Blackberry can still win the day

RIM started the smartphone market in 2003 and over time has kept innovating with great products; from Budgie to Blackberry 10 .With the present day crisis people stipulate and predict blackberry selling out.
While I believe blackberry should hold there shit together and flush it in their private toilet. RIM has to stop competing with the other companies in its industry on the same terms they have been competing on for years.Rather they need to innovate(this word is fast becoming a cliche) and create an uncontested market,they have to look beyond the smartphone plane.

Ok let me let my guard down and offer a free tip to RIM; Data is the future,I know it is.Everything called data word soon be pulled from the cloud...Look into cloud based smartphones.
I don't see a reason why Blackberry messenger should be in the app store and why RIM should sell out even after the $1billion loss.

Lagos! Fast becoming the Africa Tech Movement

The Lagos taxi driver roars across the biggest bridge in Africa at 110 mph. Buffeted by the night wind, it feels as if we're riding a motorbike.

I am with two South Africans and a guy from Silicon Valley. We’re all swilling from a bottle of so-called whisky, including the man behind the wheel. (When your taxi driver says his name is "Success," things can’t possibly go wrong.)

Lagos, Nigeria seems like an unlikely place for Africa’s major tech hub. The city's estimated population is 21 million people, and 30,000 more Africans are arriving every day.

Ten years ago, architect and author Rem Koolhaas co-wrote Mutation. After studying Nigeria’s biggest city, he says,"Lagos is not catching up with us; rather, we may be catching up with Lagos." He may have been right.

It seems fanciful to equate Lagos with a 21st century New York, as Koolhaas does. For all intents and purposes, the city should not operate at all. Its chaos outstrips that of Cairo or New Delhi.

But within the insanity, a new type of region is emerging.

In a city gridlocked by traffic after 6 a.m. and rampant with crime, Lagos offers non-mobile Internet. Wi-Fi is gut-wrenchingly slow. But despite its weak infrastructure, it stands because of its innovative residents and their hunger to succeed in the most competitive of environments.

May’s Mobile Web West Africa sold out its Lagos conference, bringing together companies, startups, inspiring investors and developers. The three-day event was the background to the emerging economic and inspired power of the region, and Lagos’s aspiration to be the city at the center of that universe.

Across Victoria Island to the "mainland" and over the bridge my taxi crossed, the city’s Co Creation Hub (CcHub) is a collaborative work space for young entrepreneurs and coders. It's close to the University of Lagos. Like similar spaces in Palo Alto, London, Berlin or Moscow, individuals converge in one space to share ideas. They even have the chance to meet VCs and angels looking for promising investments. It’s an amazing place.

But such meetup hubs compete with others around the continent. Nairobi has the iHub, a similar space, supported by companies like Google, Intel and Samsung. And the government recently announced plans for Konza Techno City — the finished project will reside 40 miles south of Nairobi, with aims to create 100,000 tech jobs by 2030.

Closer to Nigeria, the neighboring country of Ghana recently announced Hope City, a $10 billion hub in capital Accra that will see Africa’s tallest building emerge from shrubland. By 2016 Hope City will house 25,000 residents and will have created some 50,000 jobs.

Not to be outdone, South Africa has the JoziHub in Johannesburg, launched in February 2013, while Cape Town is attempting to brand itself as Silicon Cape by creating a non-profit, community-owned infrastructure that supports startups with capital and expertise.

Alas, Africa is replete with stories about great ambitions and grandiose projects that never see the light of day. Nigeria is no different.

Tinapa Resort, the planned shopping and commerce "paradise" in the Cross Rivers state, is a warning to all who believe that investment necessarily creates cities and jobs. More than $350 million was ploughed into the project, thought to boost business and tourism before it opened in 2007, based on a deep sea port in the city of Calabar, which did not exist or materialize. The resort gathered dust, becoming a ghost town — another African disaster.

That is, until the newly elected regional government announced the rehabilitation of Tinapa in the form of Tinapa Knowledge City, a private sector-driven investment to serve as an alternate ICT hub to Lagos.

The government, privately-owned Covenant University and oil company OANDO will create a campus and gas plant that will ultimately employ 10,000 people. Legendary Nigerian investor and influencer Harry Tomi Davies finds the new scheme one that costs a lot of money but is ultimately a burden, in other words, a "white elephant turned black by technology," he says.

Time will tell whether Tinapa emerges as a phoenix rather than a pachyderm. But in Nigeria, there is a sense that anything is possible — especially in Lagos, where the infrastructural impediments to success are driving entrepreneurship.

Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg and Cape Town are all vying with Lagos to claim ownership of Last Frontier Africa, the continent of the 21st century.

Just ask my speeding taxi driver. He knows Success when he sees it.

Image via DERRICK CEYRAC/AFP/Getty Images

Post from mashable.com

TOPICS: BUSINESS, CONTRIBUTOR, STARTUPS, TECH, US & WORLD, WORLD

 by Taboola

South African Start-Ups to watch out for this year(2013)

2012 has been a busy year for the south African start up scene and this hard work has born trees,trees to look out for in 2013.

