AWS full day Cape Town event to feature pitching, deep dives, panel discussions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will host a full-day event for startup founders and technical staff. The event — which is free to startups — will be held in Cape Town next month.

AWS said the event, part of Amazon’s Startup Day series will run on 13 September and was created to help accelerate startup innovation and growth.

The event will feature a keynote address by AWS global startup evangelist Mackenzie Kosut, as well as speakers from Cape Town venture capital fund 4Di Capital and SA startup Custos Media and Nigerian tech company Flutterwave.

Practical tips

AWS startup customers like Luno, Travelstart and Jumo will also share practical advice and lessons learnt, while the event will feature technical deep dives on AWS services.

The Cape Town AWS event will feature AWS global startup evangelist Mackenzie Kosut, as well as speakers from 4Di Capital, Custos Media and Flutterwave

The deep dives will cover things such as tracking and measuring user behaviour (featuring advice from startups Jumo and Travelstart), securing your customer data, AWS’s machine learning services and tools and how microservices allow you to easily deploy and debug atomic pieces of infrastructure.

In addition, panel discussions will feature thought leaders from the Africna tech ecosystem including Knife Capital, Venture Garden Group and Angelhub Ventures

Pitching competition

There will also be a pitching competition where AWS will look to find the next big startup venture.

The pitching will be held in two stages — with the first to be held between 9am and 1pm and the second between 4pm and 5pm when shortlisted founders will be given three minutes to re-pitch in front of a panel of industry experts and Startup Day attendees.

Winners will get a package of mentoring and AWS platform credits during Startup Day Cape Town.

Last month Business Day reported that Amazon is expanding its presence in Cape Town and will be the sole tenant in a new eight-storey office building that’s nearing completion. The company is also advertising a number of jobs in Cape Town.

For more on the event visit this page. To register for the event visit this page.

Editor’s note (27 August 2018): AWS t0ld Ventureburn subsequent to the publication of this article that the expansion would help benefit African startups. Read more here.