African Tech Roundup Podcast

Facebook is still smarting from having Free Basics kicked out of India. Clearly no one was more upset by India’s emphatic rejection of Mark Zuckerberg’s walled garden project than venture capitalist and Facebook board member, Marc Andreessen, who took to Twitter last week to express his frustration at the country’s decision— a move that was met by global outrage. Nevertheless, we have Andreessen t...

Siyabulela Xuza is a young engineering graduate from Harvard, who got his start in science very young, experimenting with rocket fuel in his mother’s kitchen in a little rural town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. While still very young, he would later become quite well-known for his prowess in the field of energy engineering, winning numerous awards and endowments from around the world— so much...

No doubt about it— it’s an unsettling time to be an Uber driver in Kenya. This past week, more reports of intimidation and violence against Uber drivers have been reported in Nairobi. And you can be certain that the beef is not over Uber’s shocking new logo. It appears Uber’s presence in the East African nation has begun to to seriously offend the nationalist sensibilities of some Kenyans. In this...

The soul-destroying Twitter outages and more recent SEACOM broadband disruptions notwithstanding, the team at the AfricanTechRoundup.com has been extremely busy since we properly got 2016 on the go a few weeks ago. So busy in fact, that Tefo Mohapi was unable to join Andile Masuku on the show this week. (Heads up. This week’s episode will be uncharacteristically short, but informative, nonetheless...

We had to face a tough truth this week. The fact is that we are complicit in the perpetuation of horrible crimes against humanity. And if you’re reading this right now, it’s likely that you are too. If you’re an enthusiastic user of the useful tech products made by the likes of Apple, Sony and Samsung (as we are), then you’re contributing to the on-going exploitation of children as young as seven...

African lawmakers are struggling to come to grips with the opportunities and threats presented by various important innovations being spurred by technological advancement— this as they carry out the unenviable task of safeguarding public welfare. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku discuss some of the more troublesome regulatory issues that are croppi...

We’re just loving this trend of brilliant Africans crashing our podcast recordings. The last time that happened we had a total blast with Rebecca Enonchong, Mark Kaigwa and Thebe Ikalafeng. This week, Nigerian software engineering heavyweight, Emeka Okoye, literally walked into the room as Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku were chatting about about how Africa seemed to be responding to Netflix’s surpr...

Happy New Year! The African Tech Round-up team is only one week away from being back on strike to bring you the most important digital, tech and innovation news from across the African continent. This week though, we round off our coverage of the Annual Round-up 2015 with two awesome keynote addresses. The first is one is entitled, “Where To From Here” presented by Musa Kalenga who is Africa Clien...

We let you in on a panel discussion from the Annual Round-up 2015 that covered some of the past year’s highlights from from a gadgets and apps perspective. Andile Masuku leads this laid-back conversation with Deputy Editor of Stuff Magazine and Technology Analyst, Craig Wilson, Director of Project Fable, Kojo Baffoe and Digital Content Specialist at Caxton Magazines and Contributor at TechGirl.co....

In the second instalment of our four-part Annual Round-up 2015 insights series, we bring you a panel discussion on African startups featuring Google South Africa’s Head of Communications & Public Affairs, Mich Atagana and Entrepreneur Magazine Columnist & Co-Founder of LexNove, Andrew Taylor. Mich has had the unique privilege of not only covering the birth, progress, and often, the demise...

Over the next four weeks the we are taking a much-needed break. Cue peaceful ocean sounds But we’ve made sure that over the next four weeks, in place of our regular programming, we’ll be sharing exclusive content from the Annual Round-up 2015 event we hosted at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg on November 26th 2015. The Event was powered by the good people at Opera Africa, who are totally all abou...

We attended Afrikoin Johannesburg on 3 December 2015. At the event, Andile Masuku posed a question that led to a very lively debate about whether improved “access” to seamless, more affordable financial services does in fact equal “inclusion” for Africa’s poorest— especially given how centralised the world’s computing power is, and how huge stashes of Bitcoin are held by a relatively few well-reso...

We're still buzzing from the great time we had at the Annual Round-up 2015, that Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku hosted at The Wanderers Club in Johannesburg last week. Many thanks to those of you who made it out on Thursday morning, and a big thank you to our incredibly generous and insightful guest panelists and speakers. Also, big up to our event partners, Opera Africa, Stuff magazine, and iAfrik...