The startups listed here either secured funding this year, or were recognized at a competition. While the list isn't intended to be exhaustive, these are the stories we reported on, so you can read more about the startups, competitions and venture capital companies that help drive South Africa’s entrepreneurial community forward.

Being self-funded is great, but if you find yourself weighing seed capital, new funding rounds or you’re just looking for competitions that recognise up-and-comers, you might get some ideas here.

As always, we’ll keep monitoring the scene and if you ever have a success story to share with us, or you’d just like to tell us about your startup please let us know.

Rubybox

The innovative try-before-you-buy beauty subscription startup received funding from venture capitalist Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa, for an undisclosed sum in September this year.

Moneysmart

Moneysmart secured funding from Johan Schoeman and GT Ferreira, Chairman of RMB Holdings Limited earlier this year. When Ventureburn reported on Moneysmart’s official launch in August, the online personal finance manager (PFM) was showing good traction with just under 10 000 users being reported.

Real Time Wine

At the time of writing, Real Time Wine concluded its first round of successful fundraising through angel investment group, AngelHub. The bite sized social wine review service secured private angel funding from angel investors such as Michael Jordaan, owner of Bartinney Wines and Mike Ratcliffe, managing director at Warwick Wine Estate.

Nomanini

Nomanini, the prepaid voucher business-in-a-box, recently raised US$600 000 in series-A funding from the Netherlands based eVentures Africa Fund as well as Esther Dyson — the angel investor who sits on the board of companies such as 23andMe, Evernote and Meetup.

Pashash

Pashash received angel investment of US$50 000 through Umbono, Google’s startup incubator. The a location-aware mobile app that lets you share the things you buy or like in brick-and-mortar retail stores also won the South African leg of The Next Web’s Startup World competition in Cape Town recently.

Zoe-X

The online brain training software startup won the Idea Stage track at LaunchCapeTown earlier this year. Other Idea Stage winners included mobile payment service Ching and home monitoring companyHomebug.

Snapplify

Snapplify, the service that transform PDFs into company branded mobile applications won the Growth Stage track at LaunchCapeTown. Other Growth Stage winners included animation studio, Triggerfish, and hyper-local content service Umuntu Media

Triggerfish received several million dollars in funding from the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, the National Film & Video Foundation and its US partners which include Wonderful Works, 120dB Film Finances, and Cinema Management Group.

Umuntu Media is backed by the eVentures Africa Fund.

TaxTim

The virtual tax assisstant we covered earlier this year, received US$25 000 in seed funding from Umbono and secured a second round of funding through local angel investors and an international mentor, bringing TaxTim’s valuation up to ZAR1.8 million (about US$219 500).

Gyft

Though not born in South Africa, Gyft’s founder Vinny Lingham certainly was. Gyft is a mobile gift card app and was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist this year. During the event Lingham confirmed that Gyft raised financing from sources such as Google Ventures, 500 Startups and Founder Collective.

Gigham

Gigham, a new online events portal, secured funding through Umbono earlier this year.

Paperight

Paperight aims to repurpose the humble copy shop for printing affordable books, while protecting the rights of authors and publishers. The startup launched in May this year and received funding through the Shuttleworth Foundation.

SampleBoard

We’ve yet to have an in-depth look at SampleBoard, but we were first introduced to the startup at an Umbono event where founder Rosslyn Tebbutt talked about her service which helps you conceptualise visual ideas — think interiors, weddings, fashion, landscaping and so on. SampleBoard is both self-funded and received seed funding of US$50 000 through Umbono earlier this year.

Virtual Firehose

Virtual Firehose won Startup Weekend Cape Town 2012. The system aims to overcome the management and reporting challenges that emergency services teams face due to outdated systems.

Image: Big Stock

All thanks to Ventureburn

A 19 -year-old Kenyan,Martha Chumo Starts a "Hacker school"

                               

CNN - (CNN) -- Martha Chumo, a 19-year-old self-taught programmer, was supposed to be in New York right now, honing her coding skills and mastering cutting-edge technologies in the company of fellow software enthusiasts.

Instead, she's thousands of miles away, in her hometown of Nairobi, Kenya.

A few months ago, Chumo was accepted into the summer intake of Hacker School, a U.S.-based "retreat for hackers," where budding programmers come together for three months to write code, learn new languages and share industry insights.

Whereas the programming boot camp was free to attend, Chumo still needed to find a way to cover her trip costs and buy a new laptop. Excited and determined, the young developer turned to online crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo for funds. She set a target of $4,200 and managed to raise nearly $5,800. All she needed then was a visa to travel to the United States.

Alas, this was not to be. As an unmarried adult who was not enrolled at university, Chumo was not eligible for a U.S. tourist visa because she couldn't show sufficient "social ties" to Kenya to prove that she was planning to return home after attending Hacker School.

