“Uusi” – meaning New in Finnish

After 18 months of conceptualizing, testing and getting community members to engage with it on different platforms, Uusi the brain-child of one of the RLabs champions, Terence Hendricks, finally was privately released to the public only on the MXit platform. Using MXit as the launchpad was an obvious choice in the South African market with an estimated user base of over 37 Million users.

It was also amazing to see the overwhelming response from our users that we had more than 40,000 active job seekers searching via Uusi and over 1,200 mobile CVs created in 72 hours.

Uusi is a mobile social network that provides its community members access to employment, business and educational opportunities through its network. It was also presented at the World Wide Web conference in September 2010 (see abstract) when the first version of the idea was being tested in the Western Cape region of South Africa. This first phase release of Uusi allows a MXit user to signup and search for relevant jobs according to their needs and criteria.

Uusi is also one of the start-up social enterprises that will be incubated and accelerated through the RLabs Innovation Incubator and Accelerator programme. Additional expansion to the project is under development and will be released over the next few weeks as part of the build-up to the official launch of Uusi end of 2011 truly giving its members their “New Beginning”.

Source: http://rlabs.org

Over the last few months RLabs and NaiLab have been in discussions about a partnership since our first meeting in Amsterdam (thanks to One Percent Club). It was there that we saw an opportunity to work together but also change and transform the way traditional technology incubation happens. Both myself and Sam Gichuru have a heart to see young entrepreneurs in Africa flourish to produce not just African solutions by Africans but we both believe Africa has a role to play in driving web and mobile innovation in emerging economies. There has been a number of people voicing their concerns about Africa not taking its place (read great post by Gareth Knight) and it was with that in mind that we believed collaborating will add the lots of value to our networks and eco systems. Below is just 5 examples of how this collaboration will be a game changer:

1) Both South Africa and Kenya are thriving web and mobile technology countries, having it share of technologists emerging but we not seeing enough of them adding value. Through partnership we will be able to strengthen each other in our weaknesses but also allow our entrepreneurs and technologist to scale through our networks.

5) Opportunity for Lab exchange programmes for entrepreneurs from both countries to form partnerships but also able to tap into the various eco system opportunities.

The irony of it all is that both myself and Sam have never met in Africa (previous meeting in Europe and now in the US) and we confirmed our partnership while having a meeting at another Lab (The Hub) in San Francisco. We will keep you updated with the developments and exciting things happening through this partnership.