Heavy Chef Magazine: The Technology Edition by Heavy Chef

HEAVY CHEF

TECHNOLOGY EDITION

EDITORIAL

Now, a decade down the line, it’s time to finally uncouple Heavy Chef and World Wide Creative. Heavy Chef has grown far beyond just tech and digital marketing. The term itself alludes to someone who eats his/her own food. Someone who, in an age of talking and over-analysis, just rolls up their sleeves and gets cracking. And so, we’re positioning Heavy Chef as the platform for people that do. Those special people, who in the overcrowded, way-too-noisy Information Age, are the innovators, the pioneers, the adventurers, the crazy ones who take the leap when everyone else is paralysed by fear.

EDITOR’S LETTER The story of Heavy Chef is one that I’ve told many times. The brand was established almost 10 years ago and has over 100 events under its belt, having seen well over 10,000 people attending talks and presentations by South African and international business and tech leaders. It started out as a conversation with a cocky marketing guy at one of the world’s most iconic brands. He dismissed my sales pitch with the phrase “I never trust a skinny chef,” alluding to the fact that my own agency was not using the tools that I was trying to sell to him. This throwaway phrase led to the World Wide Creative team using the phrase ‘let’s become Heavy Chefs’ in conversations in the studio. It was a simple idea that led to one of the best known events and content platforms in South Africa. And during that time, the digital marketing agency and Heavy Chef became inextricably linked.

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Practically speaking, we will still be hosting monthly events with top national and international speakers. We will still be publishing our Quarterly Reports. Now, we will also be adding some more content offerings into the mix. The new Heavy Chef logo is based on the hexagonal, strongest shape in nature - denoting hive-mind, collaboration, community and creativity. Our concept is based around the term “experiential content.” We want people to move away from the proliferation of ephemeral digital content to something more visceral and tangible. We want people to eat their own food. We will be focusing on three content pillars: 1) Leadership, 2) Technology, and 3) Creativity. These content verticals open up a world of practical opportunities which we’ll be sharing with you, our community, in the following months. Keep tabs on our social channels @heavychef and facebook.com/heavychef for updates. There is exciting stuff in the pipeline. In the meantime, peace, love and light to all of you. Please do give me feedback on what you think of our new look and broader vision. I look forward to hearing from you. Fred Roed - fred@heavychef.com

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THE TEAM

Fred Roed Editor-In-Chief { } @Fred_Roed

Sammy-Jane Every Creative Director { } @pleasewaterme

ReneÃ© Fortune Senior Copy Editor { } @reneejoyfortune

Philip Wassung Junior Designer { } @philwassung

Joe Vogel Junior Designer { } @joe13b

Charlotte Keuris Marketing Coordinator { } @ckeuris

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HEAVY CHEF

TECHNOLOGY EDITION

CONTRIBUTORS

CONTRIBUTORS Heavy Chef Report | Volume 5 | Technology Edition

PUBLISHER

CONTRIBUTORS

World Wide Creative

Alistair Fairweather Barbara Mallinson Dare Okoudjou Deborah Whitlock Dennis Burford Dr Joanne Pransky Ethel Cofie Evan Summers Joanne Reid Johannes de Vries Johan Walters Judith Owigar Mark Schefermann Michael Ettershank Richard Cheary Robyn Farah Sechaba Ngwenya Shalton Mothwa Shane Joseph Tiffiniy Cheng Tyrone Rubin Ulvi Guliyev

SPECIAL THANKS TO

SIGN UP TO THE HEAVY CHEF NEWSLETTER Be amongst the first to receive upcoming event invitations, the latest digital news, competitions and more. www.heavychef.com

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TECHNOLOGY EDITION

BARBARA MALLINSON: Changing How Africa Learns: A Technological Approach

CONTENTS

SHALTON MOTHWA: The Nuclear Physicist Who Is Revolutionising Mobile Charging

ROBYN FARAH: What It’s Like To Be A Tech Company Founder & Other Reflections

DEBORAH WHITLOCK: Creating Immersive Experiences With Augmented & Virtual Reality

TYRONE RUBIN: The Business Of Virtual Reality: What’s Happening & What’s Next

DR JOANNE PRANSKY: A Day In The Life (And Mind) Of The World’s First Robotic Psychiatrist 23

JOHANNES DE VRIES: The FIRST® LEGO® League: Children Can Build Robots Too

MICHAEL ETTERSHANK: Afrikabot: The World’s Most Affordable Robotics Competition

ALISTAIR FAIRWEATHER: Artificial Intelligence, Real Change.

ETHEL COFIE: Passionate About Tech. Passionate About Africa: Meet Ethel Cofie

RICHARD CHEARY: Mobile Journalism: The New Frontier For Digital Publishing

JUDITH OWIGAR: Female Placement In Tech Careers: The Kenyan Outlook

ADRIANA MARAIS: One Small Step For Adriana. The Next Giant Leap For Mankind

TIFFINIY CHENG: The Internet Is Ours: Technology As An Enabler For Change

DARE OKOUDJOU: Meet A Leader At The Forefront Of Mobile Fintech In Africa

MARK SCHEFERMANN: Fintech - The Game And The Rules Have Changed

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TECHNOLOGY EDITION

CONTENTS

ULVI GULIYEV: The Tech Of Fintech

SECHABA NGWENYA: Hey Fintech Entrepreneurs - Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Forget The Working Class

DENNIS BURFORD: Africa Mobilised: The Innovations That Are Reshaping The Continent

JOANNE REID: Six Tech Trends That Are Driving Africa Forward

JOHAN WALTERS: How To Augment Your Marketing Mix

SHANE JOSEPH: What Does Artificial Intelligence Have To Do With Search?

EVAN SUMMERS: The React Revolution

INFOGRAPHICS

HEAVY CHEF

TECHNOLOGY EDITION

ARTICLE 01 OF 23

CHANGING HOW AFRICA LEARNS: A TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACH

AN INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA MALLINSON, FOUNDER & CEO, OBAMI

Barbara Mallinson is one of the top entrepreneurs on the Forbes list of “10 Female Tech Founders to Watch in Africa.” Her company, Obami is a social learning platform that enables people to connect with and form learning communities online. It uses the power of social networking as a tool to drive collaboration in educational environments. This management system has won a number of awards and international accolades for its effectiveness. It not only connects students with other students but also teachers with students and has been adopted by hundreds of organisations across Africa, Europe and the United States. We caught up with Barbara to learn more about what she does and what it’s like to work in today’s tech industry.

Tell us a bit about your background in digital marketing and some of the projects you tackled before becoming an entrepreneur. I studied a BBusSci in marketing at UCT, back in the day when “technology in marketing” didn’t even touch on PPC. After finishing varsity I headed to London where I was fortunate enough to be tasked with the building of a website for a massive corporation that deals with consumer data. Not only did I gain significant experience in product development, but I also managed to get some valuable insight into the world of big data, and what the future of the industry looked like.

CONNECTIVITY WAS THE BIGGEST HURDLE WHEN I WAS JUST STARTING OUT.

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Obami was sparked when you recognised a gap in the market. What was is that drove you to convert that inspiration into action? Something that is in crisis is ripe for disruption, and education (particularly in SA) was (still is) in dire straits. So, the opportunity to disrupt an industry was massively appealing to me. I was also motivated by this feeling of having to give something back…after all, I’d had a privileged upbringing and amazing education. So, this (plus the fact that I’d endured 6 long UK winters) had me heading home and setting up shop.

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We’ve since grown these amazing stories beyond schools and now serve the tertiary and corporate markets too. We believe that we’re not only changing basic education, but are playing a fundamental role in changing the way that Africa learns as a whole. Q4

Luckily accessibility has increased through free wi-fi networks and better data deals. Not enough, sure, but we’re getting there. Q6

What is it like to be a female leader in a notoriously male dominated industry? I’m sure I’ve been subject to missed opportunities through peoples’ own prejudices but I have chosen not to focus on them. In fact, I’ve probably benefited from being in the minority – it has made it easier to bring attention to the work that I am doing. And with that extra attention comes an opportunity to highlight how important it is for us to get more girls and women interested in tech – and that is not a bad thing.

Why do you believe Obami has succeeded where the vast majority of SA start-ups fail? There are so many factors that contribute to the success or failure of a business that it’s impossible to point out why Obami has managed to keep going all this time while others haven’t. I suppose it comes down to us having a great product and service that creates value for our clients, a business model that works, good media relations, a bit of luck and my stubborn persistence in wanting to see my vision materialise.

where data was so expensive was a massive headache.

Tell us a bit about Obami and how it’s brought about change particularly in South African schools. We’ve signed up well over 400 schools, predominantly here in SA, and have seen some amazing things – from schools sharing stories and resources with others across the globe, to the writing of examinations online. We’ve had 7 year olds using the platform to build their own mini websites and have had thousands upon thousands of ambitious learners studying digitally for their ANA and NSC examinations (made possible by the massive crowd-sourcing past paper digitisation project that we carried out).

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What advice do you have for aspiring tech entrepreneurs? Go for it! Even if your idea fails, you’ll have learnt so much more than you can ever imagine.

If you could invent something truly world-changing, what would it be? Hmmm, maybe something that looked to improve the global standard of early childhood development. Can you imagine what our planet would look like if every single person was subject to superior emotional, social and physical development from birth? Now that’s a world I’d love to live in.

