It's been a turbulent week for the tech field with more bad news than good. As the week winds down however, here's a breakdown of some of what took precedence.
Stick around for a few other notable mentions at the end.
A New dawn for Ugandan Innovators?
Ugandan innovators were this week presented the proverbial golden opportunity as the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance put a pen on a Memorandum of Understanding with the Innovation Village.
The MoU is geared towards a common goal of advancing innovation and creativity among the Ugandan youth and the Ugandan government’s commitment to creating a digitally driven economy.
The Innovation Village describes itself as "a destination that the 97 who never take the trophy home come to transform their ideas into solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges."
The company, focuses on startups to help them grow in confidence and capability scaling from promising tech into fully established sustainable businesses.
Aminah Zawedde, the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance said that; “Together with the Innovation Village, we will identify and develop projects that support innovation-oriented activities that are focused on leveraging emerging digital technologies and spur the development of the innovation ecosystem in Uganda.
According to Japheth Kawanguzi, Team Lead at the Innovation Village, this collaboration will see government through the Ministry of ICT support the ecosystem through financing mechanisms to deliver tailor- made services to young tech-preneurs through a series of business training, coaching and mentorship help young people transition into the employment and job creation sectors with the right skills.
RIP Twitter
The hashtag "RIPTwitter" has been trending on the very same platform this week as many predict that the end of one of the biggest and most influential digital platforms is nearing it's end.
Users have been downloading their data and letting their users know where to find them once this "imminent" Twitter demise does come to pass.
The Twitter boss himself, Elon Musk is not one to let a good trend go to waste. He Twitted this picture in reference to the hashtag.
But exactly what do people fear? And why now?
Elon Musk who bought Twitter recently at a whooping $44 billion, has been relentless in his quest for a sustainable financial model for the company. This meant firing over half of the company employees while others left as he demanded "hardcore" working conditions in a leaked company internal memo.
Employees lost included those critical to the functionality of the platform including key software developers, coders and engineers. For context, Twitter currently has no communication department.
Remaining employees say the app is at the verge of breaking down and that will not take long to happen. How long that is, we have to wait and see it play out.
Digital Creatives Win Big In Young Silverback Digital Competition
Uganda's Young silverback digital competition came to an end this week with team CoCREATE emerging overral winners.
The CoCREATE participants, Rhoda Musiima and Manzi Mugisa from Team Pen & Ink who won the Young Silverback Digital Competition will go ahead and represent Uganda, at the Cannes Lion in France next year.
The young silverback digital competition is designed to create a platform for young creatives in the agency, corporate and art institutions to showcase their creativity.
From these competitions, the association is able to identify six individuals who excelled from seven categories comprising of the PR, Design, Film, Marketers, Media, Print, and Digital concepts.
The other teams that shined in the agency and corporate editions of the Young Silverback competition were The Matriarchs made up of Patience Aheebwa and Lynn Nasirumbi who won the PR & Media competition and Team I&E made up of Sekatawa Ivan and Nalukwago Gwonyoma Team who won the Design competition.
The winners of the student edition who won paid internships from UAA Member agencies were Team Cohort made up of Wanyama Kevin and Orhon Ivan James who won the Design competition and Team Big Jump Avenue Bazanya Benjamin and Nsimbe Jolly Nathan who won the Film competition.
Dooms day for Crypto.
Cryptocurrency Customers Across the world have joined the train of caution and scepticism of their crypto exchanges following the biggest downfall as we might know it.
One of the Giants in crypto exchange, FTX filed for bankruptcy last week after reporting billions in dollars lost following malicious attacks.
The Bahamas-based company was seeking to be acquired by Binance at the time before filing for bankruptcy but this deal fell through citing mishandled customer funds and alleged U.S. agency investigations", leaving Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire high and dry.
Earlier this year, FTX was valued at $32 billion by private investors.
Confidence in the crypto world is clearly shaken.
Another exchange, Crypto.com which ranks in the top 15 global exchanges has been battling speculation that Crypto.com was facing similar problems, and crypto experts held Twitter Spaces sessions to discuss the matter.
Crypto.com last month 'mistakenly' sent over 80 percent in ether holdings (approximately $400 million worth of crypto) to Gate.io, another exchange.
Rival exchange Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao tweeted saying that an exchange suddenly moving large amounts of crypto like that "is a clear sign of problems," adding that people should "Stay away."
Other notable mentions
Meta Platform’s social messaging platform, WhatsApp is gradually rolling out a new update that lets its users message themselves. The update was first noticed by WABetaInfo and is now available in the latest version of WhatsApp for iOS (version 2.22.23.74) and WhatsApp for Android (version 2.22.23.77).
Roke Telkom this week improved its Roke home Packages with the merger of the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) and Roke plus bundle products experience by removing all the data limits and bundles.
All Roke Telkom customers are set to experience internet speeds of up to 20Mbps without any data bundle limits on the Roke at Home packages.
