Weekly Round Up Podcast #79: Blackberry, Motorola, Ventureburn’s Pitching Den & Twitter

Getting your startup off the ground can be intimidating as all hell. Sometimes you can get so obsessed with your vision that you don’t realise it has deeply ingrained flaws. At one point, South African-based startup evly was stuck in precisely that position. That is, until its boss Eric Edelstein met the founder of cloud-storage phenomenon Dropbox. Here’s how one lunch made the company pivot so successfully that it now has a global footprint. After three months of living in San Francisvar vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

This is ridiculously cool. The brains at Disney's Pittsburgh research lab have figured out how to turn any plant into a responsive multi-touch sensor. The project, called Botanicus Interacticus (which sounds kind of like a spell out of the Harry Potter universe) uses an electrode embedded in the soil below a plant that records the interruption of electronic signals when people touch the plant. Those interruptions can then be programmed into audio and visual responses, programmed back to the user. Imagine walking through a garden of these responsive plants at a Disney theme park one day. You'll know how...

Well that's one way to get attention, UK startup Shutl has offered Jamaican sprinting sensation Usain Bolt a one percent stake in the company, and all the chicken nuggets he can eat. The VC-backed company, which specialises in delivering goods ordered online, sent a letter to Bolt offering him equity in the company and “all the McNuggets” he needs (the sprinter famously ate chicken McNuggets just before his record-breaking 100 metre final in Beijing). According to The Next Web, all he has to do in return is set aside some of his time to help the company break...

South African digital agency, Prezence Digital has announced that it will soon be launching a project it calls the 10Teams/10Brands/10Grand initiative. Established in the UK in 1998, Prezence Digital expanded into South Africa in 2002. The agency, which originally focused on the South African music and movie industries, evolved into the digital sphere with services such as mobi, web, digital campaign management, social media and, more recently, apps. Recently, Prezence Digital made headlines for its wildly successful MandelaStory campaign, with the endorsement of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 94th birthday. The campaign featured on CNN, ITN and leading...

Africa's largest online news portal News 24 is down. Anyone trying to enter the site receives a standard browser message stating that the site is not available. Update: The site is now back up. The company's Twitter account, which has nearly 180 000 followers, put the outage down to "technical difficulties" but did not elaborate any further: We're experiencing some technical difficulties and we're trying to get the site back up as soon as possible.— News24 (@News24) August 10, 2012 The story is much the same on its Facebook page. It did, however, attempt to keep people on its good...

When it comes to studying social networks in emerging market countries, Mexico occasionally gets pushed aside by the BRICS. It shouldn't be. The country looks set to overtake the UK for fifth place in Facebook user numbers, despite the fact that only 30% of the population uses it. Those 36.5-million or so Facebook users also account for 90% of Mexico's social network users. It's growth in the country isn't about to slow down either. According to online research company eMarketer, Facebook will continue to expand in Mexico at double-digit rates through 2014. As has been the case in a number...

I spend a lot of time customising and tweaking my Galaxy Nexus to try squeeze as much as possible from it, but often this results in me missing the part of owning a smartphone which its mainstream users enjoy, namely apps. Google’s Play Store is jam-packed with apps that can do anything you can imagine, literally anything, and I recently found one that I really like, it’s from Big G itself, and it’s called Schemer. Read more on Gearburn. var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

Ahem. If you play World of Warcraft, Diablo, or Starcraft you might want to mosey over to Battle.net around now and change your password. Blizzard's multiplayer platform is the latest big online player to be hacked. According to MacRumours, the hackers managed to get hold of email data for gamers outside of China and scrambled passwords. In a letter to Battle. net users, Blizzard CEO and Michael Morhaime detailed what had happened in the hack, saying that the company did not believe that any financial information had been taken: Even when you are in the business of fun,...