African Tech Roundup

This is our 100th episode! To everyone who's ever listened in to the show, interacted with us via social media, recommended the podcast to other people, made an audio contribution, emailed a comment or question, been featured as a guest, attended one of our live events, tuned in to a live stream on Facebook, or even come on board as a podcast/event sponsor, thank you. We all did this. The love is real, and we salute you!

To celebrate this milestone, we're publishing live audio taped at the African Tech Round-up LIVE: State of the Startup event we hosted a couple of weeks ago. At the gathering, Andile Masuku facilitated a lively panel discussion featuring special guests, Indresen Chetty (Managing Director: TRACE Mobile), Dominique Collett (Senior Investment Executive: RMI & Alpha Code), Ben White (Founder & CEO: VC4Africa) and Daniel Rubenstein (Co-founder: My Treasury).

Happy listening and here's to the next hundred episodes!

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

It's been barely a week since we hosted the African Tech Round-up LIVE: State of the Startup event in Johannesburg, and believe it or not, next week will mark the 100th podcast we'll have published in consecutive weeks.

We've done our best to deliver the biggest digital, tech and innovation headlines from Africa and beyond while offering candid analysis and commentary, as well as useful insights gleaned from some of the Africa's leading entrepreneurs, executives, investors and technical talent.

The conversation we're sharing on this week's show brings things full-circle in that the show's host, Andile Masuku, finally got to meet the Texas-based Nigerian, Bola Lawal, in person at our recent event-- after they interacted online, brought together by the podcast. It's humbling to realise how this little podcast has grown into a lively international community of people-- Africans and otherwise, who are actively involved and/or care deeply about the continent's growing tech ecosystem.

Bola is one of the co-founders of ScholarX, an app designed to help African students access scholarships abroad. In this chat, he talks about how ScholarX is committed to helping Africans access the very best education possible through scholarships, and he gives his take on the emergence of MOOC's and eLearning in general.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

The Tech Minute 17-03-2017 by African Tech Roundup

Mobile telcos on the continent are certainly having a rough time of it on the continent. In the same week that MTN South Africa CEO, Mteto Nyati, announced his resignation, a consortium of banks including Guaranty Trust Bank, Access Bank and Zenith Bank reportedly assumed control of Etisalat Nigeria over an outstanding $1.72 billion loan.

Media reports suggesting that Etisalat Nigeria failed to meet its debt servicing obligations since 2016 have led to speculation over what might have contributed to this crisis-- could it be unsound management decisions or simply an unfortunate consequence of operating in Nigeria's recessionary environment?

In this week's African Tech Round-up, Simon Dingle joins Andile on the show to comment on the week's biggest headlines and to discuss the import (or lack thereof) of Bitcoin reaching price parity with gold, as well as to share insights on the exciting potential of blockchain technology to revolutionise monetary regimes on the continent.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

In this Tech Minute, Brian Lupiya shares the latest on Etisalat Nigeria's $1.72 billion credit dispute with a consortium of banks including Guaranty Trust Bank, Access Bank and Zenith Bank, and reveals which international VOD subcription service has set its sights on seven African countries.

Music credit: Muzikid

Oops... Amazon is still recovering from their embarrassing human error that caused a massive outage of their Simple Storage Service, leading to significant portions of the web to go down for several hours.

For more on that story and one other major news item from the past week, listen in to this Tech Minute with Brian Lupiya.

Music credit: Muzikid

Pule Taukobong is a Founding Partner at CRE Venture Capital (CRE VC), a seed-focussed fund which invests in technology-enabled startup companies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Their impressive portfolio includes stakes in startups like Andela, Esaja, Angani, Flutterwave and more recently, Yoco.

Pule is responsible for the group's deal flow and performs industry and financial due diligence on both incoming business plans and targeted companies, while also sitting on several startup advisory boards.

In this conversation, Pule unpacks his approach to identifying sound prospects and discusses what it takes to groom promising startup founders for success.

Whatever you think of Nokia's re-introduction of the legendary 3310 device, you've got to hand it to HMD Global for completely owning Mobile World Congress 2017 in terms of capturing headlines. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to recall any other major announcement made at the world's premier mobile showcase this year.

In this week's African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku is joined by Zambian author, speaker and marketer extraordinaire, Musa Kalenga, to work out how much of the hype surrounding Nokia's new/old "dumbphone" is actually deserved, and whether the handset has the potential to do well if it's rolled out in Africa.

You should also tune in to hear Musa factor in on some of the biggest headlines from the last couple of weeks, as well as to hear him unpack insights from a second book he has in the works, The Kalenga Conundrum-- which is just one of the many projects keeping him very busy in the wake of giving up his client partner role at Facebook Africa in recent weeks.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

In this Tech Minute-- media reports have surfaced alleging SAP South Africa Managing Director Lawrence Kandaswami's involvement in a kickback scandal linked to the Department of Water and Sanitation. For more on this and other leading tech news from the past week, be sure to spare a minute to listen in.​

Music credit: Muzikid

Katlego Maphai is the co-founder and CEO of the South African mobile payments startup, Yoco.

 

Yoco launched out of beta in October 2015 and the venture has since acquired over 6 500 merchants, has gone on to process approximately $76,7 million (R1 billion rand) in annualised transactions.

The company has recently announced the conclusion of a Series-A funding round (sum undisclosed) led by two foreign, fintech-focused institutional investors-- US-based Quona Capital (manager of Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund) and the Netherlands-based, Velocity Capital.