Tag: Experts

Calling all tech students: Win a scholarship ticket for Tech4Africa

Tech4Africa, in line with its DNA; engage, inspire, enable and innovate, have provided 20 Scholarship tickets for students to attend the Tech4Africa 2011 event. This opportunity will provide students with a rare opportunity to learn firsthand from technology evangelists about the role that the web plays in African business and development.

Should you be a student in the IT, web, tech or digital space and wish to apply for one of these complimentary tickets, please email your name and contact number along with a 200 word motivation outlining why you think you should be awarded a scholarship ticket to scholarships@t4a.feedmybeta.com.

Please note that the scholarships consist of a conference ticket only which entitles entry to the conference and exhibition – successful applicants will be responsible for their own transport, travel and accommodation (if applicable). Closing dates for motivation submission is 16 October. For further information on the event, speakers or the schedule, visit the Tech4Africa website.

Tech4Africa is a two-day conference running 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.

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 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, Motribe, Clearleft, Ultinet Systems and many more.

5 reasons why Tech4Africa 2011 is the technology event of the year

As we start the second half of 2011, the technology landscape is changing at such a pace that the need to be current and timely is greater than ever.  It’s clear that mobile reach will be far greater than the PC, and that apps will be the deciding factor for the market winning device or platform.

It’s not quite the hysteria of 1999, but we are starting to reach a tipping point where most of the worlds population that could be online, are.  Perhaps more importantly, the benefit of this connectedness is felt even more in Africa where people who did not have a voice, now do.  With that as the foundational plumbing, the usefulness and immediacy of mobile will drive more and more people to consume services, utilise data, and engage socially, which then drives demand for cloud based services accessible anywhere and on any device.

Building on the success of Tech4Africa 2010, we’re back in October 2011, and even better! Our themes for this year are Mobile, Social and Cloud, and through listening to great feedback from the 2010 event, our schedule has changed somewhat to focus on fewer talks with deeper content, and expanded to include relevant events for the African tech industry. These are the highlights that make Tech4Africa 2011 the technology event of the year:

1 – Featuring Josh Spear and Herman Chinery-Hesse as keynote speakers, plus 8 more great international speakers.

2 – African speakers who are experts in their fields will share their experiences about developing tech businesses in Africa.

3 – The Trade Show runs through the duration of the conference, and is an ideal opportunity for African technology businesses to showcase their products and/or services in an environment of buyers, decision makers, journalists, tweeters, bloggers and potential recruits.

4 – Ignite is a startup competition, aimed at giving exposure to the hottest new startups, while introducing them to prospective investors, customers and the media.

5 – Presented to a single winner, the Innovation Award encourages innovation for solving uniquely African problems, whilst also encouraging global thinking.  The Award recognises that innovation can be entrepreneurial, as well as intrapreneurial, and so is open to anyone or any company.

It’s through these initiatives and more in the coming years, that we’re delivering on our objectives of Engage, Inspire, Enable, and Innovate. We hope that you can join us at the technology event of the year, running for two full days on the 27th & 28th October, at The Forum, in Bryanston, Johannesburg. To avoid disappointment, book your ticket now.

We’d love to follow you on Twitter too!  We’re @t4a

Beyond growth pains

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1

Beyond growth pains: A Q & A session with some of the global movers of Web 2.0

The social media we have come to know and love has very few prominent players. For growth in that market and developing your platform to giant proportions – with users other than close relatives and distant cousins. Who, better than the whizzes themselves to tell us how?

I sat in on a Q & A session with panelists from Twitter, Yahoo!, Mozilla Foundation and Simplegeo. Boy won’t you be glad I did because below are some of the things they covered.

Q: “What has been your hardest challenge, in your career, and how did you overcome it?”

A: (Joe Stump – Simplegeo) “Finding people I can bounce ideas off of, who have similar challenges at the same level in their growth“

A: (John Resig – Clear Left) “Understanding that the startup life wasn’t for me. It became most rewarding with a community.”

Q: “Is moving away from a small company and going corporate, the death of creativity?”

A: (Dustin Diaz – Twitter) “Twitter is always flowing with ideas. We all have different ideas and the constant challenge is to ways to implement the thinking of different people.”