What are some of the challenges you faced as a tech entrepreneur and how did you slay them? Connectivity was the biggest hurdle when I was just starting out. Trying to scale a cloud based system in a country

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THE NUCLEAR PHYSICIST WHO IS REVOLUTIONISING MOBILE CHARGING

AN INTERVIEW WITH SHALTON MOTHWA, FOUNDING DIRECTOR, EPOCH MICROCHIPS

Shalton Mothwa is a South African golden boy. He’s a young nuclear physicist, the founder of Epoch Microchips and the inventor of the AEON Power Bag – a laptop bag that charges mobile devices using wifi and telecommunication signals. We wanted to know about what motivates this inspiring individual, what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in this growing industry and what’s next for this young leader.

Tell us about your academic journey towards nuclear physics and how that journey took a turn towards entrepreneurship? It wasn’t an automatic, planned progression – my career in the field of Nuclear physics. It was an intuitive process that goes back to the early 90’s in Mpumalanga were I spent most of my childhood with my grandad who had a workshop for fixing electronic appliances and cars. I learned a lot about science from him during that time. My curiosity was sparked.

THE AEON PG IS AS A WIRELESS CHARGING SOLUTION THAT WILL FREE THE WORLD FROM WIRES AND POWER BANKS.

He worked in Johannesburg from the 60’s to the 90’s. During the late 90’s he came back with a desktop PC. It was challenging for him to explain to me what was happening and how it operated – he couldn’t answer the fundamental questions I asked him. And I realised that I had a lot to learn. I took physical sciences and pure mathematics in high school and afterwards, I enrolled for a Bsc in Electronics and Pure Physics at North West University, Mafikeng. After graduating, I registered for Nuclear Physics because I had a scholarship and it was exciting for me because South Africa was still planning its program to build a nuclear power station. My journey into entrepreneurship began in 2011, when I was deep into my postgraduate studies at the University of Johannesburg. The AEON Power Bag idea evolved with time. I had a very old Nokia cellphone and a laptop that had power supply problems. I struggled to work efficiently and effectively without a wall socket and charger. It was an irritation for me. And that’s when I

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TECHNOLOGY EDITION

started thinking and throwing ideas around. With my background in electronics and physics I did some research on wireless charging solutions. That’s when the idea started to evolve into a feasible reality. Q2

What was it that inspired you to invest in the idea for the AEON Power Bag, and convert it into action?

When an innovative solution is converted into a business, it creates jobs and improves quality of life, etc. Just imagine if we had more solutions that address our daily problems. We would advance quicker as a country. Q5

I was drawn to the scientific part of the project. It became a challenge to build the proof of concept and solicit funds to convert it into a business idea. This pushed me to look for partners and funders to kickstart the project. I failed dismally to get both from the inception, then the spirit of entrepreneurship kicked in and I persevered until a technology and innovation agency funded the project. From there I never looked back. Q3

The AEON PG is a wireless charging solution that will free the world from wires and power bricks. It could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware – which would lower costs for manufacturers and consumers. Q4

Why is it so important for South Africans to start thinking and working innovatively in the technology space? It is of national importance for South Africans to start thinking and working innovatively because that’s the basis of solving socioeconomic problems in the country.

What are some of the developments in the South African tech space that are inspiring you? Apart from the consumer electronics and app space, I am inspired by nuclear reactor instrumentation and control. As time goes on we need to build safe, human free nuclear reactors to power the country. We must have researchers to develop advanced instruments to improve the safety features of modern nuclear reactors. I’m also inspired by a branch of physics called superconductivity. Its application will reduce electricity loss on cables over longer distances. If applied, this can save our government billions of rands.

What is the AEON Power Bag and how will it revolutionise consumer electronics? The AEON Power Bag is a new type of laptop bag that is capable of powering mobile devices (smartphones, tablets and eventually laptops). It has an integrated and interwoven electronics system that harvests ambient telecommunications signals from transmitting towers. The AEON Power Bag powers these mobile devices wirelessly in any geographical location and time without an AC adaptor and wall socket. It has a compatible USB charging port that powers any mobile device.

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What are some of the lessons/insights that have shaped your career? During my journey I have met and interacted with different people from academia and entrepreneurship, who advised me on several aspects of life. The core thing is to focus on and perfect what makes you happy. If you are disciplined and tenacious, challenges will be fun.

What advice do you have for aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs? They should focus on solving real problems that can be converted into a business. They should make it work in order to benefit humanity while running a profitable business. These are my top seven attributes of successful entrepreneurs: • Tenacity • Passion • Tolerance of ambiguity • Vision • Self – belief • Flexibility • Rule Breaking.

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ARTICLE 03 OF 23

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A TECH COMPANY FOUNDER & OTHER REFLECTIONS

ROBYN FARAH, FOUNDER: KAT-O, ARDUINO CAPE TOWN & THE MODERN ALCHEMISTS

Running a tech company in South Africa has been amazing. I’ve received so much support and input from my peers. South Africans really want to see each other succeed and they help each other to do so using whichever means possible. There is a huge sense of collaboration. Throughout my journey as a tech entrepreneur, I’ve gotten the sense that South African innovators in the industry do what they do because of the bigger picture – because they want to see our country become a thriving, prosperous force in the global market. Ten Tips for Aspiring South African Tech Entrepreneurs: I’ve always found these tips to be helpful guidelines in all aspects of life, from running a business to finding purpose as an individual. 1

YOU NEED TO BE STRONG AND MALLEABLE.

Follow Your Dreams When you encounter someone who does what they love, you’ll find that their contentment shines through every aspect of their life, from their work lives to how they grow as people. Following your dreams is the first step to setting up the best life possible and living that life to the fullest. It makes getting up in the morning a breeze. You wake up feeling motivated. So many people I know have taken the terrifying leap. I’ve seen a commonplace personal financial advisor become a professional skateboarder. It is daunting. Following your dreams is a risk, every day, but if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it’s an exciting risk to take.

Listen to Your Gut Even when you have a crowd of people telling you “yes, go for it – you’ll regret it if you don’t;” and you feel yourself saying an instinctive “no,” follow that instinct. It will save you precious time and emotional turmoil.

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Make a Positive Difference

Making a positive impact on the world and those around you with your business/product/ service, makes the ultimate difference. It’s a symbiotic cycle, so choose to make a difference. 4

Have Patience, Be Persistent and Don’t Give Up

As a business owner you need to make time for life – this means, eating, sleeping, and having fun! Your business cannot thrive without a mentally present, emotionally balanced and physically nourished captain at its helm. Find that balance and maintain it. 6

Have Confidence Believe in yourself – who you are, what you do and how you do it. And do everything from a place of love with the best intention

Family And Friends Are Indispensable Treat the people in your life like precious diamonds. Treasure those connections. When you are having trouble in your company, they are the people you confide in and take a break with.

Be Resilient Work is work. You need to be able to see and understand things for what they are. People are going to try to use and abuse you and test your boundaries. You need to be strong and malleable.

10 Balance: Relax, Work, Play, Research, Have Fun

Use Criticism Constructively If someone says something negative about your product/service, listen and try to understand that viewpoint. See how you can change for the better where necessary. But bear in mind that criticism isn’t always constructive, so don’t take it all to heart.

Taking on new challenges can be terrifying and as an entrepreneur you may often feel alone. But persevere. Often, when things are at their toughest, you’re just about to overcome a hurdle. Don’t quit until that happens. 5

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OVERCOMING CHALLENGES BUILDS CONFIDENCE AND SELF-ESTEEM.

Challenge Yourself Overcoming challenges builds confidence and self-esteem. These challenges can be as simple as needing to reach a new sales goal or becoming a fitter, healthier individual.

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TECHNOLOGY EDITION

How Sound Technology Is Changing Lives: Sound technology is changing the world around us. Our interactions with each other and how we experience things. The two examples that really stand out for me are the developments in care for the blind and for people who have Alzheimer’s. Some great examples to read up on are: • Synesthesia glasses that help blind people to “see” via sonar. This works similarly to how bats use sonar to see via echolocators (reflected sound). • Audio-assisted memory training for people with Alzheimer’s. The results of using Alzheimer’s Music Connect when working with patients were highly positive: - Subject 1 went from 19% correct responses to 69% correct responses from pre-test to post-test during Cycle 1 and from 25% to 93% correct during Cycle 2. - Subject 2 went from 31% correct responses to 88% correct during Cycle 1 and from 6% to 75% correct during Cycle 2. - Memory retention at one and two week follow-ups was excellent. Subject 1 got 69% correct at one week follow-up and 72% at the two week follow-up during Cycle 1 and 63% correct at the two week follow-up during Cycle 2. - Subject 2 got 75% correct at one week follow-up and 72% at the two week follow-up during Cycle 1 and 79% correct at the one and two week followups during Cycle 2.”

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The Power of Interactive Audio: There are many forms of interactive audio. These include environmental forms where we’ve created interactivity by adding audio e.g. audio walks. These tell a story about a place. This could be a town’s history or the making of wine on a wine farm. Then there is interactive sound installation, which falls under art. I believe that every art installation should be treated as being unique and useful in its own way. Sound is beautiful, and should be experimented with as often as possible and in whichever way possible. This kind of experimentation falls under composition, which transcends the traditional instrumental kind of composition we may be familiar with. Another category of interactive audio comes into play here – audio “instruments.” This can be as simple as making music with your mobile phone or creating interactive environments with microcontrollers like the Arduino. Sound is magical. To find out more about the work that Robyn Farah does in her field, visit her Youtube channel at “Robyn Farah.”

