Currently in the heart of the tech world in Silicon Valley, I was honoured to be identified as one of 38 Emerging Tech Entrepreneurs in South Africa featured on Memeburn as part of the Old Mutual Entrepreneurship Guide. The list consist of a number of amazing technology entrepreneurs (Video Below) in South Africa and my contribution can be seen here.
Monitoring and measuring your social media activities and efforts are crucial to having an effective Social Media Strategy. There are many tools available to measure and monitor these activities but at the end you need to know what people are saying about your brand or organisation. With the increase of Social Media activity by your customers or fans you need to know how to measure the engagement and below is a quick presentation by Social2B that will give you some great insights to measure Social Media Metrics:
What does JamiiX and the London Eye have in common? Nothing really other than the London Eye being a landmark outside the venue where we launched JamiiX in the United Kingdom. This leg of the JamiiX World Tour, sponsored by SAFIPA, and hosted by the amazing Nimbus Team and our UK partner proved to be a huge success with lots of interest around the product and an opportunity for guests to engage using the JamiiX platform.
The event brought together people from non-profits, funding agencies, commercial sector and academia who had an interest in seeing the potential of JamiiX in their projects or organisations. With talks by Dr. Gary Wills (University of Southampton), Peter Holt (Nimbus) and David Deakin (TearFund) clearly set a wonderful platform for how mobile phones can be used for Social good. The launch was also the announcement of our partnership with Nimbus in the UK as well as our pilot with TearFund who will be using JamiiX in one of their projects. Overall with such a great turnout to the launch in the UK it was once more so rewarding to see an innovation being created on the Cape Flats now being take to the rest of the world.
A special thanks to all who made this event possible especially those in the background making it all possible. Watch this space as we will keep you updated on the next leg of the JamiiX World Tour but for now it is time to enjoy the best London has to offer.
Today 15 years ago Microsoft launched the now infamous Windows 95 that changed Operating systems forever. Below is some videos that will take you back to those memorable days of Microsoft dominance.
As we’ve started our first Community Tech startup a few weeks ago, we will be sharing a number of interesting business resources to help other Technology startups especially those in emerging economies. One of the latest trends in the Venture Capital (VC) world “CrowdFunding” that has brought changes to the traditional methods for VCs that includes the possibility of a much higher return. This investing model has been introduced and experimented by a number of entrepreneurs and below are some interesting slides to explain Crowd Funding as an investment method. In South Africa the concept is still fairly new but some have started the process of experimenting with Crowd Funding as a medium to invest in small start-up companies.
This evening I had the privilege meeting with Taneli Tikka a self professed serial entrepreneur. He has been CEO of a large number of Finnish technology companies including IRC-Galleria, RuntoShop and many others. He also served on the executive board for Dopplr a popular travel social network that was acquired by Nokia during 2009 for an undisclosed amount.
Taneli amazingly have a very good history in acquiring and investing in a number of companies. He also have the ability to maximise those investments and it was good getting some insight from him and advice for young entrepreneurs. His talk “Defining problems instead of solving them” was hosted by newly formed Aalto University and below is some key points that I’ve found to be useful:
- As an Entrepreneur you have to establish how you are different from all the others and be the best at what you do
- You have to stand out from the rest
- Small changes with what is out there could differentiate you from the rest
- Do not spend too much time finding out what you should do.
- Put your energies on more problem defining than problem solving
- Fight hard to define problems
- Problem identification and definition are skills young entrepreneurs should have
- Young Entrepreneurs should be able to develop their business in CHAOS.
- The most important tools for any startup entrepreneur are Deck of slides, Executive Summary and elevator pitch.
Taneli is definitely one of the young entrepreneurs we will be following closely and so much to learn by applying some of his experiences to the Social Entrepreneurial activities in reconstructing communities.
Last night we had our first radio interview on 1Africa media sharing more about Debt Breaker and its advantages to consumers. With many being over-indebted and being able to get advice and support via mobile and web technologies it interesting to see how this will be accepted in other African countries that was listening in to the interview. For more information about Debt Breaker visit the website or the mobi site.
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While researching business models for social innovation and sustainability I came accross a slide that I saw at a conference which reminded me that Growth can be found in Education, Research and Technology. The empowerment of a Community in Tension (CiT) has its roots in economic growth which according to the image above includes Education, Research and Technology. This is interesting because the factors that causes tension in local communities are lack of education, social inequality, lack of appropriate use and access of technology and lack of economic development. Taking the new growth model further we believe that economic growth is not only rooted in education, research and technology but also social equality in a South African context. This will contribute to the well-being of citizens which would stabilise the Community in Tension (CiT). Download the CiT research paper here.