Ever wanted to know something about your friends or someone you know but were too afraid to ask? Wish there was an app for that? There probably is, but there is a also a web-service. Enter Qooh.me, the apparent answer to your problem. Qooh.me is a "web application that allows you to ask your friends or people you find interesting open and anonymous questions in order to get to know them better," says creator, Vincent Mabuza. The service essentially takes users ...

Silicon Valley veteran Steve Blank, writing in Xconomy, does a great job in describing six types of startups and how a clear understanding of the needs of each is necessary by national and local governments seeking to foster more innovation: 1. The lifestyle startup On the California coast where I live, we see lifestyle entrepreneurs like surfers and divers who own small surf or dive shop or teach surfing and diving lessons to pay the bills so they can surf and dive ...

Steve Jobs' recent departure from Apple spurred us to create a list of the best and worst tech CEOs over the years. Read, digest and enjoy the triumphs and failures of these men of industry. The game changers Steve Jobs -- Apple No-one did it better than Steve. In the 70s, Jobs designed the most marketable computer of the time, the Apple II. Jobs was fired from Apple in the 80s, formed his own company called NeXT and eventually made his way ...

There was a time when Africa's eCommerce platforms were so few in number as to be negligible. The ever increasing penetration of bandwidth onto the continent has seen that change. Africa now supports a number of viable eCommerce sites, each looking to take hold of a growing market. Here are five of the best: 1. Kalahari Naspers owned Kalahari.com is the market leader in South African eCommerce. Established in 1999, kalahari.com is South Africa's largest online retailer of millions ...

How could you get paid to add to the crowdsourcing debate? It's simple, according to Daniel Neville, Brand Co-ordinator at Idea Bounty. Just do it. Idea Bounty is a global crowdsourcing platform connecting clients with thousands of creatives around the world in order to help "solve marketing and communications briefs and challenges", says the company. Clients pay for only the ideas they use and creatives receive a "bounty" for winning submissions. It's an idea clearly seeking to cash in on the ...

While I was living in Silicon Valley for a couple of months earlier this year, I had the opportunity to see how a number of the startup accelerators over there function, and also to speak to a number of tech entrepreneurs that passed through their programmes. The formal definition of an accelerator is a "programme designed to assist startup businesses with financial and/or operational resources that will increase their chance of growth and success". After seeing them for myself, my definition is ...

"The average time that a Venture Capitalist spends analysing a business plan is 22 seconds" – Speaker at the 26th Venture Capital Institute, Atlanta, 2000. Since this realisation more than 10 years ago I've often wondered whether it was entirely fair towards entrepreneurs who spend significant time and resources to develop a comprehensive business plan. But top tier venture capitalists (VC's) deal with hundreds of business plans a year, and a decision on whether to take the proposal to the next ...

Big Data is, well, big. In the information age, companies are literally drowning in vast oceans of data. Petabytes of data are being gathered everywhere in the digital age at a furious rate, and by a variety of devices. Websites and devices that are collecting data on a large scale include ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, cameras, microphones, RFID readers, and wireless sensor networks. Most large corporates are sitting on mines of data by virtue of their everyday operations and vast ...

Somewhat lost in the news because of Google's acquisition of Motorola, Buddy Media, a New York startup raised US$54-million at a US$500-million valuation. Buddy Media helps corporations set up and run their presence on a wide range of social networks. From Buddy Media: We are in the midst of a massive shift online from a search and intent-based world to a social, people-based world. The last three years were about the consumer side of social platforms, as we watched Facebook, Zynga and Twitter ...

Telecommunication in emerging markets is massive and remains a key growth area the in light of recent shrinking values in other industries. Matthew Guest of accounting firm Deloitte says there is "plenty of opportunity," while warning that are "too many competitors" in some African markets. So how does one stand out in such an environment? Startup ARC Telecoms is an IP telecommunications service provider company specifically dedicated to the small and medium sized business sector in South Africa. The company ...