African Tech Roundup

In this week’s African Tech Round-up, we ask the question, “Should Uber’s wings be clipped before they change the world as we know it?”

Lawmakers on the continent appear torn between adopting the pragmatic approach of embracing technological innovation and actively resisting the very real threat of change bringing with it the decimation of the traditional livelihoods of thousands of people who are simply not prepared or willing to adapt.

In the past week, the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has declared that for tax purposes, it will treat Uber as a technology company, rather than a transport company (meaning Uber needn't pay Value-added Tax), while in South Africa, the Competition Commission has dismissed complaints brought against Uber by the SA Meter Taxi Association who accused the ride-hailing service of anti-competitive behaviour. But in Nigeria on the other hand, Lagos State politicians are reportedly putting pressure on Uber to operate based on the old taxi franchise system in a bid to protect incumbents within the existing taxi business from disruption. Who’s got it right, do you think?

Also in this week’s podcast, Nick Saunders of email security firm, Mimecast, joins Andile Masuku to discuss the recent hacking allegations at Kenya Commercial Bank that we covered in last week’s show, as well as to unpack the diabolical DDoS attack that ground Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix and others to a halt in the US last week.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

So, Episode 80 of the African Tech Round-up, aka the episode that nearly never happened, is finally out.

In an interview Andile Masuku just taped for the upcoming season of the African Tech Conversations series, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of M-KOPA Solar, Chad Larson, shared words he lives by that epitomise why I’m glad the team didn’t give up on publishing the podcast this week— despite the ridiculousness that made it nearly impossible to do so. “Done is always better than perfect,” he said. So, here it is.

There’s no doubt that this has so far been a bumper year for the world’s hacking community. Last week, one of Kenya’s biggest banks, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), spent a fair amount of energy trying to convince its customers that their personal data remains uncompromised-- this, following claims by a certain programmer who goes by @IrakChris on Twitter claiming to have accessed KCB's client data through vulnerabilities found in the bank's mobile app.

Meanwhile, Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Reddit, Yelp, Netflix, and The New York Times suffered easily one of the world's biggest coordinated distributed denial of service (aka DDoS) attacks last Friday which led to the sites either slowing to a snail's pace or being knocked out altogether.

For all the details on these stories and more, tuck into this week's show, and be sure to tell us what you make of the week's headlines on Twitter @africanroundup, or via email using [email protected].

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Podcast photo credit: jjackowski via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Rwanda has helped Africa beat the rest of the world to rolling out a commercial drone delivery service.

The land of a thousand hills has partnered with the UPS Foundation, Gavi, and the Californian drone startup Zipline, to start using drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach places in the country.

Zipline's autonomous drones will now fly blood and plasma to places where poor road conditions often result in delays to time-critical deliveries of medical supplies for hours or even days. With drones, delivery time is reduced to minutes, even in bad weather. Take that, Amazon!

Also in this week's African Tech Round-up is high-profile tech investment news involving Naspers, MTN, as well as William Kirsh-led Triptech Media's 20% acquisition of the social transit application GoMetro-- a startup which seems to be generating a fair amount of investor interest at the moment.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Digital video content creator, streaming evangelist and co-founder of Pockitttv, Julian von Plato joins Andile Masuku to chat about VOD trends and the adoption of streaming technology on the continent.

In this conversation, Julian explains why he believes that mobile is the future of video content consumption in Africa, and why PockitTV, Sstreamm's new VOD platform (in partnership with MTN), is a great way for savvy video producers to distribute their content.

This week’s African Tech Round-up episode is jam-packed. Digital video content creator, streaming evangelist and co-founder of Pockitttv, Julian von Plato joins me to chat about VOD trends and the adoption of streaming technology on the continent, then TechCabal.com’s Editor-in-chief, Bankole Oluwafemi aka Lord Banks factors in on MTN’s ongoing run-ins with the Nigerian Communications Commission.

The past week saw internet access being blocked in Ethiopia in an effort to quell violent anti-government protests and MTN Nigeria rethinking its planned acquisition of Visafone, so Tecno’s announcement of its plans to start manufacturing mobile devices in Nigeria provided some respite. The company is looking to consolidate the rather impressive 25.3% market-share it has so far managed to carve out for itself in one of Africa’s most competitive mobile device markets while demonstrating its commitment to Nigeria’s growing mobile ecosystem.

Finally, the team at the African Tech Round-up would like to express our heartfelt condolences to all those who have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods in the recent storms that have swept through Haiti and are continuing to devastate parts of the US. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by the tragedy.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Andile Masuku chats with the four co-founders of a promising South African start-up called Airbuy— a business which plans to help people convert airtime into “airbucks” that they can use to purchase goods and services online. The chaps are still celebrating their recent win at an MIT Global Startup Labs competition hosted at Wits University, and they allow us a peek under the hood of their passionate entrepreneurial hustle.

There’s blood in the water. Nigerian lawmakers are flexing their might with a confidence rarely seen in decades past— at least as far as taking large corporates to task for flouting regulations.

According to some media reports a member of the Nigerian Senate has put forward a motion for the house to investigate MTN Nigeria’s potential collusion with leading commercial banks to facilitate the illegal repatriation of funds over the last ten years. MTN is being accused of sneaking just under $14 billion out of the Nigerian market, and despite MTN’s official declarations of innocence, lawmakers have vowed to investigate the matter thoroughly. And so MTN’s season of reckoning continues.

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, net neutrality activists around the world are celebrating the USA handing over internet control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) over the weekend. This happened in the wake of a US federal judge denying a last ditch request made by Republican Senator Ted Cruz and other politicians for an injunction to try and prevent the scheduled hand-over taking place over the weekend. Tune in for more on that story as well as more of the week’s leading headlines from across Africa and beyond.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

In a week which saw Yahoo announce that it had suffered the worst cyber-breach in history, and all three of Egypt’s incumbent mobile telcos opting not to bid for the 4G licenses being floated by the Egyptian government, Kenyan solar company, D.Light, shone brightly by announcing that they had raised $22.5 million in funding from leading VC’s, debt financiers and non-profit organisations. The money will be used to grow D.Light’s PayGo business globally— a pay-as-you-go offering which enables low-income customers to buy solar products on credit.

D.Light has already made its mark by delivering affordable solar-powered solutions in Africa, China, South Asia and the United States. The company has so far sold more than twelve million solar light and power products in 62 countries, and aims to light up the lives of 100 million people by 2020.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Nicholus, one of our US-based listeners, shares insights he gleaned at Intercommunity— the Internet Society’s annual global membership meeting which took place across various live locations around the world last week. Nicholus attended one of the sessions held in Washington DC, and emailed us a report via audio note which touched on why some US lawmakers are continuing to challenge the merits of allowing internet governance to shift from the United States to the international body, ICANN.

Also in this week’s show is a conversation Andile Masuku had with the four co-founders of a promising South African start-up called Airbuy— a business which plans to help people convert airtime into “airbucks” that they can use to purchase goods and services online. The chaps are still celebrating their recent win at an MIT Global Startup Labs competition hosted at Wits University, and they let me take a peek under the hood of their passionate entrepreneurial hustle.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

It’s been a busy week for the continent’s fintech scene.

The past week saw MTN South Africa announce that it would be discontinuing its mobile money service due to “a lack of commercial viability”. This revelation comes months after Vodacom South Africa ended it’s catastrophic attempt at copying and pasting Kenya’s M-Pesa magic.

Meanwhile, Madagascar became only the second African country after Tanzania to to roll out mobile money interoperability across the country's mobile networks.

But easily one of the catchiest headline stories of the past week was about Barclays Africa’s involvement in what’s being celebrated as the very first blockchain verified financial transaction in the world by a major banking institution.

The pilot deal between The Seychelles Trading Company Ltd. and Ornua saw the two companies harness a blockchain platform developed by Wave to trade a letter of credit.

This transaction has to be Barclays’ most overt show of confidence in the potential of blockchain technology to deliver improved efficiencies in international trade.

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, is a discussion Andile Masuku had with the Kenyan journalist, Eric Mugendi. Eric is Editor-at-large at iAfrikan.com, and also writes for his Tumbler called Kenyan Longreads.

Eric joined Andile on the show to discuss the controversy that unfolded on Twitter around the African Tech Summit happening in London on September 29th. The event’s conspicuously mostly male non-black/non-African speaker list included folks many people in the Twitterverse did not feel were representative of Africa’s tech ecosystem, and also managed to leave out many worthy participants. Andile and Eric unpacked the issues at play.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Ernesto Spruyt is the founder of https://tunga.io, an online market network that provides international clients access to African coding talent. He also happens to serve as Chief Mentor for Telegraph Media Group’s DigitalX accelerator program in Amsterdam.

Among some of the things Ernesto chatted to Andile Masuku about is what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and what he reckons African coders who aspire to having international careers ought to be keeping top of mind.