… And, we’re up. After much work and a lot of tinkering with what we have, we’re proud to release our new MVP (Minimum Viable Product) site for 2012.
Coming up are all the videos for 2011, and much more content.
In the meantime, checkout the blog archives, our past speakers, or the sitemap.
If you spot any bugs or problems, pls comment on this post, or drop us an email 😉
A world-class line-up of international and African technologists will present at the Tech4Africa conference in October this year. The event provides South Africans with a rare opportunity to learn firsthand from technology evangelists about the role that the web plays in African business and development.
The two-day conference runs from 27 to 28 October 2011 at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg and will bring international experience and perspectives to the African continent, while at the same time showcasing what Africans are doing with mobile, web, digital media and other emerging technologies.
Registration for the event is open and early bird tickets are available until 15th of June. To register or for further information, visit Tech4Africa or contact us.
“2010 saw the launch of Tech4Africa and we were met with overwhelming support from both the tech and business communities and our foundation partners, First National Bank and Internet Solutions,” says Gareth Knight, MD of Tech4Africa. “This year we’re delivering the same high standard of content and looking forward to bringing technologists together to look at what’s current now, with an emphasis on social media and how it’s relevant to digital marketing, mobile convergence, the growing cloud and the applications of BigData. We’re also focusing on great African technologists that really are leading the way.”
Keynote speakers include Josh Spear, one of the youngest and most respected digital marketing strategists in the world, and Herman Chinery-Hesse, commonly known as ‘The Bill Gates of Africa’.
Spear is a trend spotter, blogger and brand strategist, sought out for his fresh perspective and no-holds-barred style of consulting on everything from design and gadgets to authenticity and word-of-mouth. His recent focus has been the power of the blogosphere, technology, and the impact of digital media on the world. In addition to his internationally recognised trend-spotting blog, he is a founding partner of Undercurrent, a digital think-tank focused on exploring new ways to reach young people without interrupting them. With Africa rapidly leapfrogging the web and PC experience with a mobile one, the insights into how people and brands interact digitally is crucial, and indeed sets the stage for the foreseeable future. Spear has appeared in publications including Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and has presented for such diverse clients as McDonald’s, NBC, Pepsi, Virgin, The American Advertising Federation and The Google Zeitgeist conference.
Chinery-Hesse is a renowned Ghanaian technology entrepreneur who co-founded the million-dollar software company SOFTtribe, and then went on to launch BSL, which provides the infrastructure for entrepreneurs across Africa to sell products and receive payment through their cell phones. Chinery-Hesse is passionate about the contribution that technology can make in unlocking prosperity and wealth across Africa, and will be presenting his thesis on this. He has won a number of awards and is also an accomplished speaker who has delivered talks at the Wharton Business School, Harvard Business School, Cambridge University, the University of Ghana, and the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania.
Spear and Chinery-Hesse are part of a line-up of African and international thought leaders from organisations like Amazon, HP, Johns Hopkins University, Mozilla, SwiftRiver, the African Institution of Technology, SimpleGeo, Motribe, Clearleft, Ultinet Systems and many more.
Knight adds, “With Tech4Africa our simple aim is to congregate the best practitioners in Africa and the world to provide inspiration, guidance, case studies, success stories and ultimately experience, so that Africans don’t need to travel the world to gain this understanding and exposure”.
Google is looking to hire a Policy Manager for South Africa to represent Google and its policies externally before policy-makers and the broader public policy environment.
Policy experience a must.
This position is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Find the full job description here.
Good news still coming from our great event! Emerging Media, the team behind Tech4Africa’s PR strategy and implementation, has just released amazing results obtained for the conference.
The Tech4Africa media campaign has been a huge success, becoming a PR and social media case in its own right.
Find more juicy bits of information in this fascinating infographic created by BrandsEye, the company that tracked Tech4Africa’s online mentions for Emerging Media. The PR guys had something to add too and they shared their experience in their post “Tech4Africa PR campaign sets up conference for longevity and sustainability”.
The successful PR and social media campaign developed for Tech4Africa was ground-breaking, as it had no reliance on traditional advertising but nevertheless managed to secure full attendance.
The high levels of online media coverage reached are due to the great job of our PR partners and the support we received from the press. But it was also possible because speakers, delegates and people interested in the event actively participated in online conversations and discussions before, during and after the conference. To all of them, thank you for helping to spread the word and making Tech4Africa the inspiring event it became!
