Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Joel Macharia is the Founder and CEO of Abacus (https://abacus.co.ke), a Kenyan fintech firm that builds web and mobile software designed to help people anywhere in the world gain access to African financial markets. Joel previously founded and headed up the consumer financial news publication, PesaTalk.com, and prior to that, he served as the Africa Head of Product Development for the Mobile Money team at the Kenyan mobile commerce and payment technology provider, Cellulant. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Joel provides insights into Kenya's dicey financial services regulatory environment and explains how Abacus is doubling down on providing safe, affordable micro investment options both for Kenyan citizens who might otherwise have been excluded from participating in securities markets, as well as more affluent Kenyan investors based abroad.

Recorded May 17, 2018

Topics

• SEC launch spoof ICO to warn naive ICO investors » Brave New Coin
• Solving a 43Mb favorites list
• OSMI Mental Health in Tech Survey 2018
• testing FTW
• New GitHub Desktop Application | Simple collaboration from your desktop
• GitHub Releases Desktop App Version 1.2 - Laravel News
• hangouts chat
• Amazon confirms that Echo device secretly shared user’s private audio | Ars Technica
• EFF Wins Final Victory Over Podcasting Patent | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Topics covered in this episode:

• pytest 3.6.0
• * Hello* Qt for Python
• MongoDB 4.0.0-rc0 available
• Pipenv review, after using it in production
• Pandas goes Python 3 only
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/79

In this conversation with Andile Masuku, TechAdvance CEO, Edmund Olotu, sketches Nigeria's digital payments infrastructure landscape and explains why he feels the time is right for his company to participate more actively in the discourses around the next wave of data analytics-driven tech in Nigeria. Listen in to hear Edmund unpack TechAdvance's ambitions to take the game to competitors like Interswitch and position to be the platform partner of choice for big corporate and government-owned enterprises looking to reduce payments friction, as well as newer fintech startups looking to deliver digitized financial services to the masses.

Recorded May 17, 2018

Topics

• Introducing Visual Studio Live Share
• All of Mugshots.com’s alleged co-owners arrested on extortion charges
• Entire Nest ecosystem of smart home devices goes offline
• EFAIL
• No, PGP is not broken, not even with the Efail vulnerabilities - ProtonMail Blog
• Use 1Password as an authenticator for sites with two-factor authentication - 1Password Support
• You can now email Eric at phpugly@protonmail.com
• Hack $35 Activity Trackers for Mental Health &More
• Drupal exploit infects over 400 sites with cryptocurrency miner | Drupal Shell
• How a “location API” allows cops to figure out where we all are in real time

Topics covered in this episode:

• The Forgotten Optional else in Python Loops
• libraries.io
• The other (great) benefit of Python type annotations
• Setting Expectations for Open Source Participation
• ngrok
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/78

Recorded May 10, 2018

Topics

• Gmail’s Smart Compose will write emails for you - The Verge
• Stack Overflow for Teams
• square/sudo_pair
• Who controls glibc?
• Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad – Windows Command Line Tools For Developers
• Office Dev Center - Azure Machine Learning, JavaScript Custom Functions, and Power BI Custom Visuals Further Expand Developers Capabilities with Excel
• World of Warcraft DDoS attacker is going to prison for a year
• Fortnite cross-platform crossplay guide for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Mac and mobile - Polygon

In this episode of the African Tech Roundup podcast, Oliver Sauter— Co-founder and Head of Strategy, Product & Operations at https://WorldBrain.io, joins Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga for a meandering conversation that explores the link between the trend towards interoperability and idealised notions of individual data ownership. As Africa grapples with the reality of large swathes of its population being either digitally "invisible" or completely oblivious to the commercial value of the personal data they are palming off so freely, Oliver, Musa and Andile discuss how interoperability might contribute towards private citizens wielding control and commercial agency over their personal data. Also, listen in to hear why Oliver and the rest of the team at WorldBrain have chosen to embrace the non-mainstream "stewardship-ownership" model of corporate guardianship - as unpacked in Armin Steuernagel's recent TEDxZurich talk(http://bit.ly/stewardownership) - as they attempt to solve the global fake news problem. And heads up— look out for an unexpected conversation rabbit hole regarding "genetically modified organics".