Kwesé TV Poised To Give DStv A Haircut

Africa’s ‘high-end’ VOD scene is hotting up, and for home-grown heavies, ShowMax and Kwesé, the race to achieving critical mass is on.

ShowMax is on the prowl for mobile telco partners that can help it hack growth while leveraging the enviable stash of international licensed content that its mothership, DStv, has in its vault. Meanwhile, Kwesé has the benefit of being part of the Econet Group– a huge potential advantage in that they might exploit Econet’s established mobile distribution network.

With Econet’s Chairman Strive Masiyiwa promising that Kwesé will launch 60 channels across no less than 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s quite clear that the network’s “mobile-centric” strategy will not be limited to carving out a decent share of the mobile VOD market, and so DStv could well be due for a haircut.

This week’s African Tech Round-up features a chat with Nzwisisa Chidembo, a programmer, business analyst and author of new book called Exploring Consumer Adoption of NFC Mobile Payments in South Africa which unpacks research done into why South Africans haven’t taken to mobile payments as readily as consumers in other countries on the continent.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Mastercard Launches 2KUZE Agtech Marketplace For Farmers In East Africa

Several well-respected voices we featured on the show last year predicted that we would see some major Agtech plays happen in 2017. 

Sure enough, Mastercard made headlines last week for launching a digital marketplace platform called 2KUZE which connects smallholder farmers, agents, buyers and banks in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The app allows farmers to buy, sell and receive payments for agricultural products via their feature phones.

If this initiative works half as well as we hope it will, it should make a heck of a difference to small-scale farmers looking to sell their produce to the right buyers more efficiently and at the best possible prices.

This week’s African Tech Round-up features a conversation I had with Katherine Liew. Katherine is the Head of Digital Disruption at Barclays Africa. Given what’s fixing to be an exciting year for fintech on the continent, I was keen to tap Katherine’s mind to get a sense of how one the continent’s largest banking incumbents is going about keeping up with the frantic pace of innovation within the financial services industry.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Fintech News Dominates Holiday Headlines + Insights From CES 2017

The team at the African Tech Round-up has returned from the Festive break, and so we’re officially back to our normal programming.

This week, we’re catching up on some biggest stories that broke while we were on holiday, including Standard Bank acquiring Firepay— the company behind the SnapScan payments app, the George Soros-backed VC, Leapfrog raising $800 million to invest in Africa’s finance scene, and the Nigerian fintech startup, Paystack, closing a $1.3 million seed investment round involving Tencent, Comcast Ventures and Singularity Investments. There’s no doubt about it, folks. Fintech is definitely a hot ticket at the moment!

At the tail-end of this episode, I chats with Nicholus Steward, founder and CEO of the Swazi Bridge Project. He attended the world’s biggest tech show, CES 2017 in Las Vegas two weeks ago, and he’ll be sharing insights he gleaned from the event.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Discussing Inclusive Value Chains With Simon Carpenter of SAP Africa

We are one week away from returning to our regular coverage of the week’s biggest digital, tech and innovation headlines, once the team at the African Tech Round-up returns from the Festive break.

This week’s show features yet another sneak preview of Season 6 of the African Tech Conversations series. I chat with Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Officer at SAP Africa, and with 2017 well and truly underway, I find out what innovation trend Simon is most excited about.

Now, as many of you know, last week the world’s largest tech conference, CES 2017, went down in Las Vegas, Nevada last week. If you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram— which of course I encourage you to do, then you’ll know that this year we teamed up with the Swazi Bridge Project to bring you Africa-focussed highlights from the expo, courtesy of CEO and Founder of the Swazi Bridge Project, Nicholus Steward.

Be sure to take in the insights we gleaned from CES 2017– like this conversation that Nick had with Steve Perlman, CEO and founder of Artemis:

I’m looking forward to having Nicholus on the show next week to unpack some of the more interesting announcements made at CES, and to discuss key issues that emerged which are likely to impact the continent in 2017.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.