Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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 efficiencies in international trade. Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, is a discussion Andile Masuku had with the Kenyan journalist, Eric Mugendi. Eric is Editor-at-large at iAfrikan.com, and also writes for his Tumbler called Kenyan Longreads. Eric joined Andile on the show to discuss the controversy that unfolded on Twitter around the African Tech Summit happening in London on September 29th. The event’s conspicuously mostly male non-black/non-African speaker list included folks many people in the Twitterverse did not feel were representative of Africa’s tech ecosystem, and also managed to leave out many worthy participants. Andile and Eric unpacked the issues at play. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

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 Round-up, we share a conversation Andile Masuku had with Ernesto Spruyt, the founder of Tunga, 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. Ernesto explains what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and shares a few key things African coders who aspire to having international careers ought to be keeping top of mind. 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/ep27.md Topics PyroCMS 3.1 released built on Laravel 5.3 The End of SDPHP North County? Or Is it? PHPUgly Host John Congdon @johncongdon newest article in the September 2016 edition of php[arch] Lumen 5.3 is released Git 2.10 has been released The perspection of Youtube Censorship Check out DiegoDev new Blog 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

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.