Startup Africa

Netweb July The netweb event in july will feature speaker Howard Mann, on Brick Yard your business based on a book by the same name. In his book he notes that uniqueness accounts for only, if not less than, 15% of what makes your company. All businesses are kept alive and thrive if the 85% is in place and done effectively. That 85% is: • Returning calls on time. • Paying suppliers and employees when you should. • Offering your product and service as best you can. • Over delivering on expectations. Fortunately,... more

The Governments of Finland and South Africa have been working together in the fields of Science, Technology and Innovation, as part of that mandate SAFIPA is planning a knowledge exchange visit for South African entrepreneurs and other relevant people. Having attended several talks and met the previous finish minister that was based here, i can say the trip should be very useful. Finland has a unique history, in 1990-1992, the country was in a deep recession which they were struggling to get out... more

These are session notes from Gareth’s session at Geek Retreat. Image credit to The Scott, view the full image gallery Embrace your fears. They are only fears. It’s the only way to start and make progress. Jump off the cliff. There’s never a “right” time to get started, so just do it and work things out as you go. Don’t let other people impose their fears into your thinking, it will only muddle you further. Cashflow is King, always, without exception. You should always... more

This weekend will be the first South African Geek Retreat, and you can follow the events from any of the links below. Search Twitter for Hashtag #GeekRetreat Or View it on Scribble Live Or On Twubs Share and Enjoy:  Read More →

I am currently attending the SAFIPA conference, and i have found it incredibly useful. The sessions yesterday on ICT in education was interesting. The number of projects that are on going here in South Africa has me very excited, and my prediction is in 10-15 years time South Africa will be transformed into a knowledge economy. A project that i found out about here is Fundman, which is supported by SEDA (Small Enterprise development agency). What is Fundman? There are tons of Grants, Venture Capital... more

Jiqa, a startup out of South Africa which bills itself as “The real time web”, have just launched their product to the public. I have been keeping an eye on the project for a while and happy to see the first public release. Please note this is a very early beta release. What is Jiqa? Jiqa basically flips the script on traditional ranking of pages (i.e Google’s), Jiqa is a browser that records key metrics as you surf the web and then sends that to a central server, a ranking is... more

eCV mobile, is a project that has quietly been launched by eNamisa MDM (Pty) Ltd who specialize in online recruitment technologies. eCV lets you apply for jobs via SMS as well as receive alerts of jobs via SMS. The service has huge potential here in South Africa, and possibly across Africa. How does it work? Well, you simply register on the website giving your details such as email address,name, mobile number and in what industry and city you are looking for a job. Once you have registered and verified... more

The 2009 Geek retreat A while back, Heather Ford and Justin Spratt were having a chat about IS Labs — an initiative by Internet Solutions that challenges people to submit ideas to make the internet better in South Africa. We started talking about different ways to support innovation in the space, and thought that it might be interesting to replicate the IS Labs platform in a face-to-face event where we got together some of the most creative Internet minds together to talk about just that. And... more

Larry Cheng has posted on his blog a huge list of blogs by VC’s, further he has ranked them by the number of Google reader subscriptions (Read the full list with descriptions). To monitor this many blogs would take a lot of time, some of them i am familiar with such as Fred Wilsons and Guy Kawasaki. Filtering the information will also be to time consuming so i decided to hand that task over to Postrank. Out of 115, 102 feeds imported correctly. Post rank lets you filter blog posts by popularity,... more

Naijaborn a social networking startup for Nigerians from Francis Omokhape Oghuma and Mambe Nanje Churchill (*updated) has just launched the site publicly. I have been keeping a tab on the site ever since i found out about it and i am glad they have finally launched. I know what you are thinking, not ANOTHER social network. However i think naijaborn is different for a few reasons: They have not used any external code or whitebox social networks. Why do i think this is important? Well its very easy... more