Aside: Joe Stump had something relevant to say, which was unrelated to the question but makes sense to put here. “My number one rule is to hire people on the assumption that they great and potentially smarter than me.”

Q: “Are we creating a digital divide through building products that highly sophisticated and require more and more bandwidth?”

A: (John Resig – Clear Left) “There is a mobile digital divide that I’m realizing, most things now being developed android phones and the iPhone.”
The panelists earlier noted that the computer as we now use it is moving away from the need of an Operating System. The panelists assert that they spend less time using some of the functionality they once needed Operating Systems for. More people with team members that work remotely use Google Docs and other web based equivalents.

Some questions also came from delegates and this one in particular by Toby Shapshak I found really worth sharing.

Q: “With the browser becoming bigger and essentially what the internet is becoming, how do you fit that into mobile phones for use on cellphone screens?”

A: (Jonathan Snook – Yahoo!) “Get to the core of what you are trying to build and deliver that to your user. Essentially, products developed for the web have to be delivered differently for mobile phones.”

The session was quite eye-opening considering that while developing a product you also have to think of the business element related to the product.

Mongezi Mtati
http://www.mongezimtati.co.za/
@Mongezi

7 reasons why you should attend Tech4Africa

Whether you’re an African business person wanting to understand how the Web 2.0 is relevant to the enterprise, an entrepreneur interested in learning more about venture funding or a technologist wanting to learn from the best technical people around, here is how you can benefit from attending Tech4Africa on August 12 and 13, 2010:

#1 – Get global perspective for the African context

Tech4Africa is the first Web, mobile and emerging technology conference of it’s kind in Africa. It will bring together internationally respected speakers and practitioners who are building the Web and technology as we know it, with leading Africans who are themselves paving the way forward.
Speakers will delve into topics like emerging technologies; Web 2.0; mobile, wireless and cloud computing; entrepreneurship; search and marketing.

#2 – Listen to keynote speakers Clay Shirky and Leila Chirayath Janah

Clay Shirky is an experienced speaker on topics related to the Web, social media and the Internet. Shirky has spoken at events such as TED Global, SXSW, the Web 2.0 expo in New York and San Francisco, SES San Jose, the Adobe Learning Summit, New York Tech Meetup and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Leila Chirayath Janah is the founder and CEO of Samasource, a social business that connects over 800 women, youth, and refugees living in poverty to digital work. Ms. Janah is a frequent speaker on entrepreneurship, technology, and international development at institutions including MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. Her work has been profiled by CBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The New Scientist, and in 2010, she was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Women in Technology.

#3 – Listen to globally respected subject matter experts

Top international technologists at the conference will be, among others, Dustin Diaz, a user interface engineer at Twitter and author of JavaScript Design Patterns; Joe Stump, the former lead architect of social news Web site Digg and co-founder of SimpleGeo; John Resig, creator of the popular Javascript library jQuery, and a Javascript tool developer for Mozilla; and Jonathan Snook, a web designer and developer at Yahoo!.

#4 – Listen to African speakers that are leading the way

African technologists such as Steve Vosloo, the 21st century learning fellow for the Shuttleworth Foundation; Barbara Mallinson, founder of educational collaboration platform Obami; Agosta Liko, founder of mobile payment service PesaPal; Erik Hersman, the co-founder of open source crisis information site Ushahidi; Andy Hadfield, an expert in the design of web strategies and online communities; and Nii Simmonds, speaker, consultant, and sustainable evangelist on African entrepreneurship, sustainable technology, and African innovation.

These are just a few of the outstanding African speakers who are going to be present at the conference. Check out our website to see all of them.

#5 – Go to workshops where you can dive into detail with industry leaders

Learn from the best at our workshops on August 10 and 11, 2010. Sessions include “A masterclass in Usability and Accessibility”; “A deep dive into Google Analytics and Adwords”; “A Masterclass in Architecting applications and Advanced Javascript” and “Successful digital projects”.

#6 – Technology networking on steroids

Learn, discuss and share experiences and thoughts with the African technology community during the conference and at the cocktail party. Tech4Africa will be a great place to broaden your knowledge and business network. Checkout the companies that have already bought tickets for the conference.

