African Tech Roundup Podcast

This week's episode of the African Tech Round-up features a snippet from Andile Masuku's full-length sit-down with Chad Larson-- one of the three founders of the Kenyan solar power start-up M-KOPA Solar. Chad serves as the company’s Finance Director and Chief Credit Officer. He has lived in Nairobi with his wife and three boys since the company launched in 2011. Chad is a qualified CFA and an Oxfo...

This week’s African Tech Conversations sneak-peek is drawn from an in-depth chat Andile Masuku had with Eline Blaauboer, Managing Partner at both TBL Mirror Fund and Safaricom Spark Venture Fund. Eline’s worked in the venture capital and private equity sector in both Europe and Africa for last 14 years— gaining loads of experience with new investments and portfolio management, negotiation and stru...

Olivier Laouchez, who hails from Martinique (French West Indies), is the charismatic co-founder and CEO of Trace, one of the world's leading urban entertainment platforms which reaches over 200 million multicultural and multiethnic youth in 140 countries around the world. Initially a print magazine published in New York and London, Trace was relaunched as a multimedia group in 2003, and now operat...

The team at the African Tech Round-up is on break, but while we’re away over the next four weeks, the show will go on! In place of our regular programming, we’ll share sneak-previews of episodes from the brand-spanking new season of the African Tech Conversations series which starts on Friday, December 16th, 2016. The series features the likes of Eline Blaauboer, Managing Partner at TBL Mirror Fun...

Brett Parker is the Managing Director of SAP Africa. In this chat with Andile Masuku, he reveals some of the most critical strategic decisions made by SAP’s global leadership back in 2010, that helped the software giant maintain its dominant position in an increasingly competitive global market. Brett also highlights some of the fascinating greenfield opportunities SAP is pursuing on the continent...

Moroccan-born Dr Chakib Bouhdary is SAP’s global Digital Transformation Officer. In this chat with Andile Masuku, he shares some of the most common misconceptions he encounters regarding digital transformation when he interacts with executives around the world. Chakib also comments on the strategic mindset driving the trend towards large enterprises keenly making big plays outside their traditiona...

SA Taxi-owned Zebra Cabs has raised just over $21.6 million from Futuregrowth Asset Management to expand their owner-driver scheme in Johannesburg, and to take on Uber and Taxify. Their big hairy audacious goal is to have 3 000 cabs on the road by 2020. This development has got us wondering how many players Africa’s ride-sharing market can sustain. There must be easier ways to make a buck, but it...

This is a lively chat Andile Masuku had with Dr Vukosi Marivate, a Data Scientist and Senior Researcher at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). They speak about the trend towards countries around the world passing laws that require the personal information of their citizens to be hosted on servers within their borders. We reached out to Vukosi after having some ins...

Senegal is now the second African country after Tunisia to adopt an electronic currency. eCFA is equivalent in value to the country’s physical tender and will be available on all mobile money and e-wallet platforms. This development has led to e-money proponents speculating which African country might be next to adopt electronic money. Zimbabwe, perhaps? It’s popularly been argued that given the p...

How much of an over-achiever is Elon Musk fixing to become, though? In the last week, he’s added providing global internet coverage via a massive satellite network to his audacious To-do List. In this week’s African Tech Round-up Andile Masuku reflects on how Musk’s latest ambition might upset net neutrality watchdogs around the world who might not trust SpaceX to responsibly execute on something...

Trace TV is fixing to launch arguably the most hotly anticipated SVOD offering of the year, Trace Play. Their ambitious roll-out will involve making Trace Play available in English and French in 100 countries around the world. Trace’s Co-founder and CEO Olivier Laouchez is clearly serious about making sure that Trace TV remains the #1 urban network outside of the US. This past week, Vodacom South...

Jason Njoku is the inimitable Nigerian founder and CEO of the internet and entertainment group, iROKO. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Jason talks about how his group of companies is making lucrative traditional media plays while growing digital content platforms and producing local content for what's likely to be mobile-driven future.

