When asked to explain just how important North Sea oil and gas remains, it doesn’t take Malcolm Webb, chief executive of Oil & Gas UK, very long to respond with what I think you will agree is a pretty conclusive response. “Today the UK is reliant on oil and gas for approximately 73 percent of its primary energy supply.”

According to a recent study by security firm McAfee and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIC), The Economic Impact of Cyber Crime and Cyber Espionage the USA, the world's largest economy, loses about £65bn from cybercrimes every year including loss of key business data and intellectual property. The report also states that cybercrime costs the global economy $500bn annually and is a main contributor for dragging down economic growth across the world.

From an investment perspective, are there particular global trends, the high level of demand for gold in the Middle East and Asia at present for example, that give you encouragement for future growth in Africa’s mining sector?
The thing about gold that you have to remember is that there is actually very little physical gold around the world today. That is why in India, for example, gold is currently trading for around $1,600 an ounce.

A survey conducted by market research firm IDC shows that 1.004 billion devices were delivered to customers during the course of the year, a 38.4 percent increase on 2012’s results. This means that smartphones made up considerably more than half of the 1.8 billion phones sold in total.

One of my clients was recently honored as the “Supplier of the Year” by one of their major customers, a relationship that was barely four years old. In discussing this achievement, a senior executive from the supplier organization cited famed artist Andy Warhol’s observation that “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes”. This executive’s comments were insightful along several dimensions:

Of all the economies in Africa that are waking up to the resources they are blessed with, Tanzania stands out for several reasons. Not least among these must be its stability. Though it has never been a rich country, since independence in 1962 it has hardly ever been in the news. Turbulent decades have attracted the wrong type of attention to every one of Tanzania’s neighbours: cross-border conflict, inter-ethnic tension and population displacement have too frequently characterised the post colonial era.

The London-based oil exploration group, which focuses on Africa, doubled its estimate of its discovery in Kenya's South Lokichar basin, currently around 600 million barrels, following two successful well results. During the coming two years the company says it plans further exploration, predicting that the region could yield more than a billion barrels.