African Tech Round-Up

Got a minute? This brisk, energetic podcast presented by Brian Lupiya delivers the top three digital, tech and innovation stories featured in the latest episode of the African Tech Round-up (AfricanTechRoundup.com). Music credit: Brian Lupiya

Africa's 'high-end' VOD scene is hotting up, and for home-grown heavies, ShowMax and Kwesé, the race to achieving critical mass is on. ShowMax is on the prowl for mobile telco partners that can help it hack growth while leveraging the enviable stash of international licensed content that its mothership, DStv, has in its vault. Meanwhile, Kwesé has the benefit of being part of the Econet Group-- a huge potential advantage in that they might exploit Econet's established mobile distribution network. With Econet's Chairman Strive Masiyiwa promising that Kwesé will launch 60 channels across no less than 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's quite clear that the network's "mobile-centric" strategy will not be limited to carving out a decent share of the mobile VOD market, and so DStv could well be due for a haircut. This week's African Tech Round-up features a chat with Nzwisisa Chidembo, a programmer, business analyst and author of new book called Exploring Consumer Adoption of NFC Mobile Payments in South Afri

Got a minute? This brisk, energetic podcast presented by Brian Lupiya delivers the top three digital, tech and innovation stories featured in the latest episode of the African Tech Round-up (AfricanTechRoundup.com). Music credit: Brian Lupiya

Several well-respected voices we featured on the show last year predicted that we would see some major agtech plays happen in 2017. Sure enough, Mastercard made headlines last week for launching a digital marketplace platform called 2KUZE which connects smallholder farmers, agents, buyers and banks in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The app allows farmers to buy, sell and receive payments for agricultural products via their feature phones. If this initiative works half as well as we hope it will, it should make a heck of a difference to small-scale farmers looking to sell their produce to the right buyers more efficiently and at the best possible prices. This week's African Tech Round-up features a conversation Andile Masuku had with Katherine Liew. Katherine is the Head of Digital Disruption at Barclays Africa. Given what's fixing to be an exciting year for fintech on the continent, he was keen to tap Katherine's mind to get a sense of how one the continent's largest banking incumbents is going about keeping up

The team at the African Tech Round-up has returned from the Festive break, and so we’re officially back to our normal programming. At the tail-end of this episode, Andile Masuku chats with Nicholus Steward, founder and CEO of the Swazi Bridge Project. He attended the world’s biggest tech show, CES 2017 in Las Vegas two weeks ago, and he’ll be sharing insights he gleaned from the event. We’re also catching up on some biggest stories that broke while we were on holiday, including Standard Bank acquiring Firepay— the company behind the SnapScan payments app, the George Soros-backed VC, Leapfrog raising $800 million to invest in Africa's finance scene, and the Nigerian fintech startup, Paystack, closing a $1.3 million seed investment round involving Tencent, Comcast Ventures and Singularity Investments. There's no doubt about it, folks. Fintech is definitely a hot ticket at the moment! Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

We are one week away from returning to our regular coverage of the week’s biggest digital, tech and innovation headlines, once the team at the African Tech Round-up returns from the Festive break. This week's show features yet another sneak preview of Season 6 of the African Tech Conversations series. Andile Masuku chats with Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Officer at SAP Africa. With 2017 well and truly underway, Andile finds out what innovation trend Simon is most excited about. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

This week's episode of the African Tech Round-up features a snippet from Andile Masuku's full-length sit-down with Chad Larson-- one of the three founders of the Kenyan solar power start-up M-KOPA Solar. Chad serves as the company’s Finance Director and Chief Credit Officer. He has lived in Nairobi with his wife and three boys since the company launched in 2011. Chad is a qualified CFA and an Oxford MBA who previously served as the CFO of the Africap Microfinance Investment Fund, based in Johannesburg, and prior to that, he spent 10 years in the investment banking division of Bank of America in Sydney and New York, working on fixed income, structured finance, and derivative transactions. M-KOPA Solar is aiming to be a $1 billion company by providing pay-as-you-go energy to off-grid homes. To that end, the company successfully closed a $19 million round of financing led by Generation Investment Management LLP in December 2015. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creativ