But the U.S. consulate's refusal only served to slightly alter the plans of this passionate coder.

"I thought if I can't go to the hacker school, let me try to bring the school to me," says Chumo. "(Let me see) what can I do to start a school here."

Within minutes of her second visa request denial, on June 4, Chumo was calling her friends to announce that, "I'm starting a hacker school in Kenya!'

A few days later, she launched another Indiegogo campaign asking people to help her set up her own school for developers in Nairobi.

"I was so frustrated because I had applied to go to Hacker School; I got into it, I raised funds to go there, I had all these plans to read and learn for three months and then I'm not allowed to go -- that's how the idea for the school was born."

Autodidact

It's all a big change for this bright youngster who didn't even own a computer until a year ago, let alone know how to write Python web frameworks and Ruby gems.

A top pupil at her school, Chumo was planning to study medicine at the University of Nairobi. But she "bumped" into the tech world last summer during an internship that enabled her to access a computer on a daily basis.

This triggered a deep desire in her to learn everything about this exciting new world; Chumo quit her internship, took her savings and bought a laptop. Soon after she was rubbing shoulders several hours a day with fellow techies at the iHub -- a co-working space that's become the meeting point for Kenya's coders and aspiring tech entrepreneurs -- using online tools such as Github and Treehouse to become versed in web design and development.

Not interested in becoming a doctor anymore, Chumo started working with other programmers on open source software and got a job as a developer. Her passion to become better then led her to apply to Hacker School.

"In programming you're constantly reading and learning and doing something new," says Chumo. "There's always room for improvement in what you're doing," she adds. "You get to do something new and not use the same old technology forever -- that's the fun part, and also being able to build anything that you can think of."

Tech potential

Kenya has experienced a major boom in information and communications technology in recent years, spurred by major investments to use the sector as a driver for economic growth and the roll out of submarine cables bringing high-speed broadband.

Although still young, the country's burgeoning tech scene has also been boosted by a surge in the number of innovation centers, such as the iHub, which enable talented coders and young entrepreneurs to collaborate and develop their free-flowing ideas.

Chumo says that, similar to Hacker School, Nairobi's dev school will run for three months and be free of charge for participants. Its goal is to equip young programmers from across East Africa with valuable skills and help them build exciting new technology for the continent.

"My vision for it is to have a three months program where developers from Africa can come and learn new technologies and become world-class developers," says Chumo, adding that she's already found a space to host the aspiring programmers. "Not just doing small kinds of technology but getting Africa to get the new Google, the big technologies, these will be things to come from Africa."

So far, Chumo has managed to raise about $12,000 at Indiegogo, out of her $50,000 goal. As determined as ever, she says that even if she doesn't manage to hit the target, she'll continue with her plans to provide learning opportunities to East Africa's tech community.

"For the funds, I am looking into company sponsorship as an alternative," she says. "I am planning to start, now that I have some funds. I know there are many companies and individuals that are willing to run with us," adds Chumo. "In some way, it was a good thing that they didn't let me go [to Hacker School]."

Electrocuted by his Iphone while using a knockoff charger

                    Iphones now electrocutes people

     A Beijing man has been in a coma for the past 10 days, after being electrocuted while using the charger for his iPhone 4.
     China Times reported Friday that Wu Jiantong was shocked on July 8 and helped by his sister who heard him shouting and found him shaking on the floor with purple lips, China Times reports. Jiantong was using a charger that was not manufactured by Apple and may have been the cause of the electrocution.     The news out of Beijing follows reports earlier this month of a 23 year old Chinese woman, Ma Ailun, killed by an electric shock when she answered a phone call on her iPhone 5 while it was charging. Apple said that it was investigating Ailun's death.

Both Ailun and Jiantong were reportedly using phone chargers made by third-party companies, not Apple. FastCompany alleges that these knockoff chargers may be connected with the recent electrocutions. Xiang Ligang, an expert interviewed by CCTV, claims Ma may have been using a knockoff charger. He adds, "Knockoff chargers sometimes cut corners. The quality of the capacitor and circuit protector may not be good, and this may lead to the capacitor breaking down and sending 220 volts of electricity directly into the cell phone battery."

It's easy to be enticed by knockoff iPhone chargers. Apple's chargers typically sell for upwards of $39, while you can get knockoff chargers for less than $3.50 elsewhere.

Founders2be in Africa

                                       Founders2be Now in Africa,                                           the match-making social network for co-founders.

Founder2be, the match-making social network for co-founders launched in 2011 is coming to Africa,Nigeria soon, reports TechCrunch.

The platform’s co-founder, Oliver Bremer told TechCrunch that it’s first networking event in Africa will take place in Lagos, Nigeria and it would also be accepting applications for “ambassadors” — aka event hosts for its local networking events.
The Helsinki-based company is now operating in more than 100 countries, across five continents.

This is all thanks to the pioneers Chinedu Onyeaso and Emeka Akano,two Nigerian entrepreneurs who is bringing the co-founders match- making social networking site to Africa.