This month a major milestone was reached in the world of solid-state storage. For the first time, the capacity of an SSD was greater than that offered by a hard drive. The biggest hard drives on the market today are 10TB, but Samsung has achieved a 16TB SSD. According to Toshiba, that storage divide is going to grow massively over the next 5 years.

The 16TB SSD is a significant achievement not only because of the huge storage capacity, but because the SSD retained its 2.5-inch form factor. Anything above 2TB in a hard drive and you’re looking at a 3.5-inch drive. And the size of the storage component increasingly matters when you consider consumers continue to move away from desktop PCs and over to Ultrabooks, tablets, and smartphones. The same is true in data centers where space is always at a premium.

Read more: Toshiba to manufacture a 128TB SSD by 2018 and 40TB HDD by 2020

On August 17th many employees of ThoughtWorks Uganda office woke up to the shocking news that office will be closed at the end of year. The apparent reason for the closure is no business visibility in the foreseeable future. Of course this is tragic and has left many perplexed and some stranded since ThoughtWorks was seen as model for all Ugandan IT firms to aim for.

For those who don’t know, Thoughtworks is a US based global software development and products company with office in many countries which include but not limited to : South Africa, India, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Brazil and many others.

Read more: Does the closure of ThoughtWorks offices indicate the dire situation of IT in Uganda?

Intel said has been working closely with PC companies for years to deliver high performance workstations that deliver the computing demands of designers, content creators, engineers and architects.

The increase in digital creation of high definition videos, digital design by creative professionals and engineers has created a need for workstation class capabilities in a portable device. Intel has decided to kick in with plans to bring the power of Intel® Xeon® processors to notebook PCs for the first time. Intel will soon be launching the Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1500M v5 Product Family.

This family of processors is based on the next gen Skylake architecture and they will deliver high precision computing horsepower in notebook form factors, delivering the right balance of power and mobility.

Read more: Intel to start manufacturing high end Intel® Xeon® processors for mobile computers.

Security researchers based in Zurich and London have found a way to mask data in a way that it has less overheads that slow it down.

The new high speed encryption system called Hornet, will allow data to move around at speeds of upto 93GBps.
The creater of Hornet say slowness in data is due to encryption done several times as data travels. Tor encrypts data as it hops randomly between the servers or relays that make up the network.

Encrypting and decrypting data many times adds a processing overhead, which means browsing the web via Tor can be slow and frustrating.

Read more: The anonymous way to browse the web at high speed has been developed.

The Intergovernmental Standing Committee on Shipping (ISCOS) has developed a mobile phone-based tool for monitoring, reporting and resolving Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs).

These are experienced by users of ports and trade corridors in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

Director of trade facilitation and policy harmonisation at the ISCOS secretariat Alex Zulu told IHS Maritime: "The tool commonly known as m-Ship is expected to revolutionise the industry as real time-service users participate in decision making and policy formulation and improve the shipping and transport industry in East, Central and Southern Africa region."

"The scope of the platform covers the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa through transit countries to the hinterland through the Central, Dar Es Salaam and Northern Corridors including roads, rail, pipeline and the inland water ways," he added.

Read more: Mobile technology to improve port operations in Africa