This week’s African Tech Conversations sneak-peek is drawn from an in-depth chat Andile Masuku had with Eline Blaauboer, Managing Partner at both TBL Mirror Fund and Safaricom Spark Venture Fund. Eline’s worked in the venture capital and private equity sector in both Europe and Africa for last 14 years— gaining loads of experience with new investments and portfolio management, negotiation and structuring of investment rounds and deal flow generation. Her latest undertaking is something called 'Africa Tech Ventures' - a venture fund focussed on investing in and accelerating the growth of disruptive tech-enabled start-ups and businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eline and her team at Africa Tech Ventures are currently in the process of fundraising and on the look-out for investors interested in collaborating with them. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

Olivier Laouchez, who hails from Martinique (French West Indies), is the charismatic co-founder and CEO of Trace, one of the world's leading urban entertainment platforms which reaches over 200 million multicultural and multiethnic youth in 140 countries around the world. Initially a print magazine published in New York and London, Trace was relaunched as a multimedia group in 2003, and now operates 20 TV channels under several sub-brands and formats: TRACE Urban, TRACE Tropical, TRACE Toca, TRACE Gospel and TRACE Sports Stars. More recently, Trace has continued to invest aggressively in on-demand digital video, mobile services, content production and event production.

The team at the African Tech Round-up is on break, but while we’re away over the next four weeks, the show will go on! In place of our regular programming, we’ll share sneak-previews of episodes from the brand-spanking new season of the African Tech Conversations series which starts on Friday, December 16th, 2016. The series features the likes of Eline Blaauboer, Managing Partner at TBL Mirror Fund and Safaricom Spark Venture Fund, Chad Larson, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer at M-KOPA, Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Advisor at SAP Africa, and more. This week we’re ringing in the Festive Season by sharing moments from Andile Masuku's in-depth conversation with the Ethiopian-born, Dr Solomon Assefa, who is the Director of IBM Research in Africa. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution

Brett Parker is the Managing Director of SAP Africa. In this chat with Andile Masuku, he reveals some of the most critical strategic decisions made by SAP’s global leadership back in 2010, that helped the software giant maintain its dominant position in an increasingly competitive global market. Brett also highlights some of the fascinating greenfield opportunities SAP is pursuing on the continent and explains why SAP is well-positioned to partner with enterprises looking to navigate digital transformation issues.

Moroccan-born Dr Chakib Bouhdary is SAP’s global Digital Transformation Officer. In this chat with Andile Masuku, he shares some of the most common misconceptions he encounters regarding digital transformation when he interacts with executives around the world. Chakib also comments on the strategic mindset driving the trend towards large enterprises keenly making big plays outside their traditional businesses.

SA Taxi-owned Zebra Cabs has raised just over $21.6 million from Futuregrowth Asset Management to expand their owner-driver scheme in Johannesburg, and to take on Uber and Taxify. Their big hairy audacious goal is to have 3 000 cabs on the road by 2020. This development has got us wondering how many players Africa’s ride-sharing market can sustain. There must be easier ways to make a buck, but it seems the prospect of carving out a decent chunk of a potentially multi-billion dollar industry is clearly too much to pass up for VC's like Futuregrowth. The FOMO is real! It’s going to be interesting to see how quickly Zebra Cabs burns through their newly-found cash. Will they withstand the fierce price war that's almost guaranteed to ensue? How long will their financiers be willing to wait before they turn a profit? And will more funds be forthcoming when Zebra Cabs needs to extend their runway further down the line? Only time will tell. In this week’s African Tech Round-up we publish snippets from two conversatio

This is a lively chat Andile Masuku had with Dr Vukosi Marivate, a Data Scientist and Senior Researcher at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). They speak about the trend towards countries around the world passing laws that require the personal information of their citizens to be hosted on servers within their borders. We reached out to Vukosi after having some insightful engagement with him on Twitter last week; following our coverage of Russia blocking LinkedIn for flouting data security regulations.

