Mxit Archives - Memeburn

Weekly Round Up Podcast #80: Google Pixel, PlayStation VR, Mxit & more
By Staff Reporter on 7 October, 2016
Welcome to Weekly Round Up, our podcast discussing the latest tech trends, innovation, and news from the last few days covered on the Burn Media network's four sites. This week, Hadlee Simons plays host to Graham van der Made, Andy Walker and Matthew Alexander. In a week that saw a slew of hardware announcements, reviews and news, we discuss Microsoft's first Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive game ReCore. While Graham might have some choice comments towards ReCore, he's also currently playing Gears of War 4. We talk a little bit about that as well. PlayStation VR's first reviews are finally filtering...
South Africa’s Mxit is now finally, officially dead
By Andy Walker: Editor on 6 October, 2016
Once prolific South African chat app Mxit has officially died a quiet and lonely death, taking the likes of Joebanker, Info and Tradepost with it. The Stellenbosch-based company announced in October 2015 that it was to shut its doors to users spending their days on its instant messaging service. On 1 October 2016, the company finally pulled the plug. First spotted by BusinessTech, those who have a Mxit account will now be unable to log in, let alone access or send messages. Visiting the company's long-standing website also produces 404 errors. Although Mxit's demise is fairly unconcerning for most, it's safe to...

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Weekly Round Up #41: Mxit closure, Venture Capital, Halo 5, Twitter and Apple financials
By Myolisi Sikupela: Staff Reporter on 30 October, 2015
Welcome to Weekly Roundup, our podcast discussing the latest tech trends, innovation and news from the last few days. This week on BurnCast, Stuart Thomas talks to Gearburn Editor Andy Walker, Sales Manager Nick Thomson, and Staff Reporters Graham van de Made and Jacques Coetzee. The team discusses the collapse of Mxit, SAVCA's survey on Venture Capital in South Africa, Halo 5, Twitter and Apple financial reports for the Q4 2015. The team talks about what games, television series, movies they are looking forward to playing and things get awkward when Stu reveals that he is looking forward to playing a...
Thought Leader Friday: Sarah Rice, Batstone founder, speaks about purpose in business
By Myolisi Sikupela: Staff Reporter on 16 October, 2015
Hosted by Creative Spark and Burnmedia, our Thought Leader Friday sessions give our team, clients and other key members of the industry the opportunity to listen to insights from experts in the field. Our Friday sessions have featured the likes of Alan Knott-Craig Jnr (ex Mxit CEO), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) and Ogilvy’s Gavin Levinsohn. These sessions are an opportunity to learn as well as network with others in the industry. Also, beer. This Thought Leader Friday session was delivered by Sarah Rice, founder of Batstone, and a technology communications specialist with over a decade's worth of experience. Rice ran...
Mxit: the rise and collapse of ‘Africa’s largest social network’
By Stuart Thomas on 27 February, 2015
Flashback to 2010. Naspers is still a majority shareholder in Mxit, at this stage Africa's largest social network and instant messaging client with 27-million registered users. It is the darling of the South African technology space, proof that a digital African company can play on the international stage. Perhaps even more importantly, it is an inspiration to any number of mobile startups in South Africa and Africa as a whole. Five years later, it's changed ownership, undergone wide-scale retrenchments, and its user numbers are believed to have fallen even lower than it's willing to admit. So where did it all...

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Sources: fresh retrenchments at Mxit
By Stuart Thomas on 28 November, 2014
African mobile social network Mxit has begun a fresh round of retrenchments as it looks to find its place in a mobile messaging space dominated by US and Asian players. A source close to the company confirmed to Memeburn that the Stellenbosch-based company today began negotiations with staff around its downsizing efforts. This is the second wave of retrenchments at the company in the last couple of years. In late 2012, following the departure of maverick entrepreneur Alan-Knott Craig Jr, the company laid off nearly a third of its staff. At the same time however, it said that...

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Mxit offers CodeX sponsorship to help breed SA’s young coder generation
By Myolisi Sikupela: Staff Reporter on 20 November, 2014
Mxit, the South African messaging app, is offering three sponsorships for the next intake of CodeX -- the local programming apprenticeship school. Through this partnership, three bursaries valued at R25 000 each will be given to some lucky Mxit users. Considering that Mxit has about 6 million users in South Africa, being chosen will not be a stroll by the beach. CodeX is a new incubator that focuses on breeding highly skilled software developers to grow the South African technology ecosystem. It does this by training young, talented minds to build real software products. CodeX is also supplemental to tertiary...