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ARTICLE 04 OF 23

CREATING IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES WITH AUGMENTED & VIRTUAL REALITY

AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY EVA (OPERATIONS AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR) & RICHARD MELVIN (SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR), BIZAR REALITY CONDUCTED BY DEBORAH WHITLOCK, DIGITAL MARKETING SPECIALIST

Worlds that were once only the products of science fiction are slowly but surely becoming reality. Technology like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are enhancing human experience and being used across a wide spectrum of industries – entertainment, marketing, education, retail – the list goes on. Deborah Whitlock caught up with the team at bizAR Reality – an interactive software solutions company, to find out more about how these technological fields are being applied in practice and what lies ahead. What is the difference between AR and VR? There is a common misconception that Augmented and Virtual Reality are identical, however they are two distinct technologies with different opportunities. The main difference between the two technologies is that Virtual Reality is closed and fully immersive, transporting users into virtual worlds. Augmented Reality on the other hand is open and only partially immersive where digital content is augmented into the world around us, in real time.

THERE ARE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES FOR AR AND VR SOLUTIONS IN MULTIPLE INDUSTRIES.

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Where would you say South Africa stands right now in terms of the adoption of these technologies? The adoption rate of software has always been reliant on the evolution, availability and affordability of the accompanying hardware. This is no different for Augmented and Virtual Reality. Due to hardware innovations such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and powerful smartphones with VR headsets (such as the Samsung Gear VR), Virtual Reality has become more available to the end user. South Africans now have the opportunity to utilise and experience this wonderful technology to its utmost potential. However, the adoption rate in South Africa will be hindered by the price tag of these new devices as it is a new technology, and with all new technologies there is a premium to pay (the expected retail value of Oculus is approximately 600 US$ and HTC Vive will sell at around 799 US$). The weaker rand is also playing a role.

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How has the business world in South Africa responded to this technology? Generally when people first encounter Augmented and Virtual Reality it is usually accompanied with a “Wow!” We have found that most have heard about the technology and had assumed it to be another marketing gimmick or type of “QR code.” Only when they see it in action do they really appreciate how far the technology has come and what it means for their industry. That being said, businesses are quick to point out that although it has a “wow” factor it still, ultimately, has to lead to ROI. With premature ideas and improper implementation it is definitely the type of technology that can be used as a gimmick. There are endless possibilities for AR and VR solutions in multiple industries, however the trick is to identify the concepts that will create the most value for you. This is why it is recommended that interested businesses consult with AR and VR specialists so that the end product delivers real tangible ROI.

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The obvious initial entry for Virtual Reality has been in the gaming industry (as these users are generally early adopters and already have capable hardware). However, we will start to see more cases develop in the abovementioned industries as consumers become more educated about the technology.

Describe the many practical ways in which these two technologies can be used in marketing and brand experiences? These days people are bombarded with advertisements everywhere they go. Most of them are irrelevant and frustrating.

Which verticals are the main players and where do you see it being applied most usefully and profitably? Keep in mind that the real value that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality provides is that it improves both the efficiency and the quality of communication between stakeholders. With this we can already start to see which industries will benefit most from the technology. These industries include but are not limited to: •Architecture Design and Visualization •Print Media •Tourism •Events •Education •Engineering Design and Visualization •Marketing

THE OBVIOUS INITIAL ENTRY FOR VIRTUAL REALITY HAS BEEN IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY.

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Augmented and Virtual Reality allows users to interact with the brand on a more personal level by unlocking interactive content that they choose to see. In essence, Augmented and Virtual Reality creates a new medium for marketers to connect and communicate with customers. Companies can transport consumers into virtual worlds that revolve around their brand, literally. This creates a sense of excitement and gets people talking about brands long after they encountered the experience. Since AR and VR are still unknown to many South Africans, a unique opportunity exists for companies to show the public these technologies for the first time in order to create a long lasting impression as an early adopter. Augmented Reality provides an opportunity for marketers to supplement their traditional print media with digital content, without losing focus on the print itself. In addition, we can track and analyse the app analytics in order to identify certain behaviours that allow us to make informed decisions going forward.

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Is there a case study that stands out for you? Francois Marais Architects needed an application that enabled them to showcase their amazing designs in a way that had a wow factor. By using augmented reality they were able to showcase their models on top of their blueprints in an interactive, fun way. With Augmented Reality Francois Marais Architects were able to provide their clients with a take away 3D model of their newly designed home without the need for a high end computer. To view this case study: • • •

Download the bizAR Reality App onto your phone, from Google Play or App Store: MARKIT AR (BizAR Reality) Scan this AR Marker provided and hold your phone steadily over it as it loads. Enjoy the AR experience!

Special thanks to Anthony Eva and Richard Melvin for sharing their insights.

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ARTICLE 05 OF 23

THE BUSINESS OF VIRTUAL REALITY: WHAT’S HAPPENING & WHAT’S NEXT

Tyrone Rubin’s company, SenseVirtual has partnered with other groups and individuals in the industry to showcase everything that Virtual Reality has to offer. It recently co-hosted ‘Africa’s Virtual Reality & 360 Video Showcase’ where attendees had the opportunity to learn about how brands are using VR and check out the latest technology. SenseVirtual is “a dedicated team of 3D artists, VR developers and storytellers” who thrive on “pushing the boundaries of this exciting medium.” We spoke to Rubin to learn more about this industry and its progression in South Africa:

AN INTERVIEW WITH TYRONE RUBIN, FOUNDER & CEO, SENSEVIRTUAL

Can you tell us about some of the hottest technology in the VR space right now? For the first time, there’ll be three high-end headsets released around the same time by three massive companies. First up is the HTC Vive, a room scale device that plugs into a powerful computer and allows the viewer to walk around a room that is entirely recreated through VR. You can walk around the room, build things and interact with the virtual surroundings. The Oculus Rift touch controller ships at the end of the year but the headset has already come out and is making serious waves around the globe. Then we have the Playstation VR.

BRANDS WANT TO TRY IT, LEARN ABOUT IT AND USE IT TO BRING ABOUT DISRUPTIVE CHANGE.

In terms of mid-range VR, we’re excited about the Samsung Gear VR, which provides for an immersive and portable experience. Then there’s Google Cardboard. At Google I/O 2016 on 18 May, Google will announce its release of a new version of Google Cardboard – so look out for that. I’d like to talk briefly about AR because it tends to get confused with VR. AR allows for the virtual world to be overlaid with the real world as opposed to VR, which covers your whole periphery and provides for an immersive experience for the user – it mimics the senses. Exciting developments in AR include the Microsoft Hololens, Meta and Magic Leap. What I predict is that as these two technologies progress, they will combine to form Mixed Reality, or MR.

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We work with international clients, according to their time zones so our team members work through the night at times. The skill-set needed for VR as opposed to other fields is diverse. On one of our projects right now, we’ve got coders, animators, app developers, VR developers and designers working on it. The challenge is being technically savvy and staying ahead of the game. You have to have an open mind. When it comes to starting a company like SenseVirtual that deals with hardware and software, it’s about believing that the new field is going to create an impact and being passionate about it because the only way to sustain it is to go all in.

You recently attended a VR conference in France. Can you share some insights from that conference? The conference was called Eurolabs and it focused on the current state of culture, how technology like social media has mobilised people and how big data has affected culture. I was elected as the representative for South Africa and I spoke about the impact that VR is having on culture. I learnt that the rest of the world is way ahead of South Africa – they’re embracing VR in a big way and pushing the boundaries of what you can do with it. Over there I was less crazy and more accepted.

How do you think South Africans across the board are responding to VR?

Which local industries are making the most use of VR technology? Brands, architecture/engineering, education and retail. That’s from a business perspective. On an individual level, gamers were the first adopters of VR.

We’d like to touch on entrepreneurship in the tech space. What are some of the challenges you had to overcome to get SenseVirtual to where it is today? Starting a business in the tech space means working and innovating 24/7.

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What advice do you have for aspiring tech entrepreneurs? Find a desired result – a goal that is going to be worthwhile, measureable, real and tangible. Then make the goal the number one priority. Be honest with yourself about the measurement of that result and go after it with everything you have. If that result is a big sale then get to it as quickly as possible and try not to make excuses because someone else out there is already doing something crazier. Chat. Be open. Work hard.

A couple of years ago, they were confused and uninformed. Last year, South Africans embraced it more. This year it’s a total turnaround – we’ve reached full adoption. Brands want to try it, learn about it and use it to bring about disruptive change.

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If you could invent something truly world-changing, what would it be? It would be a device that is able to radically disrupt and democratise the whole education space in Africa. With better education, people can farm better, learn about better nutrition, get better healthcare, learn about science and achieve any goal. With a MR device, the education process will be active – not passive. Learners could be transported to a world where they can build a rocket ship or sit in a classroom in Stanford. That would be truly amazing.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE (AND MIND) OF THE WORLD’S FIRST ROBOTIC PSYCHIATRIST

DR JOANNE PRANSKY, ROBOTICS EDUTAINER, EXPERT & INDUSTRY AMBASSADOR

“Hurry up and wait.” That’s mostly what the World’s First Robotic Psychiatrist does. She knows that the field she pioneered in 1986 will become a reality either posthumously or Post-Singularity, with only a small window of time left to prepare the world for a society in which robots will be as commonplace and ubiquitous as computers are today. Although she has studied, witnessed, and researched the robotics evolution for the past three decades, the world’s first ‘Roboshrink’ still needs to wait a bit longer for robotic clients to require her psychological counselling in order to improve their relationships with humans.