Ntambwe Harlem Mufoncol, one of the co-founders of Baziks Pulse— a neat music streaming platform from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this chat Andile Masuku, Ntambwe shares how well African music lovers has so far taken to their recent launch and explains what makes their platform better suited for the African market than their global competition.

Andile Masuku and Brian Lupiya spent three days last week at DISCOP Johannesburg— Africa’s biggest multi-screen, multi-platform marketplace, assessing trends within the continent’s digital content scene. They spent most of our time collecting insights at the fringe of Digital Lab Africa (DLA)— a DISCOP partner initiative that aims to be a springboard for African multimedia talent looking to launch...

In this week’s African Tech Round-up, we ask the question, “Should Uber’s wings be clipped before they change the world as we know it?” Lawmakers on the continent appear torn between adopting the pragmatic approach of embracing technological innovation and actively resisting the very real threat of change bringing with it the decimation of the traditional livelihoods of thousands of people who are...

So, Episode 80 of the African Tech Round-up, aka the episode that nearly never happened, is finally out. In an interview Andile Masuku just taped for the upcoming season of the African Tech Conversations series, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of M-KOPA Solar, Chad Larson, shared words he lives by that epitomise why I’m glad the team didn’t give up on publishing the podcast this week— despite...

Rwanda has helped Africa beat the rest of the world to rolling out a commercial drone delivery service. The land of a thousand hills has partnered with the UPS Foundation, Gavi, and the Californian drone startup Zipline, to start using drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach places in the country. Zipline's autonomous drones will now fly blood and plasma to places where poo...

Digital video content creator, streaming evangelist and co-founder of Pockitttv, Julian von Plato joins Andile Masuku to chat about VOD trends and the adoption of streaming technology on the continent. In this conversation, Julian explains why he believes that mobile is the future of video content consumption in Africa, and why PockitTV, Sstreamm's new VOD platform (in partnership with MTN), is a...

This week’s African Tech Round-up episode is jam-packed. Digital video content creator, streaming evangelist and co-founder of Pockitttv, Julian von Plato joins me to chat about VOD trends and the adoption of streaming technology on the continent, then TechCabal.com’s Editor-in-chief, Bankole Oluwafemi aka Lord Banks factors in on MTN’s ongoing run-ins with the Nigerian Communications Commission....

Andile Masuku chats with the four co-founders of a promising South African start-up called Airbuy— a business which plans to help people convert airtime into “airbucks” that they can use to purchase goods and services online. The chaps are still celebrating their recent win at an MIT Global Startup Labs competition hosted at Wits University, and they allow us a peek under the hood of their passion...

There’s blood in the water. Nigerian lawmakers are flexing their might with a confidence rarely seen in decades past— at least as far as taking large corporates to task for flouting regulations. According to some media reports a member of the Nigerian Senate has put forward a motion for the house to investigate MTN Nigeria’s potential collusion with leading commercial banks to facilitate the illeg...

In a week which saw Yahoo announce that it had suffered the worst cyber-breach in history, and all three of Egypt’s incumbent mobile telcos opting not to bid for the 4G licenses being floated by the Egyptian government, Kenyan solar company, D.Light, shone brightly by announcing that they had raised $22.5 million in funding from leading VC’s, debt financiers and non-profit organisations. The money...

It’s been a busy week for the continent’s fintech scene. The past week saw MTN South Africa announce that it would be discontinuing its mobile money service due to “a lack of commercial viability”. This revelation comes months after Vodacom South Africa ended it’s catastrophic attempt at copying and pasting Kenya’s M-Pesa magic. Meanwhile, Madagascar became only the second African country after Ta...

Ernesto Spruyt is the founder of https://tunga.io, an online market network that provides international clients access to African coding talent. He also happens to serve as Chief Mentor for Telegraph Media Group’s DigitalX accelerator program in Amsterdam. Among some of the things Ernesto chatted to Andile Masuku about is what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and what he r...

Ismael Rachdaoui is the young, Moroccan founder of nextwi, a marketing platform that leverages Wi-Fi technology to help small and large business owners (primarily in the the hospitality industry) engage their clients/guests more intuitively based on their social profiles and online preferences and behaviour.