My favorite thing about Africa right now is how everyone is gingered up about amazing things that are happening in the tech scene. It's not just about the innovations or the fact that the continent has more than 45 tech hubs, it's the culture that is emerging. We are building a real tech-obsessed community here and that is great. Uganda's Hive Colab is gaining respectable traction and Teddy Ruge is determined to grow the country's tech scene. All around, Africa hubs ...

Bozza boss Emma Kaye has revealed to Ventureburn that Africa-friendly Omidyar Network made a sizable investment in the company. Bozza, which is currently based in South Africa, adds Omidyar as a second Venture Capital funder after securing investment from Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa in 2011. The startup is a video-based mobile social networking service aimed at township users. Its primary focus is to give a voice to the Pan-African market. Bozza provides a platform for youth to create their own content ...

"Crowdfunding is the democratization of [funding] for startups," says founder of Thundafund Patrick Schofield. People get the opportunity to directly vote with their wallets for the services or products they want. Though massively popular and hyped-up by the media in the US and Western Europe, where does it leave Africa? How has the continent adopted its philosophy to its own advantage, and is it successful? Starting up startups the African way Out of all the sites we could find, there are ...

Recently I wrote about the making of our mobile internet router, the BRCK, here in Nairobi, and I alluded to some of the issues around doing hardware in Africa: Making things is hard. It’s harder in Africa. I can’t overnight an order of processors, boards or 3D printing filament here. There isn't an over abundance of local fabrication facilities or tools, and the milling machine you find might be in disrepair and take you two days to calibrate. We’ve got our ...

A gift-card given, is a gift-card thrown away, as a wise man once said. A verbose and fake idiom, but in reality about 8%-19% of gift cards are never used. For Kiind, a Canadian-based startup, this means waste: financial waste, environmental waste, delivery and time waste... it's just so wasteful, and Kiind aims to fix that with its new gift-card platform which only charges a giver, "when the receiver chooses to use the gift." Actually, if you were to take Kiind's ...

There are a number of upcoming crowdfunding platforms in Africa, but this Nigerian-based startup is taking an interesting route -- it's launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds it needs to get its site up and running. Yes, a crowdfunding site is using another crowdfunding site. Meta. Headed by two co-founders and five volunteers based in Abuja, GogoAfrika is currently seeking US$15 000 to cover the building of its website and the initial marketing and awareness costs. It is ...

"Innovate. Touch. Create." are the words that Supernice stands for. While aiming to create "not just another app," the startup wants to create fun, engaging and rewarding brand experiences. Our new Startup Blitz, puts Supernice founder Daren Fuchs under the spotlight. Simply put, the startup promotes better user engagement for brands to connect the online with the offline world. This is done by designing digital widgets ranging from web, mobile to touch and gesture-based applications focused on improving interactive digital experiences. So far ...

It is sometimes too easy to dish out titbits of startup advice from a venture capital ivory tower without going through the practical realities of executing a business plan, but pattern recognition could close some expectation gaps. As Paul Graham pointed out in his version of the Startup Curve, while many people think startups are smoothly up and to the right all the time, the path to success is more of a roller coaster ride. Because of a fragile startup ecosystem in South Africa, startups here ...

Mobile point-of-sale company, SumUp, recently raised a rumoured 'double-digit million Euro' round in Series B funding from Groupon and American Express. Today it announced further Series B funding with investment from BBVA Ventures. The investment from BBVA Ventures, which is the corporate venture arm of multinational banking group BBVA, will help SumUp cement its position in Spain and Portugal, as well as expand into South America in the near future, reports The Next Web. The investment amount is undisclosed, but it ...

The organisers behind the RailsBridge Workshop, believe that there is a gender imbalance in Cape Town's tech community. The inaugural "one-and-a-bit day" Ruby programming course that runs from 26 July to 27 July, aims to serve as a starting point to women interested in coding. The free workshop which promises to show how programming skills can be useful, empowering, and fun -- particularly in the context of the web -- is bound to pique the interest of female entrepreneurs who ...