#7 – Be inspired

Our simple goal is that delegates walk away both informed and inspired. Placing greatest emphasis on learning, interaction, engagement and discussion, we want the conference to be a place for new ideas and to encourage people to make and change things.

Talking business at Tech4Africa

Building a tech business based in Africa for the overseas market is not as easy as it may seem, but it can be and is being done.

The more pertinent question though is: is it being done correctly? All too often we hear of new ventures, which have a fantastic concept & idea starting up, only to fail a few months down the line. The main reason being… “No business skills”. Business skills contribute to a huge portion of your businesses success, and it needs to be done correctly from the very beginning.

At Tech4Africa we will be hosting some of the top business leaders in the South African startup space, who will be sharing the stage in 2 panels talking about how to ensure your startup is managed perfectly from the outset.

In the first panel, entitled “Are we fundable”, the panelists will be looking at how you need to ensure that you are being realistic about the product you are building and making sure that out there, there actually is someone wanting to invest in you and your idea. Included in the panel are Andrea Böhmert, who serves on numerous management boards of IT companies in the Western Cape. Also joining Andrea, is Director of DNA Economics, a specialist economics consultancy, Gareth Ochse. The Industrial Development Corporation’s (IDC) Peter Van Der Zee is also seated on the panel. Having invested over R220m in 18 early stage companies in South Africa, Peter will bring a wealth of business knowledge to the table. TED Fellow and African Blogger, Nii Simmonds, will also share his views from an African perspective. Nii, who is an accomplished speaker, also serves on a number boards of startups around Africa. Finally, joining the panel is Invenfin CEO & innovation capitalist Brett Commaille. Brett comes from a fascinating background in investing in new companies, and is sure to share his wealth of knowledge with the rest of the  panel.

Later in the day, our second business focused panel, entitled “Building for the global market. Lessons and learnings from the coalface” will share insights & experience from entrepreneurs who have built startups from the ground in Africa, for the overseas market.
Sheraan Amod from the popular Personera, a company who produces personalised calenders from your pictures on Facebook, will give us his thoughts on how his company has quickly gained international success. Malcolm Hall from Cape Town Software development house, Open Box Software, will lend his expertise and experience of managing various IT consultancy teams around the world. Last but certainly not least the panel is completed with Leila Janah, the Founder and CEO of Samasource, a social business that connects over 800 women, youth, and refugees living in poverty to digital work. Leila has done some amazing work with Samasource, and will share her wealth of knowledge with the delegates at Tech4Africa

These are just some of the successful entrepreneurs who will be joining us at Tech4Africa. Be sure to register for your seat as places are running out fast. Our Early Bird tickets have all been already snapped up, and workshop early bird tickets are nearly sold out too. Miss it, and you miss out!

Tech4Africa lighting the spark of the African Web

While the Web continues to grow apace, new business models disrupt traditional ones, social applications dominate our thinking, investment funds innovation. Africa however remains largely untapped, apart and unspoken for. That doesn’t mean Africa is without talent, opportunity, or influence on the global web.

That is why Tech4Africa comes along to become the first Web, mobile and emerging technology conference of its kind in South Africa, bringing global perspective to the African context. The conference will be taking place in Johannesburg at The Forum on August 12-13, 2010.

Tech4Africa focuses on the role mobile, emerging and Web technologies have to play in Africa. Speakers will delve into the funding landscape in Africa and what cloud computing, Web 2.0, the mobile Internet, and other emerging technologies mean for businesses and society.

The event will bring together internationally respected speakers and practitioners who are building the web and technology as we know it, with leading Africans who are themselves paving the way forward.

The keynote speaker, Clay Shirky, is an experienced speaker on topics related to the Web, social media and the Internet. Shirky has spoken at events such as TED Global, SXSW, the Web 2.0 expo in New York and San Francisco, SES San Jose, the Adobe Learning Summit, New York Tech Meetup and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Other top technologists at the conference include Dustin Diaz, Joe Stump, and John Resig, among other top-notch technologists and entrepreneurs. Check out the amazing line up of speakers here; there are more to follow.

As such, the conference promises to be a pioneering and intimate affair, congregating digital elite for the first time in Africa.
The focus is on interaction, discussion and sharing with attendees the future of the Web and emerging technology in Africa, and the role Africans can and are playing globally.

Hope to see you there!