TCS - The TechCentral Show

TechCentral, the publisher of South Africa’s leading business technology podcasts, is thrilled to announce the launch of TCS Legends. The new show will feature interviews with (and about) some of the leading figures who helped shape South Africa’s technology industry into what it is today. As the show’s name implies, we’ll be interviewing leading figures who achieved great things in – and for – th...

Andile Ngcaba’s Convergence Partners last week announced it was buying storied South African IT services group Datacentrix from Alviva Holdings for an undisclosed sum. Datacentrix’s long-serving CEO, Ahmed Mahomed, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss the acquisition, how it happened, why Alviva decided to sell and what the future holds for the company. In the show, Mahomed unpacks: • Datac...

Kena Health took top honours at the recent MTN Business App of the Year Awards. Its chief technology officer, Pheello Maboea, tells the TechCentral Show (TCS) about the telehealth start-up’s journey so far. Founded by Saul Kornik in 2021, Kena Health aims to improve the reach of quality healthcare services by digitising access to primary healthcare professionals. The TCS interview, hosted by TechC...

There has been considerable noise about the launch – or otherwise – of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service in South Africa, much of it conjecture. What’s the real story? To unpack what exactly is required of SpaceX-launched Starlink to launch in South Africa – including the rules around black economic empowerment (BEE) – the TechCentral Show spoke to Dominic Cull, a legal expert on the...

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, author, marketer and consultant GG Alcock chats to Nkosinathi Ndlovu about how South Africa’s informal economy is being digitised. Alcock’s background as a white boy growing up in rural Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal has helped him develop a deep cultural understanding of township life and the way business is conducted there. Indeed, he has built his career as a mar...

TechCentral reported on Friday that South African cryptocurrency platforms Revix and BitFund are joining forces and, together with Austria’s Coinpanion, have formed a new alternative investment platform called Altify. Revix founder and now Altify CEO Sean Sanders joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to unpack the merger, how it came about, and what Altify hopes to do in the alternative inve...

Aidan Johnson, appointed by Massmart to lead on-demand delivery platform OneCart, believes South Africa is on the cusp of huge growth in online shopping – and that everything is to play for. Johnson, who joins Duncan McLeod on this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), talks about the OneCart business, why Massmart bought it and where it’s headed. The conversation delves into: • Why OneCart works...

ShotSpotter, a technology that “listens” for gunshots to help law enforcement authorities pinpoint potential criminal activity, has been deployed in high-crime parts of Cape Town for some years. In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Duncan McLeod chat to Tom Chittum, senior vice president for forensic services at SoundThinking, the company that owns the acoustic gunshot detection technolo...

The future of finance is on the blockchain. That’s according to Connie Bloem, co-founder and MD of Mesh.trade, who was speaking to the TechCentral Show (TCS) about alternative (AltFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi). Mesh is owned by 42Markets Group, which recently secured a R182-million funding round from technology investor Convergence Partners. Much of that funding will be used in Mesh’s expan...

Earlier this month, Cape Town-based fintech Peach Payments announced it had secured US$30-million (R570-million) in a fundraising round led by Apis Partners. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Rahul Jain, co-founder of CEO of Peach Payments, tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the funding round and what the company plans to use the money to do. In the interview, Jain unpacks: * His...

TCS | Pansy Tlakula: Information Regulator bares its teeth The Information Regulator, the agency responsible for enforcing the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), is starting to flex its muscles. Among other things, the regulator is tasked with investigating data breaches – including cyberattacks – and will not hesitate to mete out punishment on companies and government entities that d...

TCS | The Levy brothers on the future of Blue Label and Cell C When JSE-listed Blue Label Telecoms released its annual results two weeks ago, it showed its core business continuing to grow at a respectable pace. Yet investors dumped the share, worried about a lack of disclosure about Cell C’s performance. Now, in an exclusive interview with the TechCentral Show (TCS), the company’s founders and co...

