Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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African Tech Roundup - George Asamani on how DooWapp music messaging could become as ubiquitous as emojis

George Asamani is an exceedingly well-traveled 39-year-old Ghanaian who currently calls Addis Ababa home. He is the co-founder of a music and messaging app called DooWapp-- an alumnus of Telefónica's Wayra startup accelerator in the UK. In this conversation, taped at the Enterprise Africa Summit 2017 hosted by the British Council in Accra some months ago, George gave Andile a sense of the positive innovation vibes that he's absorbed while living and working in various African markets over the years. They also chatted about the importance of responding readily to market feedback when iterating a passion-driven 'nice-to-have' software product.
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Python Bytes - #41 Python Concurrency From the Ground Up and Caring for our Community

Topics covered in this episode:
See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/41
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African Tech Roundup - Kenya’s Twiga Foods Closes $10.3M Series A Investment Round Led By Wamda Capital

The last few weeks have seen three promising African tech startups land significant investments-- namely, the Nigerian digital payments firm, Flutterwave ($10 million), the Kenyan mobile-driven food supply platform, Twiga Foods ($10.3 million), and the South African fractional investments service, EasyEquities ($7.5 million). In this installment of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga discuss the merits of the Flutterwave and Twiga deals, but somehow, we forgot to chat about the EasyEquities transaction on this episode (our bad). That particular transaction stands out somewhat, owing to the fact that 30% of the company was acquired by the South African financial services giant, Sanlam. Here's to hoping that the Sanlam-EasyEquities deal signals a trend towards African institutional investors becoming savvier at identifying and financing home-grown start-ups before their overseas counterparts swoop in to snap up promising businesses from right under their noses. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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African Tech Roundup - Charlene Chen reckons Bitpesa is well-positioned to surf the blockchain wave

Charlene Chen is the Chief Operating Officer of BitPesa-- an online payment platform founded in Kenya that leverages Blockchain settlement to lower the cost and increase the speed of business payments to, from and within sub-Saharan Africa. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Charlene explains how BitPesa helps clients, that range from African businesses and multinational companies paying suppliers as far as China and Dubai to international remittance companies, use their API services for white-label payments to dozens of bank networks and mobile money operators across Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, and the DRC. She also unpacks why BitPesa hasn't gotten caught up in speculation regarding Bitcoin and sheds light on the company's prospects following the successful close of their $2.5 million Series A in January 2017.