Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Data costs need to come down significantly if Africa is ever going to realise the dream of making access to the internet available to every single person living on the continent. As things stand, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, an estimated 590 million Africans still do not have access to electricity, to say nothing of reliable web access. However, South Africa’s largest telecoms operator, the government-owned Telkom, has announced some game-changing 4G/LTE data-led mobile packages that may signal the beginning of the end of exorbitantly high data prices in that country. Aside from throwing down the gauntlet towards its rivals, Telkom seems to be committing to a business model that seeks to sign up the masses and incentivise them to consume ever increasing amounts of data, as opposed to attempting to profiteer in the short to medium term. What’s not to love about that? Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, I speak to Frank Schutte, the former Retail Product & Marketing Managing Director of South Africa’s largest life insurer— Liberty, to found a startup called MobiLife, which is “Africa’s first 100% mobile insurance offering” that aims to transform micro-insurance in South Africa. Listen in to find out what would possess Frank to take on the well-heeled incumbents who currently control South Africa’s highly-competitive multi-billion dollar life insurance industry. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Show notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep20.md recorded July 21st, 2016 Topics SDPHP Downtown Meetup Some changes that are coming to Laravel 5.3 How one Regex string brought down Stackoverflow PHP 7.1 hits Beta How Facebook can decide to revoke your license to React.js On a side note, we would like to welcome the newest member of the PHPUgly family, Nolan Congdon, new son of the host John Congdon. All our best wishes go out to the entire Congdon family. The hosts Eric Van Johnson Twitter / Github / Blog / About.me Tom Rideout Twitter / Github / About.me John Congdon Twitter / Github Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com

Jaco Van Zyl is the co-founder and MD of the South African startup, PulseIt— a company which is looking to give online voucher firms like Vouchercloud, Groupon and Shazam a run for their money. In this chat Jaco Van Zyl explain swhy so many VC’s and African tech firms seem quite bullish on the online voucher business, and why he thinks his startup has what it takes to steal market share from more established international players and fend off newer players like ttrumpet who are just as hungry for success as he is.

There’s no doubt that online education is a hot ticket at the moment. While the folks at Andela are probably still celebrating landing $24 million worth of investment courtesy of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and others, the New York-based Codecademy has closed a $30 million Series C investment round led by Naspers, through its Naspers Ventures division. Codecademy plans to use the funds to extend its global reach, build its mobile presence, and beef up its course content. It does seem that formal education business is well and truly on its way to being disrupted. In this week’s African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku catches up with Jaco Van Zyl, the co-founder and MD of the South African startup, PulseIt— a company which is looking to give online voucher firms like Vouchercloud, Groupon and Shazam a run for their money. Andile asked Jaco to explain why so many VC’s and African tech firms seem quite bullish on the online voucher business, and why he thinks his startup has what it takes to steal market share from more established international players and fend off newer players like ttrumpet who are just as hungry for success as he is. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Show notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep19.md Uncut Video Version of the show can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2AaP0zSHw Topics PHP 5.5 Reaches EOL SDPHP Downtown Meetup The Security Vulnerability of target=_blank Many projects that use the bad practice of extract ($_GET) PHPStorm Plugin Ideavim gets an update Github gets syntax highlighting for Blade Templates Amazon's AWS buys Cloud9 Cloud IDE New service for reading PHP Internals called Externals.io Running your RaspberryPi with PHP The hosts Eric Van Johnson Twitter / Github / Blog / About.me Tom Rideout Twitter / Github / About.me John Congdon Twitter / Github Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com

Last week, the global digital behemoth that is Facebook announced that they’ll be rolling out the OpenCellular system worldwide. OpenCellular is said to be an inexpensive, weather-resistant and fully customisable platform that will be able to serve as a wireless access point for connecting devices using 2G, LTE or even Wi-Fi. While this move by Facebook is no doubt just a footnote in the company’s playbook for achieving complete digital dominance, one wonders if this could signal the beginning of the end for the likes of Kenya’s BRCK— a home-grown system designed to do exactly what OpenCellular promises to do, perhaps less reliably. One wonders if there is any chance that a minnow like BRCK can stand up to the fire and might of a beast like Facebook? It seems unlikely that BRCK has captured enough of the affordable WiFi deployment market to develop a legitimate first-mover advantage, and it’s equally unlikely that anyone over at Facebook is losing any sleep worrying about their plans being disrupted by smaller players. Also in this week’s show, we share a snippet from a conversation Andile Masuku had with Gareth Cliff— the controversial South African Radio DJ, Idols South Africa judge, and Co-founder & President of Africa’s largest podcast producer, CliffCentral.com. Listen in to hear Gareth’s candid take on why he quit one of South Africa’s most lucrative radio gigs to found a platform that now boasts over 40 podcast titles and garners over 140,000 downloads per week. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Show Notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep18.md PHPUgly - Episode 18 recorded July 7th, 2016 Topics A blog post called The Autistic Programmer Do PHP and IoT Have a Future Together? Pipes (||) vs OR The joys of Timezones in code. How is the best way to handle them? Laracon.us now offering a live streaming package Laravel Package Mailthief A peak at VueJS 2.0 and what to expect The hosts Eric Van Johnson Twitter / Github / Blog / About.me Tom Rideout Twitter / Github / About.me John Congdon Twitter / Github Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com