Held in Nairobi Kenya from 24 to 25 October this year, the DEMO Africa conference will feature 40 entrepreneurs hailing from Cape Town to Cairo presenting their innovative technologies. They'll be pitching to a mix of everyone from investors and fellow entrepreneurs to the tech media. So, what can we expect to see? The 40 startups listed below are the ones that have made it through a series of screening processes out of a total of 300 submitted applications this year. ...

Whether it's information-led mobile startups, innovative ways of distributing crucial equipment or finding better ways of gathering health-related data, these award-winning startups use science and entrepreneurial ingenuity in order to address significant issues. Last week I wrote about local elearning and eco-friendly startups and how both industries are becoming more and more lucrative. Similarly, agriculture and the health-related tech industries are also in high demand. Agri-and biotech startups The need for sustainable and innovative methods of farming has become crucial in ...

Ray Chan, co-founder of 9GAG, possibly the world’s largest user-generated funny content website, says that their team seldom listens to what others have to say. Running a user-generated content site like 9GAG is no easy task. With more than 70-million unique visitors every month, they sure have their fair share of kitten pictures, funny memes and haters running amok. Chan recently shared why they “barely” listen to anything people tell them to do with the company. Making decisions Chan started off by quoting ...

Eight of App Korea's early-stage startups are currently readying themselves to head to the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco. On the way, the startups are hoping for more international recognition and to highlight innovation in the Southeast Asian region. The startups are offering services ranging from cloud services, translation, e-commerce, travel, photo curation, e-learning, social networking and even K-pop video streaming. The trip is sponsored by KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency) while the startups will present themselves from 9 ...

Editors' Lab Cape Town is a two-day hackathon taking place from 6-7 September that will be taking place in the city at 24.com’s digital headquarters and is organised by the Global Editors Network, the African Media Initiative and Google. The collaboration includes 14 teams competing to create the most innovative news-driven mobile app or website. The teams will use public data or other content to build mobile apps or digital tools that help audiences become ‘active citizens’ by better understanding ...

Africa's internet scene is growing, Africans are building killer apps and innovating in amazing ways. One of the pioneers leading Africa into a new age of disruption is Jason Njoku, the founder of iROKO Partners -- a media entertainment empire that owns iRoking and the insanely popular iROKOtv. Njoku has been heralded as the creator of Africa's Netflix by Forbes' and was also been named one of the continent's richest entrepreneurs by the publication. iROKOtv is an African video streaming ...

Accelerators and incubators, are they good or bad for startups? There is a strong sense that despite startups needing a helping hand, whether that might be with funding, work space, facilities or network, there could be a negative effect that these programmes have upon young companies -- namely that they never learn to walk on their own two feet. Mich Atagana chats to Andrea Böhmert in our latest Venture Talk, the co-founder of the newly launched Grindstone Accelerator Programme, designed ...

Microsoft South Africa has partnered with the Government’s JobsFund to further help drive the creation of up to 600 technology start-ups over the next three years by dramatically expanding its BizSpark programme, which supports small software developer entrepreneurs. Although the BizSpark initiative has launched a while ago, the partnership with SA's JobsFund will use funding from the Government’s Jobs Fund and Microsoft’s own 4Afrika initiative. This will give qualifying local software development startups access to development tools, business support through accelerators ...

Startups get a lot of attention from the industry. Simple as that. They are the sexier, jazzier, more vulnerable babies that the media gets excited about, and investors want to nurture. However what happens to startups when they grow up? When they perhaps graduate from an incubation or acceleration programme and need to walk on their own? They still have a lot of growing up to do, yet there is an expectation that they should be fully-functional companies at that ...

Every successful startup founder has to be first and foremost a great salesperson. It means to be able to sell a brand-new concept before it even exists. To get key stakeholders and users to buy in requires some creative promising -- and some faking it till making it. However, there is a thin but clear line between that and blatantly lying. One of the greatest startup salesmen was Steve Jobs. As the legend that he is, many have simply chosen to ...