In efforts to lessen South Africa's digital divide, public institutions, businesses and communities in the Western Cape could see the rollout of new broadband services, including free Wi-Fi services for local communities, in the next few years. The Western Cape Government has recently finalised a deal with local telcom Neotel that seeks to provide broadband services to over 2 000 government locations across the province. Together with SITA, the public-private partnership plans to roll-out initial connection speeds of 10Mbps in the ...

Kenyan tech startup iProcure has recently secured investment from Invested Development (ID) -- a global early stage impact investment fund manager. The startup helps farmers access high-quality products using a software that enhances retailers' agricultural sales and inventory management. This move from ID comes from its BSP Fund which invests in ICT, alternative energy, and agricultural tech solutions for underserved markets. 33 million smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa produce 80% of the subcontinent's food. Having said that, many farmers are ...

She Leads Africa, an initiative empowering women in the continent's entrepreneurial tech scene, is launching a business pitch competition seeking talented women in West Africa. The platform seeks to connect promising individuals to mentors, business funding and new market opportunities. This is one of many She Leads Africa's programmes that aims to help female entrepreneurs gain business fundamentals, connect to an active business network, and increase their access to financing. With a special focus on -- but not limited to -- tech, ...

African developers, listen up. Popular productivity app Evernote, in partnership with The African Technology Foundations (ATF), has announced that it is searching for talented app developers and designers in Africa who are building amazing products with Evernote API through its Evernote Platform Awards competition. For South African developers, Evernote and ATF will be hosting a Developer Engagement Event on 8 July at the Bandwidth Barn to brief applicants on the competition and selection criteria. The event will also include a presentation ...

With the launch of Apple's iPhone 5S and the Samsung S5, introducing biometric fingerprint authentication technology to the market, we are starting to see where future applications of fingerprint authentication might be applied. Even though the technology is originally being used for device security, it could ultimately make its way into ecommerce. Biometric fingerprint technology effectively determines whether the patterns of a fingerprint match the patterns in a pre-scanned image. The entire image is never saved though, but rather only specific ...

For startups, getting one's foot in the target market's door is everything. For people looking to rent, the story's much the same. Ekaya describes itself as an Airbnb for long-term renting. It's a trust-based marketplace where you can list, find and rent a place from your phone and on the web. Landlords, on the other hand, have a platform to advertise, vett tenants, collect rental and manage risk. But apart from that, the South African-based startup has a lot of other ...

It is easy to get taken in by the allure of entrepreneurship. People gravitate towards visions of eight-digit seed funding sums, several additional rounds of investments, and finally that glorious payout in the form of a billion dollar exit. They peruse tech blogs like ours and gaze wistfully at the gargantuan sums of capital being moved around between investors and startups. But if you dig deeper, you’ll see the other side of the coin. Being an entrepreneur is far from sexy ...

Africa Internet Holding-backed real estate startup, Lamudi, has launched an Android version of its mobile app. People looking to buy, rent or sell real estate on-the-go in over 28 markets around the globe, now have access to over 400 000 property listings in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The news follows the roll out of the iOS app which launched last week which is available in a handful of countries. The apps are said to be designed to ...

Less than 25% of Africa's rural areas have access to reliable electricity supplies, says Samsung Electronics. This affects many individual's access to basic services such as education and healthcare. In this light Samsung has launched its Solar Powered Internet Schools Initiative (SPIS) -- independent classrooms that aim to increase accessibility to education and connectivity in remote areas of Africa -- at The Dakar Financing Summit for Africa's Infrastructure, held in Senegal. These SPIS classrooms were actually first launched in 2011 with ...

Technology has changed the world, no doubt about that. By extension it has changed the way we live our lives, do business and make money. Collaborative consumption is of course nothing new. Long before the advent of the internet and smartphones, we had carpooling and timeshares. The beauty of technology is just that it has made the sharing economy so much more accessible. Now you, the potential investor (or sharer) just need to figure out how and why it works so ...