Wednesday, November 27African Digital Business Magazine

Tech

South Africa News, Tech

SA tech company tackles water crisis

“SAVING WATER GETS A SMART SOLUTION“ Cape Town’s drought has changed most South Africans’ thinking around water usage and the future of the country’s water supplies. Government tariffs and self-regulation has meant a re-think in our relationship with water and how we go about using, saving and re-purposing this scarce resource. A Cape Town company, recognizing the need for creating a sustainable home and a more empowered consumer in a future where resources will become increasingly under pressure, has produced a smart water management solution to answer the growing need for the monitoring of water usage at your fingertips. “GaugeIT allows for the evolution of a smarter, more engaged consumer, by empowering them with near-real-time water consumption information directly on their cell pho...
South Africa News, Tech

Transformation in Africa’s digital retail landscape

Undeniably, digital transformation continues to dramatically change the way we live and do business – almost daily it seems. Globally, the retail industry is one of the top industries in which we are seeing massive strides and changes when it comes to the adoption of technology, the evolving customer journey, and innovation in terms of products and services. Africa's retail landscape is no exception. On the face of it markets in Africa are outperforming some first world countries in their pace of transformation to meet the needs of the rising digitally-savvy customer population – a consumer base which is now generally better informed,  and demanding a more personalised, convenient, on demand service. The retail journey is no longer about merely walking into a store and grabbing something ...
Tech

Unearthing the IoT in Agriculture

Real-time monitoring of airborne pathogen spores for M2M disease forecasting IoT M2M connectivity specialist Eseye has partnered with Burkard, designers and builders of air samplers for agricultural research since 1953, to harness the power of the IoT. Burkard has developed a piece of real-time pathogen monitoring equipment to predict and provide an early warning system of crop disease risk. The collaboration with Eseye and its AnyNet Secure™ SIM and technology, delivers highly secure and reliable global cellular network data through its AnyNet Secure™ SIM, and provides automatic routing onto up to 440 cellular operators in 190 countries and links seamlessly to the AWS Cloud. Increasing the world’s food supply is a major issue, crop diseases can have a devastating humanitarian and econom...
Main, Tech

Technological Trends in Africa

By Rafiq Raji ‘Africa Tech’ is the True ‘Africa Rising’  Leading African technology (Africa Tech) innovators believe the African culture has become attuned to the internet age. [1] The internet-consuming culture is now fully African, they say. As they are some of the leading techies on the continent, they probably know what they are saying. The example of one of them, Jason Njoku – who founded iROKOtv, perhaps the most comprehensive online catalogue of Nigerian movies, popularly known as ‘Nollywood’ – is instructive. His idea was about using technology to meet a longstanding need of Africans in the diaspora, who are typically nostalgic about home, craving content and news about the continent. It also typifies the trend towards making technology more African: Africa Tech is essentially A...
Africa Travel, Ethiopia News, Tech

Hotels in Ethiopia Grip on Online Marketing

Whether a hotel property is independent or part of a larger chain, there is a need to be international and strategic in how best to boost brand awareness. Billboards are effective but only attract the attention of people in close proximity while TV and print ads have a larger, albeit local, reach. The time has come for online marketing to bring business from around the world. It allows businesses to tell people about their hotel offers. Promotion and growth are directly proportional to each other in business sphere, hotel booking companies such as Jovago.com promote hotels without charging promotion fees. Currently, over 500 hotels based in Ethiopia came on board with this company website broadening their accessibility and increasing number of bookings. Online with its universal attribut...
Tech

Dramatically boost network resilience with hardware-accelerated SMP

Mervin Kamoetie, Country Manager at Infinera Network resilience is a key requirement for modern telecommunications providers — and that’s particularly true when the carrier operates a fiber-optic network. The interdependence of business processes and the network, combined with an increasing number of natural disasters and manmade fiber cuts, has made the ability of the fiber infrastructure to quickly recover vital. Service providers are moving towards mesh-based transport networks, and the latest technological advance is the standards-based Shared Mesh Protection, which leverages an intelligent GMPLS control plane so a meshed transport network can recover from multiple local and network-wide failures while lowering costs by avoiding the need to dedicate backup bandwidth for every active c...
African News, Interview, South Africa News, Tech

Interview with Gysbert Kappers, CEO of Wyzetalk

Gys’s enterprising technology spirit was clearly evident at a young age when in his 20’s he started an online and offline transaction platform company that was eventually sold to SourceCom when the family business beckoned.  What followed was a highly successful 18 years career in building the largest privately owned Concrete Masonry Business in South Africa. At its peak, the business consisted of 19 factories across the country with a staff complement in excess of 600 people and a production capacity of more than 600,000 tons per annum. In a multi-million rand buyout in 2008 Gys sold the company to a JSE listed group and after seeing his three years earn-out through it was time to take a break.  Hesitant to jump into another commercial venture straight away, Gys decided to further his stu...
Nigeria News, Tech

HID Global and Botosoft Launch Mobile Student ID System in West Africa to Authenticate Over 2 Million Nigerian Students

News Highlights: HID Global and Botosoft built and delivered system to help West African Examinations Council (WAEC) register and authenticate Nigerian students. Mobile Student ID system helps WAEC combat identity fraud and preserve the value of an education in Nigeria. Handheld mobile readers eliminate identity fraud, verify student attendance and manage rules in real-time. AUSTIN, Texas, May 5, 2015 – HID Global®, a worldwide leader in secure identity solutions, today announced it has successfully launched a mobile student ID system in collaboration with Botosoft, the leading provider of technologies in Africa, to help the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) combat student identity fraud in Nigeria. Every year, beginning in the spring, more than 2.2 million students will register ...
Tech

Epson L120- a smaller, faster and cost effective printer

Ideal for home offices and students looking to cut their printing costs, Epson’s smallest 4-colour, A4, Ink Tank System (ITS) printer features Micro Piezo print head technology and Epson genuine ink so users can print Epson-quality at an ultra-low cost. This product offers a lot of features. Ultra-low-cost printing The L120 offers affordable printing and a low cost per print as it claims. Each set of ink bottles can print up to 4,000 pages in black and 6,500 pages in color, delivering an ultra-low cost per page for both black and color printing. Epson Warranty for Peace of Mind Enjoy warranty coverage of one year or 15,000 prints, whichever comes first, for maximum value from your printer and freedom from worries over its maintenance. Hassle-free and Easy to Use The L120 allows for...
Interview, Kenya News, Nigeria News, South Africa News, Tech

Exclusive interview with Mr. Kresten Buch, the founder of 88mph

Kresten Buch, a Danish web entrepreneur turned investor, brought the accelerator model to Sub Saharan Africa nearly 3 years ago and to date has invested over $3million. How many startups do you have in your business portfolio? 35 What are the most interesting ideas associated with these startups? Ideas give some insight into the entrepreneurs behind them, but they are interesting, too. Experimenting, selling, building, being wrong, being right, hanging in by the skin of your teeth. These things are interesting, and the more audacious each endeavor is, the more interesting is the startup. So far, the startup teams that have been most prone to this extreme entrepreneurial behaviour are Ghafla (entertainment news), Hivisasa (hyper-local news), Mdundo (music), Booknow (bus tickets), A...