Rwanda Launches World’s First Drone Delivery Service

Rwanda has helped Africa beat the rest of the world to rolling out a commercial drone delivery service.

The land of a thousand hills has partnered with the UPS Foundation, Gavi, and the Californian drone startup, Zipline, to start using drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach places in the country.

Zipline’s autonomous drones will now fly blood and plasma to places where poor road conditions often result in delays to time-critical deliveries of medical supplies for hours or even days. With drones, delivery time is reduced to minutes, even in bad weather. Take that, Amazon!

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up is high-profile tech investment news involving Naspers, MTN, as well as William Kirsh-led Triptech Media’s 20% acquisition of the social transit application GoMetro— a startup which seems to be generating a fair amount of investor interest at the moment.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Mobile World Congress 2016 (feat. Craig Wilson, Talib Graves-Manns & Brien Jordan-Jack)

So, Vodacom’s plans to acquire Neotel have come to naught due to “regulatory complexities and certain conditions not being fulfilled”.  Vodacom’s CEO Shameel Joosub has admitted that he’s very disappointed by his firm’s inability to make the deal happen. While I do expect for Vodacom to bounce back fairly quickly from this let-down, the jury’s still out on whether Neotel will recover from the scandals that continue to plague it.

Meanwhile, aspirational mobile trends like virtual reality are all well and good, but as Africans we must still grapple with the practical implications of having a massive percentage of mobile users on the continent continuing to rely on feature phones.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Stuff Magazine South Africa Editor and good friend of the show, Craig Wilson will join me to unpack some of the highlights of Mobile World Congress 2016— which wrapped in Barcelona just over a week ago.

Also, be sure to listen into this week’s show to catch snippets of a conversation I had with Talib Graves-Manns (Start-up Founder & Entrepreneur in Residence with Google for Entrepreneurs and Code 2040) and Brien Jordan-Jack (Aerospace Engineer, Commercial Pilot & Founder of Axiom Group).

Find out what Talib reckons sets Code 2040 apart from other “diversity in tech” initiatives aimed at creating access, awareness, and opportunities for top Black and Latino/a engineering talent in the US. And learn what Brien makes of the crazy valuations of Silicon Valley tech startups, many of which are yet to demonstrate any substantial revenue potential, never mind profitability.

Check out my full conversation with Talib Graves-Manns and Brien Jordan-Jack below: