African Tech Roundup

In the second instalment of our four-part Annual Round-up 2015 insights series, we bring you a panel discussion on African startups featuring Google South Africa’s Head of Communications & Public Affairs, Mich Atagana and Entrepreneur Magazine Columnist & Co-Founder of LexNove, Andrew Taylor.

Mich has had the unique privilege of not only covering the birth, progress, and often, the demise of many startups on the continent, but also working for some as well. Her current role at Google gives her a unique vantage point— given how the company is arguably one of the world’s biggest and most successful startups ever, and is privy to tons of rich data.

Meanwhile, as a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, and as a legal partner to many emerging small and medium-sized businesses in South Africa, Andrew operates at the coalface of the continent’s tech startup scene, and is well-placed to reflect on what kind of a year 2015 has turned out to be.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Over the next four weeks the we are taking a much-needed break.

Cue peaceful ocean sounds

But we’ve made sure that over the next four weeks, in place of our regular programming, we’ll be sharing exclusive content from the Annual Round-up 2015 event we hosted at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg on November 26th 2015. The Event was powered by the good people at Opera Africa, who are totally all about helping us “do more” (on the web).

This week, we kick things off by sharing a stimulating panel discussion around tech in enterprise facilitated by Tefo Mohapi— featuring Senior Investment Executive, RMI Holdings and former co-founder of the hugely successful fintech startup Tyme, Dominique Collett-Antolik and CEO & Founding Partner, Convergence Partners, Brandon Doyle.

Another great reason to listen in is to find out if you’re one of the two lucky people who’ve won a Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer in last week’s competition, sponsored by Google.

This week, we kick things off by sharing a stimulating panel discussion around tech in enterprise facilitated by Tefo Mohapi— featuring Senior Investment Executive, RMI Holdings and former co-founder of the hugely successful fintech startup Tyme, Dominique Collett-Antolik and CEO & Founding Partner, Convergence Partners, Brandon Doyle.

Another great reason to listen in is to find out if you’re one of the two lucky people who’ve won a Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer in last week’s competition, sponsored by Google.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

We attended Afrikoin Johannesburg on 3 December 2015.

At the event, Andile Masuku posed a question that led to a very lively debate about whether improved “access” to seamless, more affordable financial services does in fact equal “inclusion” for Africa’s poorest— especially given how centralised the world’s computing power is, and how huge stashes of Bitcoin are held by a relatively few well-resourced interests.

We also caught up with Savannah Fund founder, Mbwana Alliy for a chat after the event.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-Up (the last full-length episode of 2015), you can not only look forward to listening to Andile and Tefo's impromptu chat with Mbwana in its entirety (including him sharing his thoughts on the Angani debacle), but you can also look forward to hearing two leading Zimbabwean startup founders explain why Zimbabwe might be the perfect use-case for disruptive fintech innovations.

Then heads up, folks! For the next four weeks starting next week, in place of our regular podcast programming we’ll be sharing exclusive content from the Annual Round-up 2015 event we hosted at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg 2 weeks ago.

We’ll kick things off next week by sharing a conversation we had with Senior Investment Executive, RMI Holdings, Dominique Collett-Antolik and CEO & Founding Partner, Convergence Partners, Brandon Doyle around tech in enterprise.

Don’t miss it!

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

We're still buzzing from the great time we had at the Annual Round-up 2015, that Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku hosted at The Wanderers Club in Johannesburg last week. Many thanks to those of you who made it out on Thursday morning, and a big thank you to our incredibly generous and insightful guest panelists and speakers. Also, big up to our event partners, Opera Africa, Stuff magazine, and iAfrikan.com.

It was an chilled morning of intelligent, retrospective conversations-- which took stock of the state of Africa’s tech scene. The programme featured three keynote talks and three lively interactive panel discussions covering enterprise, startups and gadgets and apps.

The good news is that we’ll be sharing the conversations we had at the Annual Round-up in place of the African Tech Round-up podcast starting on Monday, December 14th— to hold you down till the show returns in mid-January 2016. There’ll also be plenty of cool extras we’ll be sharing exclusively on our Soundcloud account and via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so do follow us, do.

In the meantime, enjoy Episode 33 of the African Tech Round-up. And listen in to find out why two Kenyan mobile money service providers are suing Safaricom. This is definitely on trend. The last quarter of 2015 is proving to be quite trying time for Africa’s mobile operators.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Kenya’s tech scene aka Silicon Savannah is on fire! At least, that’s according to commentators like Brenda Wambui, who’s recent blog posted on Medium threw serious shade the way of some looming figures in Kenya’s tech ecosystem following the diabolical fallout at cloud services firm, Angani.

It turns out that some of the details surrounding this story that we reported on some weeks ago— details whose validity we later questioned, might in fact be accurate.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku analyse the state of investor-founder relations at Angani in the light of Brenda’s candid piece, which clearly defends the honour of the company’s founders. We’ll also try to determine whether the allegations of corruption and abuse of power she levelled at the company’s investors are justified.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

This week's instalment of the African Tech Round-up was recorded at the African Media Leaders Forum, which wrapped in Johannesburg on the weekend. And what a treat it is!