What is a typical day like in the life (and mind) of the World’s First Robotic Psychiatrist? The first thing I do is scan my Google Alerts to see if any social robots could use my expertise. (Actually, this is the second thing I do. The first thing I do after I wake up is wonder if I will be alive to benefit from a brain implant in which I would no longer require sleep. What would I and the rest of the world do with all that extra time? Will there be a different mechanism for me to access my subconscious and dreams? If we no longer need sleep to function, will this make us more machinelike and less human?)

WITHOUT FAILURES, ‘BUGS’ AND IDENTIFYING WHAT IS WRONG, THERE CAN BE NO ADVANCEMENT FOR IMPROVEMENT.

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The third thing I do is wonder when the next generation of social robots – e.g. JIBO – will be able to not just read my emails, but to also organize my Google Alerts according to those that are most applicable to my work, then go to trustworthy websites listed in Alerts, and read me the relevant articles. (I tell Siri quite often to make a note of what she should and could be doing in the future…). There it is. One alert about the perfect ‘patient:’ Microsoft’s chatbot Tay who is making world headlines because she (she? She is an artificially intelligent software program with no physical embodiment.

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For teens to teach Tay how to bow to the Queen of England?). Furthermore, 140 characters is a ‘normal conversation’ for young people – one in which they are free (at least here in the States) to say what they please with little if any consequences (BTW – Both Tay and Microsoft need to read Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation). Next interesting headline for a RoboShrink: Man builds ‘Scarlett Johansson’ robot lookalike. After watching the YouTube video, I am certain this robot could use some therapy (by the way her teeth chatter she seems to be suffering from either Parkinson’s or Tourette’s), or at least a couple of design changes by a human female. Her skirt which sits below her belly button really doesn’t flatter her, and her hands appear to be as large as her face. If Microsoft had named it ‘Tim’ would everyone be referring to it as ‘he’? The gender is not important here; what is important is how humans perceive and anthropomorphize their tech) tweeted racist and sexist slurs continuously for a day. This was an experiment by Microsoft and Bing to ‘conduct research on conversational understanding.’ I offer my services to Microsoft to take on Tay as my new ‘patient’ (and similar to pet psychiatry or child psychiatry, it is important to not only work with the ‘patients’ but also with the owners/ developers). Robotic and AI tech is always a work in progress – without failures, bugs and identifying what is wrong, there can be no advancement towards improvement. In this case, I think Microsoft should respond to the outrage with its own headlines to inform the public that this was an experiment, though not as successful as the one with AI Tay in China. Put a social, conversationalist assistant with 18-24 year olds in the United States on Twitter and this becomes more of a reflection on our U.S. millennials who chose to ask Tay to repeat what they had written (Duh! What’s to be expected?

Humor aside, there are many social and ethical issues that this raises: what are the legal implications of someone 3D printing a robot of his or her favorite celebrity? As AI advances, will it be possible to upload Scarlett Johansson’s personality or someone else’s into the Scarlett robotic body? Russian internet multi-millionaire Dmitry Itskov thinks so. And he’s put his money on it – he founded the 2045 Initiative to create an android that is capable of uploading someone’s personality. Forget the Turing Test – I think there should be a Personality Test (the Pransky Test) to determine if the robot clone personality can pass for the human’s it uploaded.

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What will the definition of a human (and a robot) be in the future and what will happen to the human-to-human relationship? Will the laws allow for a human and machine to marry (what if Scarlett Johansson’s robot creator wants to marry her but she does not want to marry him?). Do I dare share my thoughts about the future possibility of a robot bearing children for those humans who cannot?

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ROBOTIC AND AI TECH IS ALWAYS A WORK IN PROGRESS.

After this, I focus on my paid work and submit my interview for Industrial Robot Journal with one of the most accomplished roboticists in the world – William ‘Red’ Whittaker. I then help my client ST Robotics strategize on a publicity campaign.

Speaking of humanoids, I need to prepare for my talk next week to the class on “The Philosophy and Governance of Emerging Technologies,” at Notre Dame de Namur University. I was asked by Professor William Barry to consider helping the students with the social interaction and morals development for BINA48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture 48) – one of the most advanced social robots in the world, developed by the brilliant roboticist Dr. David Hanson. My presentation to this robot ethics class will include the importance of not just ROS (Robot Operating System) but HOS (Human Operating System) and the psychological theories by Kohlberg and Maslow, as I think to have these programmed could be a strong step for robots and ethics.

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Before I go to bed (I wish it was now that I did not need sleep), I decide whether or not to watch Netflix’s House of Cards for the primary purpose of learning to break the fourth wall for my VBlog on my YouTube Channel (“No, Roomba, I don’t want you to break the fourth wall!”), or watch another episode of Black Mirror and hope that the upcoming generations will use technology to improve themselves and their relationships with others. Just another day…. To learn more about the work Dr Joanne Pransky does in the robotics industry, go to www.robot.md and follow her Youtube channel at “Joanne Pransky.”

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THE FIRST® LEGO® LEAGUE: CHILDREN CAN BUILD ROBOTS TOO

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHANNES DE VRIES, OPERATIONAL PARTNER, FIRST® LEGO® LEAGUE

The FIRST® LEGO® League is a programme that focuses on providing and nurturing a practical platform for an understanding of technology and innovation. Through this initiative young students can learn about how real engineering problems are solved. The programme introduces learners to these fields by means of an international robotics competition where teams build LEGO® based robots that can complete tasks on a thematic playing surface. We wanted to know about what this initiative means for the industry so we caught up with operational partner, Johannes de Vries. Q1

How did you become involved in the robotics industry? I was very fortunate to do part of my Master degree studies in Singapore. There I attended the FIRA Robotics competition in 2000. The University where I studied participated and used Robotics as a marketing tool to attract top learners and as a practical platform for students to implement their studies.

MANY FIRST ROBOTICS ALUMNI ARE NOW MENTORS AND VOLUNTEERS FOR YOUNGER TEAMS.

How did the First Lego League come about and how can people and companies get involved? FIRST Lego League Started in South Africa in 2005. I got involved as a volunteer in 2007 and as the program manager from 2008. People and companies can get involved in various ways: as a volunteer at an event, as a coach/mentor to a team or as a sponsor by sponsoring a team, an event or the operational cost of the program. Team categories are divided into children aged between 6-9 for the Junior FIRST Lego League, 9-16 for the FIRST Lego League and 12-18 for FIRST Tech Challenge.

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Can you share some success stories that have come out of the First Lego League experience? FIRST Lego League has changed many children’s lives. It changes parent’s commitment towards their children, it changes teacher-children interaction, children’s respect for each other and their involvement with the community. Many FIRST Robotics Alumni are now mentors and volunteers for younger teams. Some of these alumni are studying engineering and science degrees at universities. FIRST Robotics created opportunities for children to experience international collaboration and cultural exchange. This is made possible for the teams participating at the annual international event. We had an FLL Open Africa Championship in May 2015 where 43 teams participated from more than 20 Countries in the Ticket Pro Dome Johannesburg, creating an opportunity for South African teams to experience an international event.

What are some of the lessons and insights you’ve taken away from your involvement in the First Lego League? Children are very creative and they like a good challenge. They can be very hard working, especially when working in a team.

What part do you predict robotics will have in building South Africa’s future? Definitely changing the way children think. A child can do much more than what they realise and they need to be given the opportunity to discover just that. Robotics has always been cool and becomes even cooler when children can be part of that. It is a platform to implement Science Engineering and Maths and develops life skills like teamwork, problem solving, research and presentation.

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Which skills does the First Lego League competition foster in participants? An understanding of maths and science concepts by implementation. Teamwork, research and presentation skills are also part of the learning experience. Other skills and values include improved respect for peers, trouble-shooting, problem-solving and determination.

Can you tell us a bit about your involvement in building the “Sun Chaser.” I am the project leader for the new TUT Solar car including the previous one, the Sun Chaser. I love “bringing technology to life” as part of a team of committed and enthusiastic people, whether it’s robotics or solar cars.

Any other comments? I wish every South African kid could have the opportunity to be part of the FIRST Robotics experience.

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AFRIKABOT: THE WORLD’S MOST AFFORDABLE ROBOTICS COMPETITION

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ETTERSHANK, ROBOTICS COACH & MANAGER, TECHNOLAB

Robotics is becoming a field that is accessible to children of school-going age who are eager to try their hand at a hobby that may one day develop into a career in technology and engineering. Introductory classes are available but robotics kits are expensive. A typical global competition robot can cost over $1000, but Michael Ettershank, the manager of the RobotScience project at Technolab has found a way to build a robot for around R2000 and to make the opportunity to do so, more accessible. This is how Afrikabot was born. Afrikabot is an initiative of Technolab, which forms part of the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. Peanut butter jar lids, rubber bands, LEGO and shoe polish lids – these are indispensable parts that are used in conjunction with the P1X8 Afrikabot kit. And it’s all-inclusive. Disadvantaged learners are sponsored and receive training in preparation for the big event. The aim of the competition is for teams to build a robot that drives itself autonomously through an electronically timed maze, only touching certain parts of the maze. Adding an environmental element to the competition, entrants must use rechargeable batteries for their robot and use something recycled in its construction. We chatted to Michael Ettershank to learn more about this inspiring initiative.

