The editors at PCWorld decided to find out. They ventured to multiple spots in 13 different cities to test various carriers’ 3G and 4G wireless speeds.

The big winner in the 4G category: AT&T, with an average download speed of 9.12 Mbps, ahead of Verizon’s 7.35-Mbps average. If you’re a content creator — i.e., if you are constantly uploading Instagram photos — you might want to go with Verizon, who had the highest average 4G upload speed of 5.86 Mbps.

From indigenous startups and mid-sized firms founded by foreigners to new offices from multinational giants like Google and IBM, the software scene in the capital city of Accra is blossoming.

It’s no Silicon Valley, but companies are finding that solutions developed for the local context are resonating across borders. Driven by sluggish growth in established tech markets, venture capitalists from around the world have become frequent visitors to this West African nation.

Still, some local companies say it’s an uphill battle to persuade investors that a tech wave is swelling on a continent known more for coups than computers.

“Our biggest challenge is credibility,” said Blaise Bayuo, founder of RetailTower, a software service that helps online sellers get their products listed on price-comparison websites. “People don’t expect a software company to come from Africa.” The company hopes putting an office in San Francisco can help close this gap.

RetailTower came about after founders ran across a discussion forum where a retailer requested help getting his wares to show up on Google‘s shopping listings. They decided to solve his problem and realized the solution could be scaled up.

Now RetailTower has 10,000 sellers (mostly outside Ghana) and is concentrating on growing that number. It hopes to eventually charge for premium membership while keeping most of its services free.

Robert Lamptey, co-founder of mobile messaging service Saya, said you can’t blame outsiders for failing to see Africa’s tech potential. It has lagged the developed world, though he believes media coverage has unfairly exaggerated the continent’s negatives.

Saya was built to answer a Ghanaian problem. Smartphone penetration here is low, and people use SMS (text messaging) to chat with each other on their mobile phones.

Saya’s interface organizes messages into threads and sends them over the phone’s less-expensive Internet connection. By some estimates it costs 1,000 times less to send a Saya chat message than a text, and it works on practically any phone.

Only about 40 days after its official launch, the app boasts 20,000 downloads, also mostly outside Ghana. There’s been a surge in Egypt, India, Indonesia and even strife-ridden Syria, possibly thanks to its “street-chat” function that allows users to converse with others nearby.

“Building an application to solve our problem ended up solving a problem for a lot of people,” Mr. Lamptey said.

Like RetailTower, Saya is building its user base before trying to collect sales. It’s testing ads that use demographic and locational data, hoping eventually to help companies target consumers who don’t mind receiving useful information, he said.

The small firm has momentum, having presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the mobile phone industry’s largest global conference.

ClaimSync, a new health-care IT company, sees itself going the opposite route, focusing on the domestic market before expanding into other countries. Its software organizes patient information for hospitals and clinics, helping them better track diagnoses and submit insurance claims more efficiently.

With 200 hospitals in Accra, CEO and co-founder Seth Akumani doesn’t foresee any problem earning revenue once the software breaks into the right channels. The problem will be getting hospitals to move away from the paper-based systems they’re used to, which would require investment in equipment and training. “I think the biggest issue is change,” Mr. Akumani said.

All three companies are in the incubator affiliated with the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, or MEST, a pioneering institute tucked away in Accra’s East Legon area. It’s funded by the charitable arm of Meltwater, a software firm that started in Norway but now is based out of San Francisco.

The two-year program takes a holistic approach to shaping college graduates into software entrepreneurs. No programming experience is required, and there’s instruction at all stages, from the first keystrokes of code to the last pitches for funding.

Michael Szymanksi was impressed when he heard Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyseggen speak about the idea. While studying for an MBA at Oxford University, he became a mentor for an annual competition in which the top student business idea gets funded by the Meltwater Foundation.

After graduation he was offered a full-time mentor position at the incubator. Mr. Szymanski is bullish on the tech industry in Ghana and believes celebrating homegrown heroes will help Ghana develop as an industry hub. Ideally he’d like to see MEST grads rivaling soccer stars as role models.

A recent trip to London showed that “hard-core” venture capital investors are taking a serious look at setting up offices Accra, he said.

“The strongest message that I was hearing from these investors was Africa is a continent of opportunity, and not opportunity just in the traditional areas of extraction. It’s a continent that has opportunity in the area of ideas, of building something, of building solutions that are applicable globally, and that gets me excited,” he told Global Atlanta.

Mark Davies makes the same argument, that Africa should play up its success stories to shed negative perceptions.