The show is an all-Africa affair— what with Mark Kaigwa stopping by. Mark is easily one of Kenya’s leading proponents of social media, as well as a respected innovator within digital tech in general. He is also the Founder and CEO of the Nairobi-based digital agency, Nendo Ventures— well-known for the Nendo Social Media Trend Report. You can look forward to hearing his insider’s take on several of the week’s biggest stories.

*tv informercial voice* But that’s not all… Cameroonian tech entrepreneur, Rebecca Enonchong, and South African business, branding and marketing legend, Thebe Ikalafeng, both make unexpected guest features on this week’s episode-- Rebecca sharing some strong views on whether she thinks the MTN will actually pay the $5.2 billion fine levied by the Nigerian Communications Commission, and Thebe dropping some wisdom around what Africa’s “new breed” of techies need to do to attain global relevance.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

With so few high-flying start-up successes in Africa’s tech eco-system, one has to wonder just how alarmed we should get when word of job cuts and other such cost-cutting measures starts to dominate headlines. After all, this sort of thing happens in business all the time!

That said, why does it seem like Nigerian startups are having a particularly hard time at the moment? Following signs of distress showing up at the countries startup poster children, Jumia and iROKOtv in recent weeks, Nigerian daily deals site, Dealdey, has reportedly sacked 60% of its workforce. Curiously, the news of this broke on a popular Kenyan blog, courtesy of “sources familiar with the matter”.

In our discussion on the African The Round-up this week, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku will briefly discuss what could be fuelling this apparent season of hardship on Nigeria’s tech startup scene. Also, listen in for all the most important digital, tech and innovation news from the past week.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

It’s been a truly awful week for the MTN Group— what with a $5.2 billion fine imposed on MTN Nigeria (the group’s largest and most profitable subsidiary) by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for failing to disconnect unregistered SIM cards timeously, the news of which led to considerable market panic and a subsequent 16% drop in MTN’s share price.

This week, MTN also started fielding allegations of engaging in highly sophisticated tax evasion practices such as using transfer pricing to ship profits off to distant tax havens via their off-shore ‘businesses’, namely MTN Dubai and MTN International in Mauritius.

Meanwhile, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange has confirmed that they will be investigating MTN for possible insider trading that may have occurred around the whole handling of information regarding the NCC debacle. And so far, the MTN Group’s CEO’s efforts to engage with the Nigerian authorities concerning the unprecedented fine have yet to yield any form of relief.

Given all this, it’s unsurprising that MTN would feature in this week’s discussion on the African Tech Round-up. However, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku couldn’t agree on an angle to frame their chat this week.

Tefo wanted us to unpack the regulatory challenges large telcos in Africa are facing in trying to innovate and grow their businesses across continent, while Andile was keen to debate the question of whether or not mobile operators like MTN might be obsolete in a few decades if they don’t refresh their legacy business models. So, they decided to let you in on their dignified little skirmish and let you decide whose topic suggestion wins the day.

Also in this week’s show, all the biggest digital, tech and innovation news from across the continent— including a progress update on Nigeria’s efforts to meet its 2017 analogue to digital migration deadline, and details on how much Kenya has lost to cybercrime in the last year.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

This week’s African Tech Round-up is chock-full of important digital, tech and innovation news from across the African continent— not least, the unfortunate rumoured in-fighting and financial distress at Jason Njoku’s media startup, iROKO Partners.

Also, we’re happy to have our content producer, Peter “The Enigma” Peele back from a a hectic trip to Dubai where he attended GITEX Technology Week 2015. We managed to convince him to jump on the mic with us this week and share some highlights from his trip.

Meanwhile, Tefo Mohapi not only delivered a talk and facilitated a discussion at the the Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute’s Leadership Conference this past week (the dude got to even have dinner with former South African President Thabo Mbeki himself), but also attended the Brand Africa 100 Awards. Be sure to catch him giving us the low-low on all that in this week’s episode.

And finally, Andile Masuku's back from a week-long leave of absence due to eye surgery he had done on his left eye.

All said, it's been a super-busy week for the team at the African Tech Round-up.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Last week it was Strive Masiyiwa's Econet Zimbabwe alluding that OTT (over the top) services such as WhatsApp and BBM are the reason they are seeing a drop in voice calls revenue and overall revenue.

Now this week, MTN South Africa CEO, Mteto Nyati, has called for South Africa's communications regulator, ICASA, to look into regulating these OTT players because they haven't invested anything in telecoms infrastructure and they are "reaping large profits".

Is this a fair call?

Isn't it up to us as customers what we use the data we purchase from mobile service providers for?

Or do we need to protect African mobile service providers from OTT services reaping profits from their infrastructure investments?

Also, this week, Tefo Mohapi (Andile Masuku is on medical leave) covers interesting technology, digital and innovation news from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya.

Additional Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0