It’s been a year since investors, including the business’s own customers, came to the rescue the Sigfox internet-of-things (IoT) network in South Africa. Now its chief commercial officer, Sumenish Naidoo, has told the TechCentral Show (TCS) that Sigfox South Africa is not only on a sustainable growth trajectory, but has big big growth plans for the rest of this decade. This comes after Remgro’s CI...

Nigerian fintech Paystack, which was acquired by Stripe, the Irish-American firm founded by the Collison brothers in 2020 for US$200-million, has big plans to expand elsewhere in Africa. Joel Bronkowski, Paystack’s country head for South Africa, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to talk about these expansion plans as well as the state of fintech on the continent. Paystack, which is headquartered in...

Luke Jedeikin and Claude Hanan are well known for founding Superbalist, the online fashion store bought in 2014 by Takealot Group. Now the pair has embarked on a new venture, launched in The Foschini Group (TFG) stable, called Bash, and they tell Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) all about it. To start the discussion, Hanan and Jedeikin talk about the origin of Superbalist – it began lif...

What does the future hold for e-commerce in South Africa? Takealot Group CEO Mamongae Mahlare joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack this and more. In the interview, Mahlare talks about her career background and how she came to Takealot. She also discusses: • The transformative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it drove up online shopping and why it’s impact is still being felt. • Takealot...

Volvo Cars, part of Sweden’s Volvo Group, has seen a big growth in interest in electric vehicles from the South African motoring public – and the company hopes the introduction early next year of its most affordable EV yet, the EX30, will accelerate that. That’s according to Volvo Cars South Africa MD Greg Maruszewski, who was speaking to Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) – watch or list...

Bryan Hattingh, CEO of Cycan, is well-known in South Africa’s technology industry for his leadership coaching and for helping companies find top talent. Hattingh joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss what he believes is required of leadership in a post-Covid world – hint: it’s not more of the same. He discusses a range of issues in the interview, including: • How the pandemi...

It’s been just over 20 years since Andile Ngcaba quit his government job – he was director-general of communications – and became an investor in the technology sector. Now, in an interview with Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Ngcaba looks back at the past two decades, the formation of Convergence Partners, the investments the business has made and why, and its focus areas. Ngcaba, who...

Following the recent decision to rebrand MTN GlobalConnect as Bayobab, founder and CEO Frédéric Schepens joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the telecommunications infrastructure provider’s expansion plans. Bayobab, which owns stakes in a number of subsea cable systems and other telecoms infrastructure, is the result of “change under way to position the business as a world-class, Africa...

Telkom is facing difficult times, but CEO Serame Taukobong has insisted the company “does not need a knight in shining armour” to come riding to its rescue. In this TechCentral Show (TCS) interview with Taukobong, the Telkom boss provides his views on the interest received from a consortium that includes former CEO Sipho Maseko and Mauritius-based Axian Telecom, as well as MTN Group signalling tha...

Senior Altron executive Collin Govender is passionate about leadership – and believes South Africa needs much more of it if it is to solve its myriad challenges. Govender – who started his career as a forklift operator in a Durban warehouse and who today heads two important businesses in the Altron stable, Altron Systems Integration and Altron Karabina – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show...

The State IT Agency (Sita), government’s central IT procurement and services agency, has been through the wringer. The entity, created in 1999, has been plagued for much of its existence by oftentimes poor leadership and well as widespread corruption – detailed in a 2017 TechCentral interview former CEO Setumo Mohapi. Now, after several years without a CEO – the company had been placed into a form...

The rise and fall of Nokia’s mobile phone business has been well documented. Once dominant in the feature-phone era, the Finnish company was caught flat-footed by the launch of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. The acquisition of Nokia’s handset business by Microsoft – desperate at the time for its Windows Phone operating system to be a meaningful third player in smartphone software and also de...

JSE-listed retailer Woolworths is moving to replace its fleet of fossil fuel-burning logistics and delivery vehicles with fully electric alternatives. To discuss the project, and more, Duncan McLeod is joined on the TechCentral Show (TCS) by Ndia Magadagela, co-founder and CEO of South African EV-as-a-service (EVaaS) start-up Everlectric. Everlectric, through Woolworths’ logistics partner DSV, is...