Kenya’s tech scene aka Silicon Savannah is on fire! At least, that’s according to commentators like Brenda Wambui, who’s recent blog posted on Medium threw serious shade the way of some looming figures in Kenya’s tech ecosystem following the diabolical fallout at cloud services firm, Angani. It turns out that some of the details surrounding this story that we reported on some weeks ago— details wh...

This week's instalment of the African Tech Round-up was recorded at the African Media Leaders Forum, which wrapped in Johannesburg on the weekend. And what a treat it is! The show is an all-Africa affair— what with Mark Kaigwa stopping by. Mark is easily one of Kenya’s leading proponents of social media, as well as a respected innovator within digital tech in general. He is also the Founder and CE...

With so few high-flying start-up successes in Africa’s tech eco-system, one has to wonder just how alarmed we should get when word of job cuts and other such cost-cutting measures starts to dominate headlines. After all, this sort of thing happens in business all the time! That said, why does it seem like Nigerian startups are having a particularly hard time at the moment? Following signs of distr...

It’s been a truly awful week for the MTN Group— what with a $5.2 billion fine imposed on MTN Nigeria (the group’s largest and most profitable subsidiary) by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for failing to disconnect unregistered SIM cards timeously, the news of which led to considerable market panic and a subsequent 16% drop in MTN’s share price. This week, MTN also started fielding al...

This week’s African Tech Round-up is chock-full of important digital, tech and innovation news from across the African continent— not least, the unfortunate rumoured in-fighting and financial distress at Jason Njoku’s media startup, iROKO Partners. Also, we’re happy to have our content producer, Peter “The Enigma” Peele back from a a hectic trip to Dubai where he attended GITEX Technology Week 201...

Last week it was Strive Masiyiwa's Econet Zimbabwe alluding that OTT (over the top) services such as WhatsApp and BBM are the reason they are seeing a drop in voice calls revenue and overall revenue. Now this week, MTN South Africa CEO, Mteto Nyati, has called for South Africa's communications regulator, ICASA, to look into regulating these OTT players because they haven't invested anything in tel...

Tefo Mohapi was invited to speak at Tech4Africa 2015 last week. He shared on the important work that he and his team at iAfrikan are continuing to do in spearheading the ground-breaking Report Xenophobia campaign. While at the event, Tefo was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by Nic Haralambous, who opened his talk with this outlandish statement, "I believe everyone who starts a business is a bit b...

In what is arguably the largest cybercrime scandal affecting cars to date, Volkswagen has admitted to installing software in some of their diesel-powered cars to give out false emission data results during tests. This scandal affects their other brands like Audi, Skoda and SEAT and has seen the South African government, through the departments of Environmental Affairs and Transport as well as the...

As avid consumers of new media, it’s hard not to love the ad blocking features Apple has worked into iOS9, and the clever ad blocking apps that are selling like hotcakes on mobile app stores everywhere. But content publishers are claiming that ad blocking is tantamount to taking the bread out of their mouths, and warn that ultimately you and I will suffer as great content— traditionally funded thr...

Citing “increased competition” and “unfavourable market conditions” Altron is puling the plug on the Altech Node console and will discontinue its video-on-demand offering come the end of October 2015. The news comes in the wake of Naspers’ recent launch of the Netflix-clone, ShowMax, which the tech giant is clearly not sparing any expense in promoting. (By the way, you may as well take advantage o...

Launching a start-up in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. Very few promising ventures-- even those that achieve solid traction, can expect to land Silicon Valley-type investment offers that might allow a founder the liberty to concentrate solely on growth, versus say, survival. This week's discussion is inspired in part by a recent blog post by iROKOtv Founder and MD, Jason Njoku, written in re...

You probably remember how popular Nokia's 3310 device was when it launched back in 2000. Affectionately known as “Die Hard” by ardent fans, it was for many the possession that would make them truly feel a part of 21st Century civilisation. It’s pretty incredible how far mobile telephony has come in the 15 years since Nokia launched the record-breaking 3310 handset. Who could have guessed that in 2...