AFEX rising

Wednesday, 04 May 2022

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The Nigerian tech industry has been going through very tumultuous times as it came face to face with reconciling the practices of powerful people in the industry. But this hasn't deterred the stellar movement that made Lagos one of the thriving tech hubs in Africa.

AFEX is flying the flag high in the pages of the Financial Times as it appears on a list of Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies – Agriculture and Commodities category for 2022 list.

Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.

Summary of the news

AFEX is part of the Financial Times’ ranking of Africa’s fastest-growing companies
Amazon's Labour Union has lost its bid to represent its workers at a second New York warehouse
Apple store in Maryland has become the third to launch a union drive
Facebook-owner Meta has granted access to an AI large language model

AFEX tops Financial Times’ ranking of Africa’s fastest-growing companies

AFEX, Nigeria’s commodity market player and a private sector commodities exchange, has been ranked number one in the Financial Times (FT) rating of Africa’s Fastest-Growing Companies – Agriculture & Commodities category for 2022.

Technext reports that the listing of Africa’s Fastest-Growing Companies compiled by the Financial Times features advanced, modern, and thriving businesses fueling the global economy in this 21st century.

The company topped the list by exhibiting its sales growth. It has launched the first Asset-Backed Commercial Paper listed on an African Commodities Exchange. It has also added over 350,000 digital farmers to its WorkBench platform.

Despite thousands of applicants, only 75 companies made the cut. In collaboration with Statista, Financial Times ranks these 75 companies with the fastest revenue growth in Africa between 2017 and 2020. And, AFEX emerged first in the list of Nigeria’s fastest-growing firms and third place overall among Africa’s fastest-growing companies.

Amazon Labour Union loses bid to represent workers at second New York warehouse

Amazon workers voted against union representation at a warehouse in Staten Island, according to a Monday tally, a decisive loss that come a month after a neighbouring facility voted to organize.

CNET reports that Workers rejected the Amazon Labor Union, which sought to represent them, with 380 yes votes and 618 no votes. The number of remaining challenged ballots wouldn't change the outcome if counted, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

"The organizing will continue at this facility and beyond," the ALU said in a tweet that acknowledged the defeat. "The fight has just begun."

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement the company is glad the workers' voices were heard. "We look forward to continuing to work directly together as we strive to make every day better for our employees," Nantel said.

Apple store in Maryland becomes third to launch union drive

Retail employees at the Towson Town Center store in Maryland have announced their intention to form a union, becoming the third Apple Store to do so, Apple Insider reports. The Towson Town Center store near Baltimore follows Apple Stores in New York, and also Atlanta, in their aim to unionize.

According to The Washington Post on Tuesday, organizers within the store say that they have worked on getting support for almost a year. They've worked in coordination with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, three sources told the publication.

The sources also say that having 65% of employees signed up to their campaign, they have a "supermajority," that Apple will not be able to overcome.

No further details are available yet, but the organizers in the two previous stores have been pressing for an increase in the current starting pay of $20 per hour. Workers at the Cumberland Mall store in Atlanta, are asking for an increase to $28 per hour.

Facebook-owner, Meta, opens access to AI large language model

Facebook-owner Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) is opening up access to a large language model for artificial intelligence research, the social media company said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

Meta said its model was the first 175-billion-parameter language model to be made available to the broader AI research community.

"Large language models" are natural language processing systems which are trained on massive volumes of text, and are capable of answering reading comprehension questions or generating new text.

In a blog post, Meta said the release of its "Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B)" model would improve researchers' abilities to understand how large language models work.

Meta said restrictions on access to such models had been "hindering progress on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues such as bias and toxicity."