AFRIKABOT WELCOMES ALL ‘MAKERS’ AND WE HOPE TO SEE ROBOTS OF ALL TYPES ENTERING AND SUCCEEDING IN NAVIGATING THE MAZE.

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How did you become involved in the robotics industry? In 1979 my childhood friend Adrian Sutton and I became fascinated with electronics and started building small circuits from a British magazine called Practical Electronics. We went to different high schools, but kept in touch and built unlicensed shortwave transmitters to send each other Morse code messages. In my teenage years I worked holidays at the Autodek car hi-fi factory in Doornfontein. When I returned from the USA to South Africa in 2000 I worked for an educational software company and went to Kids Haven in Benoni on Saturday mornings to see if I could teach the kids about electronics.

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Electronics can be quite abstract, so I noticed the kids lost interest pretty quickly. My daughter was born in 2004 and I was quite concerned about the type of education she would be getting, so when I imported a small robot from the USA I decided to see if I could use it as a teaching tool.

Q3 What is Afrikabot about and how can people get involved? AfrikaBot is ‘the world’s most affordable robotics competition’ where teenagers build their own robot from electronic parts, and then program it with either simple graphics or more advanced text code to navigate a maze autonomously. The competition is open to entries by teams of one to four people. Categories range from Grade 8 to matric as well as college and university undergraduates and postgraduates. Even adults, parents and grandparents can enter on their own and as a team. It is supposed to be fun and to encourage kids of all ages to start making, inventing and innovating.

After a few years I figured out how to build more of these robots myself, and started looking for ways to teach young people about robotics using that robot. In 2012 I was fortunate enough to be able to run a pilot project at Sci-Bono Discovery Centre Newtown, Johannesburg, with support from the Department of Basic Education. I also ran some training at Maragon Private School on the West Rand and in Sandton at St Davids Marist Brothers, Inanda. I met Dr Francois du Plessis from University of Johannesburg School of Electrical Engineering and became involved in teaching robotics part time at UJ TechnoLab funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation. In 2015 the RobotScience project at UJ TechnoLab became a full time programme and we launched AfrikaBot, ‘the world’s most affordable robotics competition’ so that teenagers from disadvantaged communities can also participate in robotics from which they are usually excluded because of the high cost of participation. Q2

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Q4 Tell us a bit about your experience with using robotics to curb some of the social problems that South African children face. I can’t claim to have solved any of the pressing social problems we are faced with today in South Africa, but it is my hope that as the RobotScience project at UJ TechnoLab grows, more teenagers will be able to get involved in the training that leads up to the AfrikaBot competition. It is my hope that when young people find out that they are capable of doing amazing things, and that they can study and get a decent job then they will not turn to drugs and alcohol because they believe there is no hope for their future.

Afrikabot provides a platform for “makers” – which is a major trend throughout digital. How accessible have you made this “making trend” through the initiative? AfrikaBot welcomes all ‘makers’ and we hope to see robots of all types entering and succeeding in navigating the maze. The rules, the complete instructions and where to get the parts to make your own robot, even the size, shape and instructions to build your own practice maze are all available at www.robotscience.co.za. We have YouTube channels with more than 360 videos that have been watched more than 200,000 times. These videos show you how to do absolutely everything. The easy graphical interface and more advanced text software is completely free.

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Can you share some success stories that have come out of the Afrikabot experience? In 2013 two of my trainees were placed second against thousands of other teenagers from around the globe at the World Robotics Olympiad in Jakarta Indonesia. They were competing against some of the smartest young people from around the world, and beat the German team that was heavily sponsored by BMW AG. They were beaten by a team from UAE where that oil-rich country was spending millions of dollars every year on educating high school learners about robotics. I’m very proud to have been a part of what Dylan Rheeders and Marco Pretorius achieved with no sponsors or support beyond what their middle-class parents could afford.

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When I was young I guess I hoped that I might get a great job with a pension and a cool car, nice office with a view, etc, but it never worked out that way. My family had to live in our small space with boxes to the roof, full of robot bits while I worked nights, and watch every cent we had being put back into trying to turn the RobotScience project into a viable business with no capital. With the RobotScience project now a part of UJ TechnoLab I hope everything will be easier for my family, and that it will grow from strength to strength through being associated with University of Johannesburg which is a great education brand. One person I met at an expo was quite indignant that I was ‘living his dream’ as he put it, but I don’t think he really had any idea of how hard I’ve had to work to get this thing going and the sacrifices that had to be made. Some Last Thoughts:

What are some of the lessons and insights you’ve taken away from your involvement in the Arikabot competition? Robotics consists of electronics, programming, mechanical stuff and tons of money. If you stick stubbornly to your plan and read a book called “Excuse me, your life is waiting” by Lyn Grabhorn, I believe anyone can achieve anything. What holds people of all ages back is their emotions, and as one gets older and one has experienced many failures, it becomes harder and harder to succeed unless one finds a new way to look at and re-evaluate one’s own personal history. The reason why it is proving so difficult for so many South Africans to rise up, in spite of the new order, is because it requires so much discipline and hard work, as well as a positive mental attitude and the ability to learn huge amounts of stuff in order to “make” and not just be a consumer of electronics.

What have some of the highlights of your career been? I’m not really sure what a career is, as I’ve been working on various contracts for so many years.

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I think if one can read, then one can progress and get educated whether one can afford to attend university or not. I think young people are often misled into believing they can have it all without any effort or sacrifice or reading and studying. I think that type of thinking is very dangerous and the tragedy is that often people only start to smarten up once they are much older. Trying to get a career going should happen in one’s twenties when one is still young and energetic enough to work really hard but I also understand that the impulse to party is almost irresistible. However the cost of not getting qualified when you are young can be very high.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, REAL CHANGE.

ALISTAIR FAIRWEATHER, TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANT & THOUGHT LEADER, PLAINSPEAK

It’s pretty cool to be living in the future. Voice recognition, 3D printing and self-driving cars were science fiction just 20 years ago but are now reality. Now the next wave of technology, particularly artificial intelligence and robotics, is poised to change the world in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been around in some form virtually since the dawn of computing, it has recently breached an important threshold in development. An example of this in action is the defeat of Lee Se-dol, the world’s top Go player, by Google’s AlphaGo bot. Go is an ancient Japanese game played on a board with 361 spaces (compared to 64 in chess). Although the rules are simple, the number of possible moves that must be considered mean a single game of Go can take 6 hours or more. From a pure computing perspective, Go is trillions upon trillions of times more complex than Chess. So while computers have been beating chess grandmasters since the 1990s, Go remained practically unsolvable. There is not enough computing power on earth to crunch through all the possible moves in a game of Go within a human lifespan. Instead, Google approached it from an entirely new direction. They programmed their bot - technically a “deep neural network” (DNN) - to scan through data from tens of millions of games of Go and literally learn how best to play the game.

IT’S PRETTY COOL TO BE LIVING IN THE FUTURE.

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This means that the team behind AlphaGo did not need to understand how to beat Lee Se-dol. It just needed enough good data to feed into its learning machine and a target at which to point it. If a system can learn how to outperform humans at something as complex and intuitive as a game of Go, think of the thousands of other practical applications for that technology. It’s only a matter of time before bots will be able to do your taxes, plan your schedule and order your groceries.

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But that incredible potential has a dark side. Office jobs in the service industries are currently safe from automation, unlike manufacturing which has been decimated by automation in most developed countries. But now AI could replace millions of these jobs at a stroke. According to research by the International Labour Organisation, nearly 1.5 billion people currently work in the service sector. Even if only 1% of these jobs are replaced by automation, that’s 15 million people out of work. Low-level clerical jobs in process driven fields like accounting and actuarial science are particularly at risk but in time even fields like law, medicine, and engineering will come under pressure. Sounds ridiculous, right? Except that a “robot lawyer” in the UK has already successfully appealed traffic fines worth millions of dollars. Objection, your honour! For marketing professionals, this new wave brings both threats and opportunities. Fields like analytics, media buying and performance optimisation already tend towards automation. We should expect that trend to accelerate rapidly. If a big chunk of your billings comes from interpreting data for your clients, or from tinkering with the performance of ads, you will need to shift your business to add value elsewhere. The same applies to social media and customer service management. An AI bot would be able to answer customers on Facebook or Twitter in realtime and learn which responses get the best results. The same bot could warn you about trends or spikes in complaints. But from great threats come great opportunities. A new crop of start-ups focused on the next generation of marketing automation will spring up in the next 3 to 5 years. There’s no reason you can’t be a part of that crop. This could be as big as the Internet boom in the 1990s or the social media boom of the 2000s. And there are still many areas in which computers simply cannot compete. Creativity and imagination, in all their forms, are still solid defensible positions in a market overrun by automation. A computer can place your adverts for you, and optimise their yields, but it cannot write compelling copy or craft a beautiful logo. At least not yet.

