AfricaResource The Place for Africa on the Net

Even if you abolished these old formats in favor of media locked up with technologies like FairPlay or PlaysForSure, you'd still have no bar to music file sharing. Both Apple and Microsoft's systems allow buyers of a song to burn it to an audio CD that can then be copied back to a computer in an unrestricted format. The side effect: It only took a few minutes with a file-sharing program to find MP3 copies of songs sold only on iTunes. And even without the audio-CD workaround, hackers have repeatedly dismantled the defenses of FairPlay and PlaysForSure.

Google Inc. saw its share price slip Friday after the company's second-quarter earnings came in slightly below Wall Street's estimates, thanks to higher expenses. However, Google's massive hiring caused a jump in expenses related to payroll and bonuses beyond what the company had budgeted. That caused earnings per share to come in below analysts predictions, even though revenue exceeded estimates. Bottom line narrowly misses estimates; analysts see buying opportunity.

For people in the camps, the economic boom has had the perverse effect of further undermining their already precarious existence. With land at a premium, the local government of Khartoum state periodically sends police and bulldozers into the camps to plow under swaths of mud houses, pushing people even farther out into the desert, and then sells the cleared land to developers."This government has a different feeling towards the southerners," Yobu said. "They look at the south as inferior and themselves as superior. If we separate, we'll have more revenue, and more freedom also. The south has oil, and gold. But right now, the money is in their hands."

Mr. Wyler, an executive based in Boston who made his fortune during the tech boom, said he would lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service. Until that point, Mr. Wyler, 37, had never set foot in Africa — he was invited by a Rwandan government official he had met at a wedding. Mr. Wyler never expected to start a business there; he simply wanted to try to help the war-torn country. But after nearly four years, most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize, Rwandan officials say. “The bottom line is that he promised many things and didn’t deliver,” said Albert Butare, the country’s telecommunications minister.

Most students are unaware, for instance, that amid bearish performance of developed stock markets over the past years, several leading African stock markets in Ghana, Egypt, Botswana, Nigeria and Uganda have bucked the negative trend and recorded solid triple digit performance. Since year-end 2001, African stock markets on average have accumulated index returns of 127% in US dollar terms led by Ghana with a whopping return of 564%, which is the highest in the world over the period. These positive trends, coupled with Africa's low correlation to world markets make investment in the region attractive for portfolio diversification.