Scaling Internet-Based Startups in African Markets

We’ve all heard of the idea that entrepreneurs are people who see a ‘gap’ in the market and then create a product or service to address that gap. The implication is that there’s a ready market there that will snap … Read More

E-commerce & Mobile Payments in Africa will not scale without Business Process Integration

E-Commerce (or M-Commerce) and Mobile Payments in Africa gets a lot of attention.  I get a number of mobile payments pitches every month, and you can imagine how tough my skin has become over the last 6 months. Especially as … Read More

Comparisons and Lessons from the Kenyan and Jordanian Startup Ecosystems

In 2009, Yahoo acquired Maktoob a thriving Arab online community that had 16 million users at the time, Mashable.com reported a suspected price of $85M

Sitting at a lively roundtable discussion between young technology entrepreneurs during Amman’sMixNMentor at Oasis500, a leading seed investor … Read More

Where Opportunities Lie in the African Mobile Space

This is the second in a 4-part series on Africa: The Present frontier. 

Africa straddles two realities. One is underpinned by the belief that Africa is the next frontier and measures the continent’s progress against an expected trajectory and momentum … Read More

Disruptive Innovation in the African Tech Context

What is it really to disrupt, or what is a disruptive innovation? And to put it in the African context, what does ‘disruption’ mean for the continent and what are the opportunities to disrupt?

A dictionary definition of the term … Read More

From Mobile Money to Mobile Finance: Effects of Mobile Money on household, community and national economics

Back in 2011,  Erik Hersman, Ken Banks & Rudy De Waele curated a presentation dubbed “Mobile Trends 2020 Africa“, a collaborative outlook. Essentially they sought the views of different people across the continent who are players in one way or … Read More

MFarm Makes Unreasonable Institute Finals: How You Can Help

Kenyan mobile tech startup MFarm, launched at the first IPO48 contest in Nairobi in October 2010 by the all-girl tech team of Jamila, Sue and Linda. The 48 hour “idea-to-business” contest pit them against more than a dozen other contenders … Read More

Visa gets serious: Let the Africa Mobile Payment Wars Begin

A student at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania was asked by a former lead engineer at paypal during a mentoring session almost a year ago “Why are you not using Amazon web services for cloud computing?”, he … Read More

Forecasting Africa's Mobile Future

Co-founder of Ushahidi, Erik Hersman, gave an interesting talk at the recently held AITEC Africa conference in Nairobi, Kenya in which he made some observations, predictions and opportunities regarding the current state and future of mobile in Africa especially looking at where the … Read More

Startup Watch: M-PAYER

As a follow up to yesterday’s article on mobile money, let’s take a look at another area that the success of mobile money is affecting. One of the most interesting side effects of the continued growth of mobile money is how … Read More