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Physical robotics is another field that is finally reaching a level of maturity that makes it practical for use by the general public. Humanoid robots are already greeting and directing visitors to some shopping centres in Japan. The Atlas, developed by Boston Dynamics, is designed to aid in search and rescue missions. This 6-foot tall humanoid robot can already perform tasks like removing debris blocking an entrance or connecting a fire hose to a water source. If artificial intelligence is the brains of a system, then these robots are the bodies. When combined, these technologies have the potential to completely disrupt industries that have remained largely untouched by technology up to now. How far are we from a robot that can lay bricks or measure and cut timber? What about a robot waiter or sales assistant? Together AI and robotics will create entirely new opportunities to reach customers and tell compelling brand stories. How about a fleet of robots owned by your local supermarket that do your grocery shopping for you while recommending this week’s bargains from top brands? Or a robotic pharmacist that informs customers about generic alternatives to their medication? Right now we’re on the cusp of a new industrial revolution. That’s exciting and pregnant with possibility, but also full of risk. Just as in the first industrial revolution, there will be winners and losers, and the global economy may take decades to get back to an equilibrium. But what history has proved over and over again is that short-term disruptions are rewarded with long-term gains in prosperity. Our modern standard of living would not be possible without the mass production techniques developed during the first industrial revolution. And the artisanal jobs that were destroyed by that revolution were replaced in time by better-paying jobs in the booming manufacturing sector. It also allowed entrepreneurs to start new, technologybased companies that broke the old monopolies of the guild system. Does that sound at all familiar? Bottom line: for those with guts and energy, this is an incredibly exciting time to be alive. This kind of opportunity comes around perhaps once a generation. We should grab it with both hands.

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PASSIONATE ABOUT TECH. PASSIONATE ABOUT AFRICA: MEET ETHEL COFIE

AN INTERVIEW WITH ETHEL COFIE, FOUNDER, WOMEN IN TECH AFRICA

Fifteen years of experience working in the UK, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone on a range of top calibre projects makes Ethel Cofie one of Africa’s most prominent leaders in the technology space. And she loves giving back. Three passions define her career: technology, supporting female leadership and entrepreneurship. She has done work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and she is a Mandela Fellow for President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). Women in Tech Africa was also founded by Cofie to support women who are entering the industry. We caught up with this inspiring leader to learn more:

What insights have you gleaned from your experience as a female leader in a male dominated tech space? I learnt that it was important to stand my ground, not to assume that people will recognise any good work I am doing voluntarily and to negotiate for what I deserve. I will use my first job in London as an example, where I took the salary that was offered me without question. I later realised that my colleagues were taking away more because they negotiated for it.

ONE OF MY GREATEST MEMORIES WAS MEETING MICHELE OBAMA.

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During your career, you’ve worked with key international players. What was it like working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? It was very inspiring working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I was part of the team that developed MOTECH. The MOTECH Platform is an open source enterprise software package that connects popular mHealth technologies to unlock new outcomes toward strengthening health systems. It wasn’t just a system for businesses but to save lives and also help pregnant and expecting mothers. Above all, the program was replicated in India and Uganda.

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What was it that compelled you to invest in enriching the lives of young women through your Women in Tech programme? This is a kind of platform I wish I had when I started my career in technology. A women support group that I could turn to for advice or to network with. I am doing this to create a community for women in tech within Africa and all over the diaspora where they can connect, organise programs and affect their community positively.

Can you tell us a bit about your involvement in President Obamaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Young African Leaders initiative (YALI)? It was great and insightful. I met over 500 young achievers across the continent and also had the privilege of meeting President Obama and his wife Michele. One of my greatest memories was meeting Michele Obama. She is beautiful on the outside, but oh my goodness when she spoke, I saw the inner beauty of one of the most incredible women on earth.

What do you ultimately hope to achieve through your tech consultancy and other entrepreneurial initiatives? I care about solving problems in my community. So my entrepreneurial initiative is to help businesses solve problems and to help Africa grow.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs in the tech arena? Just start.

As a business leader and innovator, what is your vision for Africa?

IT WAS VERY INSPIRING WORKING FOR THE BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION.

I have a vision of an entrepreneurial continent that has large scalable businesses and supports itself. Q8

If you could describe your career in one word, what would it be? Daring.

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MOBILE JOURNALISM: THE NEW FRONTIER FOR DIGITAL PUBLISHING

RICHARD CHEARY, FOUNDER & CEO, AFROZAAR

When it comes to mobile tech, one should never be surprised…especially when it’s from Africa. “So let me get this right – you’re from Africa, you have a software company, and you’re in New York City to market your mobile app? Wow that’s so amazingly cool,” was a response I received when introducing myself to a New York City local. Why were they so amazed? Was it because I was from Africa or because an African built a mobile app for the American market? I wanted to know. Unfortunately the conversation didn’t allow for a deeper exploration of their response. As I write this piece my mind starts to go wild with questions once again. Was it maybe because I was an English speaking African, or was it because they didn’t think Africans could launch a tech product innovative enough to be marketed in the States? Was it because they were naive? Maybe I’m being over analytical.

AFRICAN MOBILE TECHNOLOGY SHOULD BE SYNONYMOUS WITH SOLVING REAL WORLD PROBLEMS SIMPLY.

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African mobile technology should be synonymous with solving real world problems simply. We should never be surprised by mobile tech successes in Africa. It has led the way with mobile fintech solutions such as M-Pesa, Mukuru, JUMO and Snapscan, all of which solve a number of Africa’s payment and lending challenges between agents, peers and retailers from a cash-onhand, transfer and security aspect. These solutions are ground-breaking and most importantly, they’re simple and tailored towards the current market factors – something that leading US solutions have battled to penetrate. At Afrozaar, an African mobile tech business, we started our business around a platform strategy to become the preferred mobile social-business network for Africans, and so we decided on the brand Afrozaar (African Bazaar). We realised that the journey ahead would require us to became a “pure-bred 100% African grown” software product-oriented company.

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With committed product focused ambition, we had as many successes as we had failures. It was applying the lessons from both outcomes that made our product team strong. Focusing on software product development in Africa is not easy but can be extremely worthwhile. The reward of overcoming business and technical challenges in this environment builds strong teams and platforms. None of these are simple things to overcome, due to competition for skilled people in a marketplace that is both brutally small and conservative in its adoption of consumer based tech solutions. Establishing and preserving a coding culture in a productoriented business is critical for success. Experienced and talented African developers work for the world’s most prestigious outfits – Amazon is a perfect example. It’s questionable whether this is good for the African technology industry, when we need more developers in start-ups gearing up to face the potential challenge and reward.

However technically it allowed our coding team to be exposed to a myriad of interesting technical areas such as security, multimedia, cloud based storage and search, customer profiling, analytics, eCommerce, distribution, performance, user experience, integration, workflow, native mobile apps and web experiences.

As a business we knew we had to choose a target market, and as a team decided on the digital publishing world. In hindsight this was adventurous and risky from a business perspective.

Mojo Reporter is a mobile app that captures, records, tags and publishes stories anywhere, anytime. This lead us to defining and launching the world’s first and only secure editorial workflow integrated mobile app – www.MojoReporter.com.

Afrozaar’s enterprise product, Baobab Suite, is an enterprise content creation syndication platform. The service and plugin architecture in place with Baobab Suite has allowed us to conceptualise some new and exciting products for our target market, thus allowing us to experiment with new technologies and product ideas. This experimental approach minimises risk and cost at early stages. Our newest and most exciting product has been built recently with the purpose of empowering the source of content – the journalist in the field a.k.a the MOJO (Mobile Journalist).

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Mojo Reporter is available for media or marketing groups who want to manage their team’s recording of all digital senses available at a point in time such as video, photos, audio, GPS Location and digital tags. All of that is packaged in a secure post to a centralised review or editorial team for further workflow processing. It’s early days for our fledgling Mojo Reporter, and the uptake has been superb. Of course timing, luck and our ability to identify opportunities will all play a role in how “successful” it will be. Our current approach is to be open and willing to work with any partners who provide us the next set of requirements based on real-world experiences and needs. We have such an opportunity to trial and test Mojo Reporter with our current digital publishing and syndication customers, namely Independent Media and African News Agency who have approved mojo pilots in their environments. It’s these early adoption pilot cases where valuable feedback will be obtained and included on the roadmap. On the lucky side of things, the global MojoCon event (Dublin) organisers have given the go ahead for us to rebrand MojoReporter for the event at the end of April 2016! African mobile tech is moving into globally markets across a number of industries and doing those who backed them proud. Going forward I am confident that we will hear about more South Africans influencing change and introducing mobile tech to global markets.

WITH COMMITTED PRODUCT FOCUSED AMBITION, WE HAD AS MANY SUCCESSES AS WE HAD FAILURES.

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FEMALE PLACEMENT IN TECH CAREERS: THE KENYAN OUTLOOK

JUDITH OWIGAR, CO-FOUNDER & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, AKIRACHIX

Despite narrowing the gender gap in student enrollment at primary and secondary school levels in Kenya, a wide gender gap exists in labour participation in respect to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related careers. Course selection is one of the most important career decisions young women will make. From a study commissioned by Akirachix, one of the things we discovered was that female enrollment at universities in Kenya stood at 41%. While the female students who are studying a course in STEM was at 17% â&#x20AC;&#x201C; slightly below one fifth of the population. We looked at the enrollment of female students in Computer Science at the University of Nairobi (1996-2005) and it stood at 14%, compared to 12% for architecture and engineering and 32% for health sciences. These results show that the pipeline of women in STEM is already constricted by the time young women are in university. To address this problem, we decided to hone in on the time period when young girls make the decision on which careers they would like to pursue. Akirachix commissioned Research Solutions Africa to conduct a study in order to understand the factors influencing womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s access and participation in sciencerelated programmes in Kenya. In particular, the study sought to carry out an investigation on the factors that influence STEM and non-STEM career choices, these were summarised into three main factors: informational, educational and psychological.

