A few months ago, we at Burn Media HQ discovered a curious new courier service in our neighbourhood: you can tweet to get a grilled cheese sandwich delivered straight to you face. Needless to say, it sparked our interest as much it did our appetite. It turned out that the Grilled Cheese Club is run by local entrepreneur, Simon Hartley, as a trial service fitting into his bigger vision of a cheap, efficient on-demand courier service in South Africa. It's ...

South African digital agency, Aqua Group, has just confirmed the acquisition of nine-year-old software company, Applogix. The deal will help Aqua strengthen its role as a strong digital competitor with a focus on the ever growing mobile and ecommerce market. “The acquisition of Applogix is a strategic move that demonstrates our commitment to providing our clients with a fully-integrated digital service,” says Brent Shahim, CEO of Aqua. “[Applogix] gives us the ability to bring clients powerful strategic and technological solutions ...

The notable red and yellow German logistics company DHL Express recently announced a massive growth milestone of 1000% within the last three years in sub-Saharan Africa. This impressive growth is mostly attributed to its third party business partnership strategy. In the press release, DHL Express notes that it's increased its service points from 300 to over 3 300. Apart from the DHL outlets, the company has also partnered with key business owners or resellers including electronic stores and travel agencies ...

And it's probably not bitcoin. In the last couple of years, startups - especially within the tech sector - have (finally) been given a bit more time in the spotlight. I'd say that this has mostly coincided with endeavours like Silicon Cape and the passion of a handful of individuals (entrepreneurs, investors and geeks) to create more of an ecosystem for (tech) entrepreneurs to flourish. I've mostly been on the fence about getting overly involved or saying anything overly opinionated about this, ...

One of Southern Africa's leading ecommerce companies, uAfrica, today announced the winners of the six award categories highlighting the best in the online retail space at the eCommerce Awards held at the eCommerce Conference 2014. The eCommerce Conference is designed to help people keep up to date with the latest trends in ecommerce, present the best the world of ecommerce has to offer, and of course, to be able to network and share business ideas with industry colleagues. As part of ...

Long ago in a world far, far away (Cape Town, 2010), I started and ran a group-buying website. Yes, I was taken in by the amazing allure of Groupon, the "fastest growing company in the world". Little did I realise growing too fast was not actually a positive. Nevertheless, I was hooked and put together a small team that would launch a site and start selling deals within a month. It took us just over four weeks to put up our ...

What makes a good business? Is it the idea? Or perhaps the market gap? Maybe it is the business model or timing. There are many different elements that make a good business. Every day in Africa a startup is launched or an idea is born. If there is a problem and it has a tech fix, someone in South Africa is working on it. We want to you to tell us why your business is great and why this idea could ...

For the second time this year, the LaunchLab initiative is offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their ideas to win their share of R80 000 in seed funding. With a slight change this time round, Stellenbosch University has partnered with the University of the Western Cape to make the Pitching Den "bigger and better" than the previous round help earlier this year. With a Microsoft BizSpark sponsorship, the pitching venues will be taking place on three university campuses, namely Stellenbosch University, ...

In the run-up to the 2014 South African eCommerce Conference, which will be held on 4 September in Johannesburg, uAfrica has just announced the top 30 shortlisted sites. Apart from announcing the top ecommerce store in South Africa, the event promises to excite and inspire attendees with a line up of international and local speakers who will be covering topics pertinent to the ecommerce industry. Currently in their ninth year, the eCommerce Awards received over 116 000 eCommerce survey responses, the results ...

Bitcoin in Africa is brewing with potential. From Ghana to Kenya there are interesting startups trying to tackle the issue of remittances, while in South Africa popular payment gateway PayFast recently introduced bitcoin integration to more than 30 000 of its ecommerce clients. But although this is very exciting, the adoption rate of the cryptocurrency is still very slow due to an abundance of misconceptions and a lack of infrastructure. South African startup Xoin (pronounced with the Xhosa click) is hoping to ...