Mastercard and Gates Foundation bring mobile banking to East African farmers via feature phones

Mastercard, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, announced the launch of 2KUZE, a digital platform that connects smallholder farmers, agents, buyers and banks in East Africa. 2KUZE enables farmers to buy, sell and receive payments for agricultural goods via their feature phones, bringing the benefits and security of mobile commerce to farmers in the region.

2KUZE is currently being piloted in Nandi Hills, Kenya, in partnership with Cafédirect Producers Foundation, a nonprofit organization working with 300,000 small holder farmers globally.

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Google adds offline search capabilities to its Android app

Searching for anything and everything on Google is a great, convenient thing—until you lose internet connection. Google remedies this issue by adding offline search to its Search app on Android. It’s starting to roll out to users and it might already be on your device. What offline search offers is it’ll start queuing things you search for when your connection gets spotty. When you get back online, Google will run the search in the background and notify you about search results when they’re ready. To know if you already have this feature, you should see a “Manage searches” option in the slide-out menu. There you will be able to see any pending searches you may have.

Source: Android Police

KGI Securities analyst foresees new Kaby Lake-powered MacBooks coming this year, including one with 32GB desktop-class RAM

Looks like MacBooks are getting refreshed this year, with one of them getting desktop-class specs—at least according to the new research note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. According to Kuo, there will be 12-inch MacBook models running on Intel Kaby Lake processors entering production in early second quarter. There will supposedly be a 16GB RAM option for this lineup, which could be a high-end version or one of the built-to-order configurations. At the moment 12-inch MacBooks have only up to 8GB of RAM.

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Regular Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge users start receiving Android Nougat update

Looks like Samsung is sticking to the January 17 rollout of the Android 7.0 update for its users—at least for those in China and the UK. Owners of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge in said countries have started to see 1.2GB updates heading to their handsets. And this rollout isn’t limited to beta testers. January 17 was the estimated date for the European release of the update so we’re expecting Android Nougat to make its way to Galaxy S7 devices from other regions soon.

There is a report from China, though, claiming a beta version of the app is still being released in the country (despite beta being closed) and it seems to be causing some issues. Whether this is affecting the rollout in the UK or the global release of the update isn’t clear at the moment.

Source: SamMobile