Startup news

The topic of micropayments has struck a heated note amongst online paywall experts and content providers. There are many who denounce the system, marking it as a tried-and-failed experiment, while others proclaim it as the future of online transactions. A micropayment can be defined as a financial transaction of a small sum of money, usually in an online context. PayPal defines this sum at US$12.00 or less, in terms of its own micropayment system. For the average end-user, micropayments are ...

Kenya is abuzz right now. The outlook for technology and innovation in Africa has never been brighter, and Kenya is positioning itself strategically in anticipation of a wave of groundbreaking web and mobile emerging market products and services. The resources being put into the Kenyan IT sector currently demonstrate how seriously the country is taking the challenge to become Africa’s Innovation hub. The Kenyan Government, through its ICT Board,  recently closed the window for proposals for its $4-million grant towards local content and software ...

Seedcamp, a European micro-seed fund that invests in early stage startup companies, has selected 11 South African technology startups to possibly attend the Seedcamp Week programme held in September in London, UK, where they will be in line for a potential €50 000 investment. Seedcamp, in conjunction with the Tech4Africa conference, put out a call for applications for funding and received more than 40 entries from technology startups across South Africa. The selected African entrepreneurs will have a rare opportunity to ...

Do you like the idea of saving 25% on a floatation hydrotherapy session? Or what about a R100 saving on a meal at Gourmet Burger. If these deals appeal to you, then you might want to consider joining Twangoo.co.za, a new Cape Town-based startup which is harnessing the power of collective buying to make great deals available in cities around South Africa. Collective buying is one of the hottest trends on the web right now, and it's a timely introduction to ...

A new start-up, Smokoo.co.za, has found a unique way of publicising their upcoming launch in South Africa. They're not telling anyone what they do. Instead, the company has begun marketing themselves with a competition where people have to guess what kind of company Smokoo is going to be. The person who comes closest, wins an iPad. The only clues on their homepage are their logo, an iPad and a clock that's counting down towards the launch date of 1 August 2010. They also ...

If you’re in downtown Nairobi before the 4th of August, be sure to pop in to the Barber Q Hair Studio and get yourself a free head massage. The studio is on the 2nd Floor of El-Roi Plaza, close to the Odeon Cinema. This is just one example of the thousands of snippets of information that are at the heart of Mocality, a free-to-list, hyper-local mobile business directory in Nairobi, Kenya. Mocality offers a free business suite of tools to all ...

As I write this story, I’m tucking into my free lunch. Yep, that’s right, I said free lunch. Remember when you were told that “there’s no such thing as...”? Well, that’s because I’m eating it. Vida e caffè just gave me a croissant and a cappucino without a penny leaving my pocket and all because I signed up to AMMO Mobile, a trendy new mobile banking application developed locally that has come swaggering onto the mobile banking playing field with ...

A new South African start-up, Waytag, is setting out with the ambitious goal of revolutionising the way we think about and use addresses. Location-based services are clearly a strong feature in most fast-growing web services and applications, such as FourSquare, GoWalla and Twitter. It can however sometimes seem like these types of applications exist in a world of their own, catering to just a small niche of web-savvy people. Waytag may just change all this by improving the usability of ...

Jamiix, a brand new social-media aggregator that was developed on Cape Town’s notoriously under-resourced and impoverished Cape Flats is launching internationally with grand ambitions to become an integral part of the Web 2.0 landscape. The web and mobile-based tool is described as a “distribution and aggregation technology to engage with clients who are in need of support services”. It grew organically out of a desire for affordable communications in the area of social services, which is a chronic need on the ...

A new South African online-recruitment portal, "developed out of frustration with existing recruitment methods", claims to have developed creative solutions for the difficult task of match-making between employers and employees. Sebenzi.co.za attempts to shake up the existing model, where the power is placed firmly in the hands of the recruitment agencies which have access to a database of CVs, and who frequently share the personal details of recruits without their knowledge or consent. The new players have set out on ...