With so much focus on advancing the entrepreneurial ecosystems around African startup hubs at the moment, more and more Africans are starting their own businesses by choice as opposed to necessity. But, not all interesting ventures that launch can automatically claim ‘startup’ status. While the essence of successful innovation-driven Silicon Valley startups can be found in the African spirit of Ubuntu, African ventures are still mostly backed by efficiency-driven entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, game-changing startups from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana have ...

Globally, the discussion around innovation has been one of great interest especially in the wake of troubling economic times in the recent past. The discussion is strong in relation to Africa’s situation as well. Innovation sometimes can be a bit hard to describe in exact terms but one thing is for sure, you always know genuine innovation or innovativeness when you see it. Yet, it is a critical component to our ability to deal with the challenges of today and the ...

A couple of months ago, Facebook acquired the wildly popular photo sharing social network, Instagram, for a cool US$1-billion. Popular yes, profitable? Nope. With zero revenue to speak of, hacker-CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw something in Instagram and its thirteen employees that justified spending a chunk of Facebook’s newly acquired change after its record-breaking, yet troubled IPO. What’s the next billion dollar idea? It’s anyone’s guess, but here are our favourites. Pinterest Pinterest, the social scrapbooking darling has seen its user base shoot past ...

Magic: The Gathering, released in the early 1990s, is the most widely played trading card game in the world. With numbers in the region of 12-million players and fans, Magic has expanded each year with new cards, rule tweaks, global tournaments and, more recently, tapping into the digital market. The aim of the game is to take out your opponent(s) by casting spells, creatures and artefacts to ultimately reduce their life to zero. The decks of cards come in different colours: ...

The mobile banking wars are hotting up. Just a day after Nedbank released a beta app to its staff, fellow South African banking giant Standard Bank quietly slipped out one of its own. The app, which is currently available for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry launched yesterday without any official announcement from Standard Bank. The launch comes just under a year after First National Bank (FNB) launched the country's first mobile banking app. Like FNB's effort, Standard Bank's app comes with ...

Ever tried to log into your Facebook or Google account, only to be asked to enter your credit card details? Of course the two most popular websites in the world would be a prime target for anyone looking to plant some malware, but according to a new study, it's getting more difficult to detect the threats. The latest report from cybercrime security company ThreatMetrix describes how a new version of the Zeus Trojan is targeting Facebook and Gmail log in ...

A spat has broken out between a blogger and two high-profile internet radio stations, with new threats of legal action. On Monday, Shaun Dewberry wrote a blog post calling the listener figures of South African online radio stations, including 2OceansVibe Radio and Ballz Radio, "complete fabrications. Utter nonsense. Lies, even". Dewberry, who describes himself as "probably the first South African on Twitter" and has the Twitter handle @shaun is a techie at Interwebsradio, a Rock and Indie streaming radio ...

Shaun Dewberry, the blogger at the centre of an escalating internet radio listener stats storm has been served with legal papers by the company who provides these stats to a number of high-profile internet radio stations. Dewberry, who describes himself as "probably the first South African on Twitter" and has the Twitter handle @shaun is a techie at Interwebsradio, a Rock and Indie streaming radio station. On Monday, Dewberry wrote a blog post calling the listener figures of South African online ...

This is interesting. Very interesting. The launch of Flipboard for Android in China is giving users in that country access to Twitter. As The Next Web points out, the social network is usually blocked in the country except to people using a virtual private network (VPN). Flipboard allows users not on a VPN to tweet from their accounts. Admittedly iOS users have been able to do so since the app launched for the iPad in December 2011 and the iPhone ...

It is a well-known fact that if a customer has a negative experience with a service or brand, they are more likely to share it than one that is satisfied. Sharing experiences is now an everyday task to many with the birth of the social web where everyone is a public journalist. That said, anyone can post anything at any time to their favourite social media channel for the world to see. With the fast digital landscape we are busy ...