For the past five years, entrepreneur and media mogul Trevor Ncube has advocated for a “Third Way” in Zimbabwean politics. Disillusioned and disappointed with Zimbabwe’s two largest political parties, Ncube envisions a grand political party, made up of the best men and women across the political divide, business community, and civil society. Ncube’s vision sadly remains unfulfilled in the political realm, but has gown roots in Zimbabwe’s budding social media world. Thirty-something accountant Nigel Mugamu (a.k.a. “SirNige”) has succeeded ...

Piccing is on to great things. The "social picture and inspiration sharing platform", as it calls itself, is enjoying rapid growth in user-base, unique visitors to its site, and just secured extra funding. The cherry on top is expansion into South Africa, with a new programming and content development office setting up in Cape Town, South Africa. The web-startup was founded in March 2011 in Palo Alto, California, by European internet entrepreneurs Dirk Spielmann (Zurich, Switzerland), and Nikolaj Zethraeus (Malmö, ...

Ask every startup founder how much time and money they spend on public relations, and the usual answer is “Nothing.” With a limited amount of both resources, entrepreneurs worry about building product and doing sales rather than getting buzz. However, a review of Marissa Mayer’s time at Yahoo! thus far should reveal that not only is PR important, it is vital for early-stage companies to survive. It has been a year since Marissa Mayer started the revolution at Yahoo! – the ...

South African games platform SkillPod Media has announced that its white label gaming solutions for two of the US’s largest publishers, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures Entertainment, have gone live. The company's platform acts as a bridge between publishers and game developers. SkillPod Media's vision is to provide a white label publishing platform that would seamlessly integrate publishers and users. In turn, the platform offers publishers a single content management solution that is fully integrated with multiple game developers. Furthermore, it ...

If Uber hasn't launched in your city yet then you are missing something, because in the last few months the mobile based private car service has been aggressively expanding. The company just got an insane amount of investment from Google Ventures and a few other funders. Think about it this way: if you have US$361.2-million injected into your company, what would you do? Expand expand expand. Things are changing at Uber: the company has revamped its site with a slicker ...

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 ...