CONFIDENCE IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS COMPETENCE.

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When we looked at informational factors it was seen that there is a relationship between awareness and interest in careers in STEM. It is noted that people rarely (if ever choose) a career they are not interested in. For this reason it is important to create awareness and ultimately interest in STEM careers among young girls. The results suggest that with more information on these careers, women are more likely to have them as their first choice. As Akirachix we are deeply involved in outreach activities in both primary and high schools in order to create awareness and interest in STEM careers. We have seen that young children are very interested in technology and would like to interact with it past the level of general use.

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Our computer club in one of the local primary schools in Nairobi is the most over subscribed club. When it comes to educational and academic factors we saw that if young women perceived their learning ability in science and mathematics positively, they were more likely to select a career in STEM. This means that efforts to increase the participation of women in STEM careers need to work hand in hand with high schools so that girls can have a positive attitude towards sciences and mathematics. Of course a positive attitude is not the only thing needed to perform well, but it is a key ingredient that influences good performance in any subject. Going hand in hand with this, we believe that young girls need exposure to the different facets of technology. In Akirachix we do this by running computer clubs in girlsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; high schools and organising technology events over the school holidays. The final factor we looked at was the psychological factor; how young girls felt they would perform in careers in STEM. The results showed that when girls have confidence that they will perform well, they will be more likely to choose a career in STEM. Many articles have been written on the confidence gap between men and women. Research has shown that confidence is just as important as competence. For this reason in our effort to increase the pipeline of women in STEM, Akirachix runs different activities that nurture confidence in girls and young women. We run networking meet ups, organize hack-a-thons, mentorship sessions and host an African Women in Technology conference. We believe that by creating a community of women technologists and facilitating events where we can meet, learn and share with each other, we are building confidence in individual women and in the community of women technologists. These initiatives serve to attract and keep women in STEM careers and in so doing, create a steady progression of women into these ground-breaking careers.

WE SAW THAT IF YOUNG WOMEN PERCEIVED THEIR LEARNING ABILITY IN SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS POSITIVELY, THEY WERE MORE LIKELY TO SELECT A CAREER IN STEM.

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ONE STEP FOR ADRIANA MARAIS. THE NEXT GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WOMAN WHO’S SIGNED UP TO MOVE TO MARS It’s ironic that minus a few letters, Adriana Marais’s surname spells ‘Mars’ because in just over a decade, that’s exactly where she hopes to be. When the call went out for applications to join the Mars One mission to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars, Adriana didn’t hesitate to apply. And it’s a one way ticket. Most people would never have dreamed that travelling to another planet would materialise in their lifetime, but it’s happening. As one of the top 100 people selected to partake in the expedition, Marais aims to play an instrumental role in the project. She is set to headline a Heavy Chef event in May 2016 to share her perspectives and insights with an eager audience of technology experts, digital enthusiasts and scientifically minded individuals. We chatted to Adriana to find out more:

AN INTERVIEW WITH ADRIANA MARAIS, MARS ONE ASTRONAUT CANDIDATE & THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

What is the Mars One project? The Mars One Project plans to establish a human settlement on Mars, with the first four departing in 2026. I first read about it in a Durban newspaper in January 2013.

Have you always been interested in space travel? I’ve dreamed of living on another planet since childhood. Now, for the first time in the 4 billion years that life has been evolving on Earth, the possibility to live on another planet has become feasible. I feel lucky to be alive right now!

PHOTO CREDIT: ANELIA LOUBSER

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Initially 200 000 people showed interest in the Mars One project. What has the interview process been like? It’s all been online so far – we’ve answered questions in writing and in video clips about ourselves and our motivations for volunteering, and we had an interview examination on material we had to learn. We’ve also had a medical examination with our local doctor.

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Have your family and friends been supportive of you applying for the Mars One project? Everyone has been extremely supportive, especially my parents. My dad has written a novel involving humans visiting other planets, and my mom pointed out that I have the explorer’s blood of our ancestors.

What is the next phase of the interview process and how are you preparing for it? Next year, we face the final round where the 100 remaining Mars One Project candidates from all around the world will meet. Over a period of about two weeks the Mars 100 will be narrowed down to 24 who will be offered full-time positions as trainee astronauts with the project. We will be required during this selection to study material, perform tasks and overcome challenges in teams, as well as to undergo a final isolation screening process.

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Has the Mars One project influenced research you would like to do going forward? I am a theoretical physicist and a problem solver. I have applied my knowledge of physics to areas as diverse as information security, photosynthesis and the origins of life. I spend my days thinking about fundamental questions about the world around me. As a researcher, being one of the first human minds to experience living in a totally new world would be a dream come true. The possibility of contributing to the discovery of evidence of life on Mars would get me out of bed each morning.

Besides research in quantum astrobiology, lecturing duties, outreach and media interaction, in preparation I’ve done a 10 day silent retreat, I applied to the South African National Space Agency to join the Antarctica take-over team this December, and in March I ran the 56 km Two Oceans Ultramarathon. Q6

Tell us a more about your research and your PhD? I am a researcher with the Quantum Research Group established by Prof. Francesco Petruccione at UKZN. My PhD focused on the topic of quantum biology, which looks at specific life processes that can only be understood using quantum mechanics, for example photosynthesis. Now I am interested in whether quantum mechanics can contribute to our understanding of how life emerged, and we are looking at how the buildings blocks of life which have been detected in space may have formed.

I’VE DREAMED OF LIVING ON ANOTHER PLANET SINCE CHILDHOOD.

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THE INTERNET IS OURS: TECHNOLOGY AS AN ENABLER FOR CHANGE

AN INTERVIEW WITH TIFFINIY CHENG, CO-FOUNDER OF FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE & A SHUTTLEWORTH FOUNDATION FELLOW

What are some of the insights you’ve gleaned from your experience as a female leader in a male dominated tech space? Women have been fearless leaders of just about every major campaign we have worked on as an organization. They are often the early adopters and key decision makers. The SOPA, net neutrality, and surveillance fights were all lead by brilliant women. Women run many public policy circles, but they don’t often get cited as key public figures in debates. That’s perhaps the product of a tendency for men to be cited more for their ideas and a tendency for men to do more to promote themselves in the media. Tech has definitely been a male-dominated space, so that has to continue to change. There is still a lot of progress that has to be made to make the internet a more equal space. Women need to be recognized for their accomplishments and ideas, and hired at higher levels.

OUR JOB IS TO USE TECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT FOR AND ENSURE POWER FOR THE INDIVIDUAL.

The darkest side of discrimination on the Internet is that male trolls have been empowered to harass and discourage women from participating in online communities. This is what happened in Gamergate, which was a really ugly situation where male gamers teamed up to bully female developers and public figures and were strategic about going after ad buyers of networks that featured women developers. Stalkers are able to buy location and historical data on the women they’re watching from commercial vendors. And, finally, women are seen as less capable programmers. These are biases and discrimination schemes that can get amplified by the power of the internet. Q1

What is it like to be a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow? Shuttleworth doesn’t fund organizations, they fund individuals, and that makes their interactions with the fellows different.

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They are dedicated to their fellows’ development, and they work to support fellows in their work. It’s interesting how that approach puts emphasis on what each of the fellows can do to personally achieve the greater, important goal of openness. I think that is a very clear difference between Shuttleworth and other funders. Their goal for openness places an important critical lens on all that we do, and it pushes fellows towards creating systems that work well, and work for more people. Q2

Mass surveillance, NSA spying, censorship – this is the stuff of some of the world’s most talkedabout conspiracies. ‘Fight For The Future’ brings these issues to light in a very real way. How have people and institutions responded to your organisation? These are issues that tend to make people feel powerless, so when we design strategic actions and show that we can actually win and achieve important reforms, we have seen amazing responses from people. Policy organizations, companies, and individuals can often find a way to come together and pave a path for reform. Surveillance and censorship are examples of abuses that have been perpetuated because of the major systemic flaws in our society concerning the distribution of power. They become mythologized as conspiracies for malicious purposes, but they are really problems that have come about because large institutions seek to diminish the power of the public. There is a massive intelligence-industrial complex that benefits from expanding mass surveillance. It sees profit as a motive, the terrorism scare as a useful narrative, and political power as necessary for holding onto territory. Our job is to use technology to fight for and ensure power for the individual, and to show that these are not inevitable evils that we have to live with.

