Fundamo co-founder and CEO Hannes van Rensburg is set to head up the Sub-Saharan division of Visa -- the world’s largest debit and credit card network. The South African-based mobile money platform has been a part of Visa since mid-2011 when it was bought out for US$110-million. Elizabeth Buse, Group President of Visa Asia-Pacific, Central Europe, Middle-East and Africa reckons that Van Rensburg intuitively understands “the social, political and business environment in Sub-Saharan Africa”. She thinks that this understanding comes largely ...

Some people think that social gifting is the next big thing in tech. Hell some even think it’s the future of ecommerce. One of the latest guests to the part is a site called Active Gifts. According to the Ukranian-based company’s CEO Artem Sukhoroslov, the site’s aim is to make sure that 100% of people receiving gifts are satisfied with them. He claims to have to stats that show 75% of people only pretend to be satisfied with the gifts ...

Are you afraid all your friends on Facebook will miss out on your latest status update? You know, because it's super-important? Well fret no more. The social networking giant is reportedly testing out a system that lets people pay US$2 to promote their status updates above everyone else's. At the moment, the feature is only available to a select group of ordinary users. What it's effectively doing is monetising is popularity -- sort of like one of those really shitty ...

Ghostbusters has always been awesome but back in 1984 it was even cooler than Apple. That’s why the Cupertino-based tech giant parodied the movie’s theme song in a video for it's international sales conference that year. The concept for the video is pretty simple: Apple employees rid store shelves of IBM products. They’re ‘Blue busters’ you see, ridding the world of the dark-suited drudgery of Big Blue. Look, if you know the history of Apple, you’ll know how much of a ...

Microsoft Bing recently announced a huge overhaul to its user interface, which will see social media feeds from sites like Facebook and Twitter incorporated into a new social side bar on search results pages. The bar includes relevant posts from people you're following using your social accounts (assuming you're signed in at the time), as well as suggestions from experts that Bing thinks could answer your question. All of this may seem a bit similar to the way dear ...

It’s pretty much accepted wisdom that Africa has been at the forefront of mobile payment tech for a while now. But how many of you knew that the first mobile financial service in an emerging market went live 10 years ago in Africa? Celpay, which is powered by South African-based company Fundamo, launched in Zambia way back in 2002. That’s a full five years before Kenya’s mobile darling MPesa went live. It was the first in a series of services aimed ...

Google's investing in Africa in a big way. Its startup incubators -- Umbono in South Africa and Edba2 in Egypt -- are great examples of this investment. Now it wants to give journalism on the continent a boost. The internet giant today announced the US$1-million African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC) which it says is aimed at helping African journalism "flourish in the digital age". The project will provide grants from US$12 500 to US$100 000 for projects aimed at strengthening ...

It pretty much goes without saying that people on the move would use a device that they can carry along with them on their travels. Unless the whole point of travelling was to get away from their inbox or they enjoyed the simple pleasure of carting a desktop computer around. So it's not surprising to learn that three out of four active travellers take their mobile device along when they hop on a plane and jet off to some fantastic ...

South Korea is a leading player in the global tech industry with Korean brands leaving their mark in various sectors. While we hear a lot about South Korean firms innovating and pushing the envelope, there is hardly any platform to showcase the thriving software and tech startup scene in South Korea. BeLaunch hopes to do just that by giving a platform for Korean startups and at the same time enable people and organizations outside Korea to tap into the exciting ...

Recently, Eric Jackson at Forbes, wrote an article that suggests that Google and Facebook will struggle to maintain their market dominance as technology increasingly shifts toward mobile computing. Jackson makes the point that many of the companies that started at the birth of the Web (Web 1.0) struggled to survive as social networking (Web 2.0) began to emerge. Now, he thinks that we are entering a new technical phase, where the Web is no longer relevant and mobile is king. ...