Though he hails from the U.K., Mr. Davies has seen Ghana’s tech industry from the inside. After launching successful tech startups in Europe and the U.S., he came to Africa in 2000 looking to “give back.” He heard surprisingly innovative discussions and was advised – by the philanthropic community, no less – that a new company would have more impact than another charity.

He helped found Busy Internet, which started as an incubator but morphed into the country’s largest Internet-service provider. Busy’s offices are just across Ring Road from Esoko, where Mr. Davies is now CEO.

Despite being the instigator of this rapidly escalating legal battle, for Yahoo, this suit could not come at a more inopportune time. Expected to announce deep cuts to its payroll this week, the company is already in a desperate position as it is. After watching helplessly as a seemingly promising 2010 deal with Facebook effectively unraveled, Yahoo has since been faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of rediscovering and clearly defining its once-ubiquitous identity. The last thing Yahoo needs is something like this to accelerate the evaporation of its swiftly diminishing assets.

For Facebook, who, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Yahoo, is preparing for a much anticipated initial public offering in the weeks ahead, the suit is clearly a retaliatory measure. When the social networking site filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, it requested, among other things, that the initial suit filed by Yahoo be dropped.

“While we are asserting patent claims of our own, we do so in response to Yahoo’s short-sighted decision to attack one of its partners and prioritize litigation over innovation,” Facebook attorney Ted Ullyot said in a statement made Tuesday.

Responding to Facebook’s assertions, Yahoo released a statement of its own and, after discounting the counterclaim as “without merit and nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the weakness of its defense [against Yahoo’s claim],” reasserted the validity of its own suit against the popular social site.

“As we have made clear from the outset, the unauthorized use of our patented technology is unacceptable and must be resolved appropriately,” Yahoo declared. “Other leading companies license these technologies, and Facebook must do the same or change the way it operates.”

Unsurprisingly, Yahoo’s more aggressive stance has earned it the unenviable label of “patent troll” among many in the tech world. Already suffering from an identity crisis and a severe relevance deficiency, Yahoo cannot afford to be lumped in with companies like Intellectual Ventures and other non-innovative, non-producing companies that make their millions on royalties and legal settlements if it truly wishes to regain notoriety.

If I was calling the shots up in Sunnyvale, I would give careful thought to my next move against a (projected) $100 billion company.

“Mergers and acquisitions will become more prominent,” said Ben Ramirez, an analyst at Frost and Sullivan. “Predators will be those with high capital expenditures and high market share and the prey will be those that have little market share and weak product diversification.”

Dell Inc recently purchased network and data security products maker SonicWall. Juniper Networks bought privately held Mykonos Software for $80 million in February, and last year Intel completed its $7.7 billion purchase of McAfee.

Fortinet, a provider of network security appliances, security software maker F5 Networks Inc, and data security company Imperva Inc are some of the companies that sources said are potential targets.

“An interesting play might be if HP would pick up a player like Fortinet,” said Lawrence Pingree, a network security analyst at research firm Gartner.

Representatives for Hewlett Packard declined comment. Fortinet and F5 Networks were not immediately available for comment, and Imperva declined comment.

HELPROOM ANSWER Microsoft’s forums reveal that plenty of Windows Live Mail users are finding the same problem, Philip. You’ve already found an effective workaround, but can reduce the number of steps required by clicking on the small down arrow next to the Forward button and choosing ‘Forward as attachment’, rather than first having to save the message.

The drawback with this method is that you won’t be able to edit the original message or remove its sender and recipient information before forwarding.

We recommend you instead try the free Mozilla Thunderbird email client to run your Windows Live Mail account .

1. Pull, Don’t Push

One of the first lessons you will learn very quickly when engaging in social media is that traditional forms of marketing don’t work as well. Don’t come out of the gate pushing your products or services. New tools require new rules.

For example, don’t respond to new Twitter followers with a “Thanks for following. Visit my Web site for a free…[insert promotional message].” That’s a dead giveaway that the offender is new to social media and has yet to understand that it’s a “pull” medium, not “push.”

2. Win the Right to be Heard

Social media engagement is a conversation, and participation is the currency required. Your value as a participant is judged in keeping with the value you provide the community as a whole. Become a “glory hog” and you’ll garner very little attention. Share freely, and you will become a respected member.

3. Content Is Still King

Nothing beats well-written, informative and entertaining content in all its variant forms: blog posts, tweets, status updates, video, podcasts, images, webinars or whitepapers. Its benefits are numerous:

• Improved search engine placement. Google loves frequently updated content;
• Thought leadership. Content helps to position you as a knowledgeable expert;
• More effective customer engagement. Content targeted to the needs of your customers will keep them coming back;
• Becomes a sharable asset. Content created with some type of social media layer — social bookmarks, Facebook Like, “Tweet This” — can be shared by Fans and followers. In fact, no content should be created that does not have social sharing capabilities associated with it.

