Yvon le Roux, Vice President, Emerging Markets

In my role as vice president of Cisco’s Africa and Levant region, I’m fortunate to meet dynamic people from across the region face-to-face and via TelePresence. I hear inspiring stories of how technology is improving lives, and I feel proud of the role we play in assisting in country transformation, providing the backbone to a human network where technology empowers people to connect, process and share information.

I was honored to address the launch ceremony of the Seacom submarine cable in Tanzania this week. It was a major announcement, as SEACOM will provide the catalyst for African consumers, business and government to realise the benefits of connectivity and collaboration across the globe.

Pictures on Flickr

I shared the stage with His Excellency, President Kikwete of Tanzania and Brian Herlihy, the CEO of SEACOM. We simultaneously addressed dignitaries, partners and journalists situated at venues in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa.

Cisco and SEACOM jointly built a voice, data and video platform for this launch, relying on the Seacom network to create a collaborative environment to stream live video over Internet Protocol to the five launch locations. The Cisco team supplied routers, switches, DMS equipment and encoders for this launch.

The benefits of Seacom’s 1,28 Terabytes per second (Tb/s), 17,000 kilometers, submarine fiber optic cable system are far reaching, and its far more than simply installing broadband in homes and offices. It’s about the people of Africa, bringing networks to them, changing lives and about improving how nations plan public services, health care, transportation, construction, and even sporting events.
Take health care as a primary example. Broadband is key to the success of telemedicine, as it will provide communities with multichannel access to a wide range of health care services. This milestone will help improve collaboration among health workers as well as provide for greater capability for self-treatment and improvements in primary care. This improvements will help optimize the performance of health care service as a whole, resulting in a healthier and economically stronger nation.

There is no doubt it is an exciting and truly transformational time for Africa.
John Chambers, our President and CEO, says that ‘Education and the Internet are the two equalizers in life’. As a company, Cisco is firmly committed to advancing the Human Network in Africa. I look forward to sharing more of this excitement with you over the next few days and months.

De Broncode van Jan Sloot

ZTE Tops China Mobile 3G Contract

ZTE is reported to have picked up just over a third of the latest TD-SCDMA tender from China Mobile, reports the Interfax news agency.

China Mobile has unveiled the results for its third-phase TD-SCDMA network tender which covers 200 Chinese cities.

According to the results, ZTE, Huawei, and Datang Mobile gain a total market share of 72%, with ZTE gaining 34%, Huawei gaining 22% and Datang Mobile, 16%; and the remaining five companies, including New Postcom, FiberHome, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson, and Potevio, gain market shares of about 5% to 6% each.

In March 2009, China Mobile launched its third-phase TD-SCDMA network tender that covers 200 Chinese cities, including Foshan, Wuxi, and Wenzhou. According to its former plan, this tender will involve purchase of 39,000 wireless base stations and total value of over CNY8.6 billion. On the completion of these base stations, China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network is expected to cover 70% of the areas in China.

However, according to reports in local media, the actual scale of this third-phase tender is larger than the original plan and the value involved is nearly double.

Older news; Chinese Market News - China Mobile Invests in Far EasTone - Bloomberg

In Drought-Ending IPO, LogMeIn Logs $107 Million

In the year’s first initial public offering by a venture-backed company from New England, Woburn, MA-based remote access software maker LogMeIn has raised $80 million, according to a report late Tuesday night in the Wall Street Journal. Through lead underwriters Barclays and JP Morgan Chase, the company sold 5 million shares at $16 per share—the high end of the price range it had hoped the offering would bring.

Altogether, 6.67 million shares were sold in the offering, raising $107.2 million. Of that, $27.2 million will go to individual shareholders who sold parts of their stakes, including LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon and chief technology officer Martin Anka. LogMeIn’s stock will begin trading today on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol LOGM.

It’s only the fourth time in 2009 a U.S. venture-backed company has gone public, after a four-month period at the beginning of the year with no venture-backed IPOs at all.

Whether or not the sale heralds the gradual restoration of the IPO as one of the traditional exit paths for venture investors, it’s bringing respectable returns to LogMeIn’s investors. Altogether, venture backers put $20 million into the company, in return for shares now worth a collective $155 million, according to the Journal.

Prism Venture Works, the company’s single largest shareholder, comes out of the IPO with an 18.2 percent share of the company that’s worth $62.3 million at the $16-per-share price. Polaris Venture Partners sold shares worth $7.4 million in the offering and is holding onto a 13.9 percent stake worth $47.6 million. Intel Capital’s 4.2 percent stake is now worth $14.2 million, and Integral Capital Partners sold shares worth $5 million and retained a 5.4 percent stake worth $18.4 million.

Medidata of New York, OpenTable of San Francisco, and SolarWinds of Austin, TX, are the other three venture-backed companies that risked IPOs this year.