When you think about the number of tech communities popping up everywhere, the question no one seems to ask is whether or not the ecosystem they are in is sustainable. When you think about it scientifically, in a marine ecosystem, if one link is missing the entire ecosystem suffers. It is easy to watch the meteoric rise of a growing tech scene, full of promise, innovators and 10-million people ready to make the same mistakes. It's easy to get caught ...

Things seem to be going well for Rocket Internet, with news and investments coming every week from the ecommerce cookie cutter company. This time it's with LAZADA, Southeast Asia's (SEA) largest online shopping "mall". The company has announced a new round of funding and the welcoming of Verlinvest, a Belgian family-owned, consumer-focused investment holding company as an investor. Together, with existing investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group, LAZADA's investors have pumped in an impressive US$100-million in a ...

EDGE Campus, the Stellenbosch-based education software startup, has just announced the launch of Qurio-- a free mobile and web product designed to help simplify assessment processes for teachers across the African continent. The product goes live at the 2013 African Education Week. As important as assessment has been in helping educators to better understand how and when to intervene, the process is too often "tedious" and "proves to be a logistical and practical nightmare." According to the startup's research, educators in ...

The University of Stellenbosch Business School's Executive Development (USB-ED) and Micro Enterprise Development Organisation (MEDO) have signed a letter of intent to collaborate. This is a partnership between one of the top executive development programs in the world and a support initiative attempting to bridge the gap between the disadvantaged and quality tertiary education. MEDO wants to change the creation and sustainable development of entrepreneurs dependent on corporate Enterprise Development (ED) funding to enable training, business support and relevant initiatives ...

As work takes up a substantial part of our lives, it's a question that often evokes a see-sawing set of emotions -- and yet, the answer is simple, really. What compels us to leap, despite a menacing set of fears? I think it has to do with desire. Very simply, the chains of apprehension will snap at a disproportionately great desire to explore the uncharted. So the short answer is: you will if you want to. But do you really want ...

Fab, the gay social network turned ecommerce-design service with 14-million registered members, is now worth over US$1-billion after it received US$150 million in Series D funding. One of the investors involved in the round was none other than Tencent, China's largest listed Internet company whose services include social networks, ecommerce and web portals. Fab's impressive valuation has almost doubled since its last round of funding a year ago, but the company remains unprofitable, according to The Wall Street Journal. This indicates ...

The WordPress themes' space has gotten quite crowed in the last few years. From ThemeForest to Elegant Themes, the competitors have boxed it out for dominance, or at least tried to establish their niche within the WordPress ecosystem. All the while one competitor has quietly gone about its business, and reaped the rewards. This is WooThemes. Everybody loves a good origin story A proudly South African company, although many don't know it, WooThemes has quite a Romantic tale behind it. It was ...

German serial web company copiers, Rocket Internet, is reporting that its Nigeria-based Amazon wannabe, Jumia, will move to a new 90 000 sqft warehouse in Lagos which will house 500 employees and "create the largest ecommerce campus in West Africa." Jumnia has now served more than 500 000 customers since its launch, one year ago and is reporting approximately 100 000 unique visitors a day -- making it Nigeria's fourth most visited website according to Rocket Internet (and 18th according ...

Last week, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs released its impact report on the state of global business. According to the organisation, one of the biggest factors hindering growth in emerging markets is access to loans and funds. "We live in a world today in which one of the biggest problems that we face is a lack of jobs. As we think about what’s going in the Middle East and North Africa, and the challenges that we see in Africa, ...

With more than 400-million users of its UC Browser, China’s UCWeb is probably one of most popular mobile browser makers in the world. UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu tells us that that the company’s first product started as a BlackBerry Messenger type of service called UCMail. Unfortunately, it didn’t take off. But the team was quick to realize that people weren’t using UCMail. Rather, they wanted an application that could help them browse the web. So in 2004, UCMail rebranded to UCWeb, ...