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Nal’ibali reading campaign joins Mxit to improve SA’s literacy with new app
By Jacques Coetzee: Staff Reporter on 2 September, 2014
The Nal'ibali reading campaign has joined forces with South African based social networking platform Mxit to launch an app aimed at better distributing children's stories together with literacy tips across the country. Mainly driven by PRAESA (the Project for the Study of Alternative Education) and Times Media, Nal'ibali (isiXhosa for “here’s the story”) was launched in 2012 with a mission to spark children's potential through storytelling and reading. The partnership with Mxit Reach allows anyone with a mobile handset -- including feature phones -- to help share stories, literacy tips and support with children in their mother tongues. ...
Can features like Chat Cards and Newsfeed make Mxit cool again?
By Stuart Thomas on 10 April, 2014
Not so long ago, Mxit appeared to be caught in something of a malaise. Alan Knott Craig Jr, the man who promised to change the company from the ground up had parted ways with it, the board appeared reluctant to appoint a new CEO and its product was stuck in pretty much the same place it had been in for years. No one can accuse it of that now. In the space of a few months and under new CEO Francois Swart, it has launched brand new smartphone and feature phone versions, launched in India and rolled out a host...

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Building the next Mxit: where is South Africa’s next big mobile business?
By Hilton Tarrant: Columnist on 26 March, 2014
Isn’t it a sad indictment on everyone involved in the tech/mobile/start-up industry in South Africa that the most exciting mobile business to emerge from the country is roughly a decade old (in its current incarnation as messaging app)? A decade?! I look at list after list of startups to watch and there’s nothing that stands out as ‘wow’. There’s the inevitable grouping of half-baked clones of services and products that exist in foreign markets. Is copying and pasting an idea from the US going to make you wildly successful and able to cash out and hardly ever work again? Probably not....

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Mxit officially launches in India, sets sights on massive feature phone base
By Stuart Thomas on 29 January, 2014
Plans from Mxit, the South African based mobile social network, to expand into India have hardly been a well-kept secret, but it's still a pretty interesting move and now it's official. Mxit today officially launched its India operation, headed up by Sam Rufus Nallaraj (a former contestant on The Apprentice Asia and Vice President at Deloitte & Touché in Hyderabad) with former South African cricketer and Indian coach Gary Kirsten as the face of its marketing campaign. While India's smartphone market is burgeoning, it looks like Mxit is aiming its sights squarely at the country's massive feature phone user...

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Mxit’s India foray: what we know so far [update]
By Stuart Thomas on 28 January, 2014
It's hardly unfair to say that Mxit was in stuck in stasis for a little while. Between Alan Knott Craig Jr leaving and the launch of Mxit 7, the company just seemed to kind of exist. Now though, it looks like the company's determined not to let the cobwebs settle again as it prepares for a full-frontal assault on the Asian markets, starting with India. While Mxit has always been supported in India, its user numbers are limited. Of the 7.4-million or so monthly active users it lays claim to 84% are in South Africa, with most of the...

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Twitter wants to be a messaging app, Instagram wants to be Snapchat. And that’s missing the point…
By Hilton Tarrant: Columnist on 18 December, 2013
Of course Snapchat turning down a US$3-billion offer from Facebook has made everyone sit up and take notice. That’s real money, even for the Valley. Is it a surprise that Twitter last week moved direct messaging to the timeline? Is it a surprise that it's added photo messaging to DMs? Is it a surprise that Instagram launched private (‘Direct’) messaging? No. No. No. And it's also not a surprise that those two companies unveiled these features within a day of each other. It's a fight for attention. Right now, there’s no winner takes all. Even WhatsApp (ironically the least innovative...

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Mxit reboots with #mxit7… Now what?
By Hilton Tarrant: Columnist on 19 November, 2013
Mxit 7 on iOS is gorgeous. Its reimagined J2ME client is perhaps even more impressive. But, as we’ve seen over and over again, a gorgeous product does not a successful product make... First, a disclosure: I know a fair number of people at Mxit. I've known CMO Vincent Maher for almost a decade. New rockstar chairman Michael Jordaan. Product manager Peter Matthaei. Brad Whittington. And a few ex-Mxit staffers, like Sarah Rice. I haven't spoken to any of them about this piece. Nor have I spoken to them about what's gone on behind the scenes over the past year....

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Mxit 7 is here: fresh feature phone app, smartphone version to come
By Stuart Thomas on 12 November, 2013
The new version of Mxit is here. Okay, it isn't really a surprise, given that we were able to give you preview of it late last week. What is interesting is that the mobile social network seems to be doing as much as possible to dismiss any notions that it might have forgotten the feature phone customers who make up the core of its user base. The decision to release Mxit 7 for feature phones today, for instance, can't be accidental. Especially given that it will be followed later in the week by versions for iPhone and iPad....

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