Senegal is now the second African country after Tunisia to adopt an electronic currency. eCFA is equivalent in value to the country’s physical tender and will be available on all mobile money and e-wallet platforms. This development has led to e-money proponents speculating which African country might be next to adopt electronic money. Zimbabwe, perhaps? It’s popularly been argued that given the persistent economic troubles that have dogged the country, Zimbabwe might very well be the continent’s best use case for the adoption of virtual currency. But for the time being, Zimbabweans will have to be content with the country’s newest currency-- bond notes, which the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe started rolling out on Monday, December 28th, 2016. This week’s African Tech Round-up features a lively chat Andile Masuku had with Dr Vukosi Marivate, a Data Scientist and Senior Researcher at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). They speak about the trend towards countries around the world

How much of an over-achiever is Elon Musk fixing to become, though? In the last week, he’s added providing global internet coverage via a massive satellite network to his audacious To-do List. In this week’s African Tech Round-up Andile Masuku reflects on how Musk’s latest ambition might upset net neutrality watchdogs around the world who might not trust SpaceX to responsibly execute on something they don’t trust the likes of Google and Facebook to do. Also in this week’s show is more about perhaps the most publicised tech investment news of the past week, the $1.6 million investment haul made by the Kenyan agritech startup WeFarm. It’s exciting to see agritech startups start to excite the global VC community. It's absurd how millions of people on the continent go hungry every year despite how well-endowed Africa is in terms of natural resources. It’s about time we harness tech to work smarter, improve our yields, and get food to hungry people not just on the continent, but wherever it’s needed around the wor

Trace TV is fixing to launch arguably the most hotly anticipated SVOD offering of the year, Trace Play. Their ambitious roll-out will involve making Trace Play available in English and French in 100 countries around the world. Trace’s Co-founder and CEO Olivier Laouchez is clearly serious about making sure that Trace TV remains the #1 urban network outside of the US. This past week, Vodacom South Africa announced the planned launch of an SVOD of their own called Vodacom On Demand. They plan to go live in 2017 with DSTV’s ShowMax onboard in a very cosy arrangement that’s left us wondering if their partnership could grow into something more substantial, like a deal to rival AT&T’s recent acquisition of Time Warner, for instance. Vodacom has said that they’re happy to partner with as many serious content players as might want to play with them, revealing that a future partnership with Netflix will happen in due course. We're fairly certain that a deal of AT&T-Time Warner proportions between a telco and b

Jason Njoku is the inimitable Nigerian founder and CEO of the internet and entertainment group, iROKO. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Jason talks about how his group of companies is making lucrative traditional media plays while growing digital content platforms and producing local content for what's likely to be mobile-driven future.

Ntambwe Harlem Mufoncol, one of the co-founders of Baziks Pulse— a neat music streaming platform from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this chat Andile Masuku, Ntambwe shares how well African music lovers has so far taken to their recent launch and explains what makes their platform better suited for the African market than their global competition.

Andile Masuku and Brian Lupiya spent three days last week at DISCOP Johannesburg— Africa’s biggest multi-screen, multi-platform marketplace, assessing trends within the continent’s digital content scene. They spent most of our time collecting insights at the fringe of Digital Lab Africa (DLA)— a DISCOP partner initiative that aims to be a springboard for African multimedia talent looking to launch worthy projects and business ideas within digital music, web creation, virtual reality and video game development. So this week, in place of the bringing you the week’s highlights in terms of digital, tech and innovation news from across Africa, Brian joins Andile on the show to help present cool snippets from four of the many great conversations they taped both at DLA and in DISCOP’s main exhibition area. The aim is to give you a sense of the vibe, as well as point to where the future of digital content production and platforms on the continent might be headed. Look out for audio featuring Harlem Mufoncol, one of t