Celebrating The African Tech Round-Up’s First Birthday!

The African Tech Round-up turns one today, and it’s difficult not be sentimental.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year! We set out to provide some much-needed coverage of the biggest digital, tech and innovation news stories from the African continent— minus all the PR-soaked click-bait and consumer-driven tech chatter one tends to find all over the web. We’ve certainly done our best to deliver on that mandate.

In producing the show over the last 52 weeks, we hope that like us, you’ve come to better understand the intricacies of Africa’s emerging tech and innovation scene, and that you’ve found the discussions and debates we’ve engaged in as interesting and enlightening as we did.

To celebrate our anniversary, on this week’s episode, Tefo Mohapi and I will be sharing audio highlights from the past year. Do join us in revisiting great chats we’ve had with some of the more memorable guests we’ve had on the show– folks like Rebecca Enonchong, Emeka Okoye, Dominique Collett-Antolik, Mbwana Alliy, and others.

We’d like to thank you for supporting this podcast by listening in every week, sharing it with other people, and engaging with us on social media, via email and by sending us audio voice notes that we shared on past episodes of the show. We’re excited to witness the community that is forming around this platform. Let’s keep talking!

Finally, we dedicate everything we’ve so far achieved, and everything we purpose to do going forward to you, and all the other incredible people of the Motherland who continue to work tirelessly in trenches of leading firms and emerging startups alike, to make Africa great.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

“Cashflow Rules Everything Around Me” Alludes iROKOtv’s Jason Njoku

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 response to a question posted on a popular Nigerian tech message board by someone who was curious to know how many Nigerian startups are in fact profitable.

Tefo Mohapi and I weren’t sure of what to make of both the question and and Jason’s subsequent response to it, so we decided to bounce some ideas around to try and determine which of these three: 1) growth, 2) profitability, or 3) being cashflow positive, African startup founders should focus on in order to succeed. Consider this just the start of a very long conversation that we plan to keep applying our minds to.

A definite highlight this week was having Jovago.com Founder and MD, Marek Zmyslowski aka Chinedu join us on this week’s African Tech Round-up while he was in Johannesburg on business. It was very kind of him to let us hijack him for a couple of hours, and include his two cents on this week’s news and discussion topic.

Be sure to catch all the week’s biggest digital, tech and innovation news:

• Kenya and South Sudan are set to start work on a multi-million dollar high-speed fibre optic cable within the next two years,
• The Consumer Federation of Kenya is leading a boycott of DSTV over high cable subscription rates,
• Nigerian e-commerce platform Yudala is keen to pull an ‘Amazon’ as it plans to roll out a traffic-beating drone-delivery service,
• South Africa’s largest online news platform, News24, has finally opted to disable public comments to articles posted on their website,
• Facebook 2nd Quarter African User numbers reveal some fascinating trends,
• Singtel, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica are joining forces to launch a VC initiative spanning Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, and 
• A quick reminder to anyone living in South Africa that public comments on the proposed new Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Bill are to be submitted to the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development on or before November 30th.