African Tech Round-Up

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 incumbent

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, Reddi

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 heartf

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 C

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

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

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.

Ismael Rachdaoui is the young, Moroccan founder of nextwi, a marketing platform that leverages Wi-Fi technology to help small and large business owners (primarily in the the hospitality industry) engage their clients/guests more intuitively based on their social profiles and online preferences and behaviour.

Brian Ondari is both the co-founder and Chief Operations Officer at AirKlip, a promising Kenyan startup that aims to become every university student’s personal assistant by creating a simple collaborative environment (app) for students and administrators.

Harry Hare is the founder and publisher of CIO East Africa, an ICT information platform that has a monthly print publication (CIO East Africa), an online ICT portal (www.cio.co.ke) and a series of events including the CIO Executive Breakfast Series, the CIO Golf Series and the CIO 100 Awards and Symposium. He is also the founder and Director of African eDevelopment Resource Centre, as well as the founder of DEMO Africa 2012, a flagship initiative of LIONS @frica which has showcased over 150 startups that have gone on to raise over US$11 million in venture capital.

The French e-commerce startup, Afrimarket, has raised €10 million from the Global Innovation Fund and the private sector arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Proparco, as well from as a handful of individual investors such as the co-founder of PriceMinister, Olivier Mathiot, who’s been granted a seat on Afrimarket’s board. At a glance, the company seems to have it made-- except that growth within the e-commerce sector across the continent has consistently failed to meet expectations, and foreign-owned, foreigner-run e-commerce copy-cat plays backed by the likes of Rocket Internet continue to have precious little to show in terms of solid success. The bottom line is that this is Africa, and Afrimarket’s founder and CEO, Rania Belkahia, better have a few good tricks up her sleeve, including a tonne of patience and access to a lot more cash, if her company is to achieve its ambitious aspiration of dominating the French-speaking West African e-commerce market. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Rou

Lexi Novitske is the Principal Investment Officer for Africa at Singularity Investments. Lexi is based in Lagos and has interesting insights on picking winning investments as an outsider working in a continent with a notorious dearth of data. She strongly believes that Africa could very well deliver the world’s next unicorn.

Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicised trip to the continent spawned dozens of think-pieces in the blogosphere this past week. Many pundits clearly view Mark’s 'surprise' visit to Nigeria and Kenya as an affirmation of the continent’s importance as a valuable source of under-utilised tech talent, and as a hot-bed of home-grown innovation. Others read it as a pre-cursor to a massive wave of foreign investment that's expected to wash over the continent’s technology industry. We, on the other hand, can’t help sensing the calculated profit motive wrapped up in Mark’s impeccably orchestrated African safari. 'Connecting Africa’ is no doubt a huge priority for Facebook, given the growth of the continent’s increasingly affluent middle class, the availability of relatively cheap labour, and the hundreds of millions of impoverished Africans who are prime for education— read monetisation. Now, on some level Mark Zuckerberg must care about humanity and all, but it is curious how readily many of us have fallen for the man's tr

Farouk Jivani is a business consultant-turned angel investor who has invested in a couple of Kenyan startups-- one of them being the music downloads platform, Mdundo.com. In this chat, Farouk describes the allure of African markets to angel investors based abroad, and shares on what it's like to be a hands-on investor in early-stage businesses that have the potential to be the next big thing.

Tsholo Mogotsi in the Director for Economic Development Facilitation at the City of Joburg. In this chat with Andile Masuku Tsholo talks about the City of Joburg's commitment to lead the continent in providing it's citizens with the most advanced web-enabled infrastructure. He also sheds light on the role of public institutions in promoting innovation on the continent.

Amrote Abdella is the Director for Venture Capital & Start-ups and Africa Initiatives (Microsoft 4Afrika) at Microsoft. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Amrote shares what it’s like to be embedded in one of the world’s largest tech companies, and being deployed in arguably the world’s fastest growing tech market(s). Listen in to hear Amrote’s take on how Microsoft is responding to next generation tech biggies like Google and Uber’s disruptive ambitions and what Microsoft might consider their next big play.

Stephen Ozoigbo is the CEO of the African Technology Foundation and the Managing Partner of the US State Department-backed Lions @frica initiative. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Stephen talks about his journey from investment banking to being one of Africa's foremost tech and innovation evangelists. Stephen's high-profile community-building efforts within the continent's burgeoning tech ecosystem allows him to eloquently address the challenge of keeping up with global innovation faced by African startups, VC's, angel investors, legacy enterprise players, as well as government agencies.