Cape Town radio station 567 CapeTalk, with Sage Pastel, has announced the winner of the CapeTalk Small Business Awards 2013, a three-week competition that was geared towards finding the small business in the Western Cape with the best service, according to CapeTalk listeners. The winner of the competition's fifth iteration is landscape design and maintenance company Garden Vision; with health eshop Earthshine and animated explainer-video production company Blink Tower taking the two runners up spots. Garden Vision, and owner Jeremy McLaughlin, was ...

Technology: the great equaliser. It can empower so many players in an industry, from buyers and sellers to suppliers and competitors. It can cheapen infrastructure, and create new channels of distribution (think the internet and ecommerce). Technology has the power to change an industry's structure, which can also lower its profitability (such as the internet and ecommerce), but it also has the ability to open up new markets across all industries. If we look at say a five to 15 ...

This is interesting. Makeup and beauty subscription service rubybox has joined the 24.com stable as the Naspers-owned portal expands beyond its core publishing business. Rubybox, which acquired competitor GlamBox SA last year as part of an investment deal with VC company Hasso Platner Ventures Africa, was launched in September 2011 by Sylvia Gruber and co-founder Margaux Knuppe in 2011. It claims to have a consumer base of around 50 000 -- something it thinks will combine well with the six-million ...

Cameroon-based company QuickTicket has launched a campaign on Indiegogo today with the hopes of ultimately raising US$14 880. The company aims to solve the problem of purchasing and making ticket related arrangements in many parts of Africa. The web-based platform will let travelers and agencies view bus schedules, reserve or purchase tickets, preview each bus plan and choose favorable seats, monitor the status of buses they book for and check for parcel deliveries. They will also receive bus status updates and ...

In my book, there are two types of entrepreneurs -- the serious variety who use technology and innovation to disrupt industries and deliver major impacts and revenues, and the lifestyle variety who have swapped a job at a corporate for a startup that delivers incremental improvement on a problem set that is minor in nature. Lifestyle entrepreneurs often build companies that end up selling time and expertise rather than a unique product or solution that drives change. Their startups never ...

Joot Ventures Sdn Bhd, the company that developed Joota, a social content network, today announced that it has secured a total of USD 700K funding from two investment sources -- US$500K from Interactive E Solutions JLT of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and, US$200K from an undisclosed individual angel investor. The new cash infusion will boost the startup's finance product development and support its global marketing moves. The news shows that social startups still manage to attract investment, at least in Malaysia. ...

GoMetro, the startup that publishes real-time transport information for commuters, today announced the launch of a mobile jobs portal, GoMetro Jobs. Keeping in line with the startup's previous team effort -- read more about the iROKING music service partnership -- it is introducing the service with the help of cloud-based recruitment software company, graylink. Commuters will have access to 500 (or so) job listings from employers like Discovery, Shoprite, Mercedes Benz, Telkom and Woolworths. Graylink CEO Mark Gray says that the partnership ...

I think we’re beginning to see a growing influx of Asian entrepreneurs looking at problems outside of Asia to solve. Smart Voicemail is a startup along these lines that tackles a problem you just don’t see in Asia. The startup focuses on automating voicemails for people in the USA and Europe. It’s only something we see in developed nations that didn’t leapfrog straight into cellphones and texting. In the USA, people used to receive voicemails on their answering machines. Just ...

Like most things in life, working at a young dynamic startup company has its ups and downs. A recent unofficial survey of more than 150 startup employees suggests that low pay and lack of company structure are what concern them the most. What the survey has noted is that many of a startup company's characteristics are double-edged swords. For instance, having an open-minded work environment might mean that there'll be more space for your ideas but it lacks organisational structure. ...

So we have told South African startups what's what when it comes to the happenings of the country's startup ecosystem. People have been asking us about other parts of Africa and if we could put together a comprehensive guide for other regions as well. We have heard you and done as you have asked, this time putting our focus on East Africa. Update: yes, it's true: we've now put together a summary of the West African startup landscape too. As ...