Cognician, GetAGreatBoss and iSigned pack their bags for London
Seedcamp, the European micro seed fund that focuses on early stage startups has announced that it has selected three South African technology-startups to attend ‘Seedcamp Week’ in London from the 13th till the 17th of September.
South Africa has secured three of the twenty three available places at Seedcamp week from the more than 600 teams that have applied over the year. The Seedcamp finalists 2010 include a wide selection of teams from 16 different countries, active in more than 19 cities.
The South African startups were identified from the 11 startups who were selected to attend the mini Seedcamp week that was held in conjunction with the inaugural Tech4Africa conference, which brought both a prestigious and sought after line-up of international speakers from the world’s most respected web startups to South African shores.
The three chosen startups will now be facing tighter competition since they will be competing with a much stronger field of startups for a possible 50,000 Euro investment from Seedcamp along with the connection to next generation developers and entrepreneurs from a network of over 400 top-tier industry mentors.
“The South African startups we’ve chosen have unique and original products and offerings,” says Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp. The 3 selected startups include:
Cognician describes itself as the ‘original thinking guide’ – a software application that automates complex intellectual tasks by asking you a range of intelligent, thought-provoking questions.
GetAGreatBoss pride themselves on enabling great managers to showcase their management strength in order to attract talent and boost their own careers.
iSigned on the other hand, offers secure, permanent online storage, management and sharing for legal and other important documents. It’s the ideal tool for individuals and businesses that want to store wills, legal agreements, investment records and share them with other parties securely.
“We do believe that all three of these companies have the potential to go up against a group of international startups for their place in the sun,” she says.
Sohoni says that choosing from the field of the 11 startups was a difficult task, since Seedcamp was extremely impressed by the quality of ideas presented during the one-day workshop and that each company has the right kind of founder, displaying the perfect combination between hunger and ambition.
Overall Sohoni says Seedcamp would like this event to be the first of many and sees South Africa as a great entry-point into the African continent.
“Africa has some of the smartest minds in the world and there’s a ton of potential here,” she adds.
“It‘s a continent we would definitely like to remain involved in,” she concludes.
In his article “Why does being in Africa make you untrustworthy?“, Erik Hersman points out to the fact that Africans are generally suspects by default to the eyes of global corporations, which often put the continent off their radar.
Africa could be a continent of contrasts, but with lots of potentiality too. If only the world stopped making easy generalizations and looked closer to realize that.
One of the key factors for any business is to assess and be real about the context and the market in which operates. Thus, more accurate solutions can be provided to address specific needs, what improves the chance of success. If the context is problematic, that means there are needs to be fulfilled, and therefore that could be seen as an opportunity.
An example of this could be Hersman’s own enterprise, Ushahidi, a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008, and which now it has become a platform with global reach.
Ushahidi is a world-class technology service, but owes its roots to providing a solution to the very African need of transparency, which turns out to be a global issue.
The organization’s technology is open source, and it is often used by Internet writer Clay Shirky as an example of a successful crowdsourcing movement.
Other entrepreneurs and businesses are also working to provide services tied up to specific regional socio-cultural and economic facts, as were seen at Tech4Africa 2010. Services like PesaPal (a mobile payments company in Nairobi, Kenya) or mPedigree (allows consumers to verify with a free text message if their medicines are safe), are proving to be on the right track when addressing local needs via the most used and available technology in their target markets.
Many other startup services in Africa are choosing to use SMS as their trading platform, among other things, due to the scarce Internet connectivity and the broader use of the cell phone in many areas of the continent. And companies are focusing on that too, such is the case of Zain Nigeria, which is offering its customers access to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo via SMS.
Nevertheless, whether focused on local, regional or global needs, African technology startups and companies must build their products based on the highest standards, and for that it’s important to keep in touch with the world’s latest developments and practices, if the continent wants to get into the world’s radar and export its innovative products or play globally.
All in all, one of the ways to bootstrap Africa to the spotlight might be what the aforementioned African organizations are already doing; which is, as Erik Hersman put it in his article: “to come up with our own business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.”
Do you agree this could be a solution? Should Africans see the problems or the opportunities?
Photo courtesy of @whiteafrican via Flickr/Creative Commons