4. Authenticity and Transparency are Social Networking Cornerstones

Those words may seem trite, but I believe they remain the cornerstones of this new-media marketing paradigm. Be real. Be open. Be honest. Admit mistakes when you make them.

5. You Don’t Have to be on Every Social Network

It’s impossible to maintain an active presence on every social network and you don’t have to. You should be where your customers are, however.

6. Give and You Shall Receive

Have an attitude of helpfulness in your social network activities. Doing so will go a long way toward establishing a credible name for yourself in social media circles.

“Lose control of your marketing,” is how the author David Meerman Scott puts it. His philosophy is to give ideas and information away freely with no strings attached. Be willing to give up control of the marketing message and it will benefit you in the long run.

7. It’s Just One Channel

The rules of marketing still apply to one extent or the other. Social media is another channel to build your brand and market your message. It’s not a panacea nor should it be considered a replacement for every other form of advertising and marketing.

One thing I have learned is that there is room for integration. Email and search are still where most marketers spend top dollar, and for good reason. They both perform very well. Social media should be one part of a multi-channel retail marketing strategy.

8. Social Media Is a Mindset

You have to incorporate social media DNA into your thinking. Don’t just change your toolset (tactics), change your mindset (strategy). It does little good to know “how” to do something without, at the same time, understanding “why” to do it, as well.

9. Be Yourself

I recommend using your photo as your avatar and your name as your handle. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have an identity tied to your brand. It’s just that in social media, people would rather relate to and build trust with other people than brands.

Being yourself also means not surreptitiously pretending to be someone you are not. Remember commandment 4 about authenticity and transparency being chief cornerstones.

10. Experiment

Though it does comes with a set of largely unwritten rules, social media does not have an set of philosophical or practical codes. There is still plenty of room for experimentation. In fact, that’s the only way the medium will ever grow.

The Harmonie product will let users monitor IBM Connections notifications and perform IBM Connections actions from a sidebar in Outlook, saving them from having to toggle between the email application and the interface of the IBM software, the company plans to announce on Tuesday.

Enterprise social software like IBM Connections provides Facebook-like and Twitter-like features and functionality but is designed for workplace use. Through features like employee profiles, status updates, activity streams, microblogging and document sharing, enterprise social software is designed to improve collaboration and communication among employees.

Letting users manage their enterprise social software accounts from within their email applications generally leads to a higher usage of enterprise social software, said David Lavenda, Harmonie’s vice president of marketing and product strategy.

“Getting business users to adopt enterprise social platforms is somewhat challenging because people have to learn a new interface and check a new collaboration application,” he said. “With Harmonie, we want to bring collaboration capabilities into a single place to make them easier for people to use.”

The Harmonie product for IBM Connections will also aggregate within the Outlook sidebar, Microsoft SharePoint documents and Microsoft Lync functionality like IM and video conferencing. Through an OEM agreement, IBM will be in charge of selling the Harmonie product for IBM Connections to its customers.

Harmonie is also updating the free version of its product for SharePoint and Outlook, called Harmonie for SharePoint — Outlook Edition. Enhancements include the ability to “follow” real-time notifications of changes to documents, as well as new analytics features, including automated suggestions of colleagues to connect with.

Harmonie also makes a version of this product for users of the Lotus Notes email client. Harmonie has sold about 500,000 licenses of the Harmonie for SharePoint products for Outlook and Notes. Free trial versions of the products have also been downloaded about 500,000 times.

Founded in 1993, Harmonie had revenue growth of 259 percent in 2011, when it also became a Gold ISV partner in the Microsoft Partner Network and added about 145 new enterprise customers to its roster, according to Lavenda.

Its customers include Mercedes Benz, Raytheon, Toshiba and Amway.

The firm has signed a £1.3 million deal with Social and Market Strategic Research (SMSR) to conduct its telephone surveys, reported the Hull Daily Mail.

It will use staff in its contact centres to call the vast number of people in order to carry out surveys and win new clients.

With such a high volume of calls to complete, KC may find that the cheapest and most efficient way to tackle the task is to run voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions, providing workers with a reliable and cost-effective telephony set-up.

Martyn Davies, telecom consultant at Weird Crater, recently said the benefits of VoIP are wide-ranging, making it the ideal business investment.

Darren Hornby, project director at SMSR, said the time is right for a specialist contractor to deal with the huge telemarketing campaign it wishes to conduct.