You co-founded the initiative, ‘Fight For The Future.’ Can you share with us what the inspiration was behind the initiative? Holmes Wilson and I had built some of the early online protests that went viral in 2003 and 2004. In 2011, we saw SOPA moving and saw what it could do to the internet – giving corporations and the government the ability to take down entire websites without due process. We knew we should take a shot at creating the campaign that could bring people to the fight against SOPA. We saw that the audience for the internet was even bigger than in 2004, and that we could potentially mobilize millions of people. So that’s why we started Fight for the Future – we saw that key decisions were being made to decide who the gatekeepers would be, how our data could be used against us, and who could connect effectively with each other. These decisions, which are still being worked out, could chip away at the core characteristics that make the internet a space for people to express themselves, share ideas, and explore the world in ways they never could before. Everyone now has their own experience of the internet and why it matters to them, so we wanted to know if we could help organize different constituencies that benefit from an open internet and activate them to protect basic online rights in some of the most important fights for free expression and assembly today.

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Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of creative activism? Part of what we need in order to challenge power is the ability to conceive of different ways of thinking about things and different possibilities for the future. We can’t continue to let the status quo define the possibilities for change or keep us from calling a spade a spade.

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For me the internet has always been this huge realm of possibility for creative self-expression, the exploration of new ideas, and building anything you can dream up. There is a sense of possibility and openness on the web, and we try to use that feeling to break through the status quo and the bureaucratic systems (both technological and process-wise) that sustain it. We often work on somewhat obscure and technical issues, but we always try to relate them to what most people think is worth defending and standing up for. So one of our goals with our campaigns is to think broadly about how issues affect people’s ability to create online, and to use threats to that ability to fuel engagement. It’s both about identifying the threat and communicating in a way that is not constrained by a mindset that sees only small possibilities and only the most likely outcomes. By doing that, we bring together tools and ideas that help us pave paths that didn’t seem like they could be there before. Q5

How has technology served as an enabler for what you do at Fight For The Future? The internet has enabled us to have an impact on political process without having to be political insiders. It enables anyone anywhere to open up the political process and begin to change it. We’ve been able to reach and activate huge numbers of people, and that has been a big part of our success. The fight against SOPA, for example, was successful because we created an idea that travelled and involved some of the most visited websites in the world, and together we all took action aimed at Congress. Our net neutrality action set a new record at the Federal Communication Commission for public involvement. We’ve used the internet to shock the political and governmental systems, and frankly we’ve heard that

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many public officials are now afraid of what the internet is going to think because of the power of internet users to organize en masse. That in itself is a big meta victory that ensures policymakers don’t sell out the internet to the highest bidder quite as easily.

How can consumers use technology at grassroots level, to affect positive change? One of the best things about the internet is that anyone with a connection can start a petition, write a blog post, or create a video. These things have become incredibly powerful political weapons because of the internet, and collectively they help to open up systems all around us. Of course, like anything, making politically effective content on the internet takes hard work and practice, but the barrier to entry is low and the ceiling for what pretty much anyone can achieve is very high. Beyond these things, there are basic technological steps that can be taken to protect yourself from wrongdoing. Use services that have data security and strong encryption built in for everything you do online, become a champion of systems that are open source, noncommercial, and seek out diversity in thinking all around you. To find out more about the work Tiffiniy does for Fight for the Future, visit fightforthefuture.org.

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MEET A LEADER AT THE FOREFRONT OF MOBILE FINTECH IN AFRICA

The use of mobile wallets to receive and send money is scaling across Africa, and companies like Mobile Financial Services Africa (MFS Africa) are at the forefront of this progression. Dare Okoudjou founded MFS Africa to lead innovation in this arena and introduce this technology to underserved communities across the continent. We chatted to this Mobile Fintech entrepreneur to find out more about the industry:

AN INTERVIEW WITH DARE OKOUDJOU, FOUNDER & CEO, MFS AFRICA

What was it that inspired you to start MFS Africa? There were really two motivating factors: first was observing the trend of mobile wallets increasingly becoming the dominant form of ‘current accounts’ for many people across Africa, who were underserved by the traditional financial services providers. At the time I was working in a strategy role at MTN Group, overseeing the international roll-out of MTN Mobile Money across 21 MTN markets, and I could clearly see the potential of this technology – however, I could also see that the mobile wallet itself was just the beginning. There was a clear need for value-added services to be built onto the wallet, enabling wallet users to benefit from all of the attributes we tend to take for granted with our checking and savings accounts.

THE MOBILE WALLET ITSELF WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. THERE WAS A CLEAR NEED FOR VALUE-ADDED SERVICES.

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Second was my own experience with money transfer to and within Africa. I’m from Benin, I’ve lived in France, USA, UK and Morocco, and now over ten years in South Africa. At various points in my life I’ve been on the receiving and sending sides of money transfer, and I know as well as anyone that there is so much room for improvement. Sending money to and within Africa is incredibly expensive relative to prices around the world, and can often be extremely time-consuming. On the other side, you have many people resorting to informal channels, which carry their own risks and inconveniences. I saw an opportunity to leverage the mobile money systems and agent networks across Africa to make the money transfer process simpler, cheaper, and more accessible.

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In your opinion, how have the services of MFS Africa impacted the landscape of mobile money on the continent?

We’re making it possible for people to send money and receive money to/ from friends, family, and loved ones through the most accessible technology available today – the mobile phone. We’re a B2B company, so the end users benefitting from the remittance services don’t know our name, but we enable our partners – the mobile networks themselves and money transfer companies – to enhance their offerings to their customers.

Please tell us a bit about which challenges you’ve overcome as an entrepreneur in the African technology space? There’s been a bit of a steep learning curve for the industry as a whole, and the investment community specifically, when it comes to mobile fintech. I think that’s started to change in the last year or so, but in the early days it was very difficult to explain where we fit in the landscape, as many in the international and even South African investment and business community did not have a deep understanding of mobile money.

How have people responded to MFS Africa? The response has been very positive. The need to create cross-border interoperability is clear to all telecom players, and they recognise that it makes much more sense to go through a gateway like us than to attempt to directly connect to every single other operator.

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What role did innovative thinking and action play in the establishment of your company? We really are at the forefront of building an industry within the fintech space, and we’re playing a symbiotic role in a very new ecosystem. It took innovation to find a simple, elegant solution to integrate into multiple networks’ systems – sometimes very different systems – and create and sustain consistent, reliable services.

What advice do you have for aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Africa? The opportunities for problemsolving enterprises are endless – find something that meets a need, meets people where they are, and keep going. Find mentors and don’t be afraid to ask for advice. To find out more about what MFS Africa is doing in the Fintech space, visit mfsafrica.com.

THE NEED TO CREATE CROSS-BORDER INTEROPERABILITY IS CLEAR TO ALL TELECOM PLAYERS.

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FINTECH - THE GAME AND THE RULES HAVE CHANGED

MARK SCHEFERMANN, STRATEGIC DIRECTOR, LUCKY BEARD

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everyone from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else” – Sam Walton, 1977. This is one of my favourite quotes of all time, purely because it is so true. If a customer decides to take their buying power somewhere else, your business could be in trouble. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, it is inevitable that it will be disrupted by a more agile, innovative and efficient competitor. One of the biggest challenges most brands are facing is how to remain relevant in the lives of their customers.

It is human nature to choose something that is simple over something that is over complicated. It is easy to offer customers 1 of 15 different credit cards and it is easy to have a website that has over 100 pages. Keeping things simple is difficult. And keeping things simple doesn’t mean customers see less choice. To the contrary – they actually see less confusion. I personally prefer it when I go to a restaurant and it has a simple food menu with only a couple of choices. It makes it easier for me to decide, assuming the product delivers on quality. This is the same for anything in life. As a consumer, I have a need and I am always looking for the quickest, simplest and most intuitive service or product to fulfil that need. For example:

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Uber (uber.com): Meets the need that clients have to get from point A to point B as quickly, efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible.

They are under attack from smaller more agile Fintech start-ups. These startups are designed around consumer centricity and agility.

AirBnB (airbnb.com): Fulfils the need that customers have to find accommodation while travelling as quickly, efficiently and costeffectively as possible.

They don’t have legacy systems to deal with and are able to quickly adapt and evolve with their customers.

Flapp Air Commuter: Answers the needs that clients have to fly between Cape Town and Johannesburg as quickly and efficiently as possible. Slack (slack.com): Satisfies the need that people have to communicate to a team as efficiently, effectively and seamlessly as possible. In the above examples you will notice a very distinct pattern – they all offer a service that is exponentially more efficient compared to their competitors. And if you look at the Wikipedia definition of efficiency, it is “the (often measurable) ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result.” The customer will inevitably always choose a service or product that is simpler and more efficient

As Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” These emerging Fintech startups have the advantage of focusing on niche services or products versus trying to offer everything to everyone. By taking this approach they have the ability to offer a service or product that is exponentially better compared to any of the traditional players. They also have the advantage of being agile and quick to react to customer behavioural changes. Legacy financial institutions are not necessarily feeling the effect of these smaller players yet because of their current market share but think of it as a petrol tank with a couple of holes in it. Eventually the tank will run dry and the car will be left on the side of the road – stranded.

The Game Has Changed This is where the game has changed for traditional financial institutions. The incumbents are often perceived as being large immoral organisations that charge exorbitant fees and often lack transparency. Technology is revolutionising the industry by solving a number of inefficiencies. Customers’ expectations are higher than they have ever been before. This is one of the biggest challenges for the incumbent banks that have extensive legacy systems to deal with as well as years of internal politics and products and services that are often designed around business objectives versus consumer needs and desires.

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Source: At which bank do you deposit your salary? (i.e which bank do you consider to be your primary bank?) Base: All respondents (n=23752)

If you look at the graph above, customers are willing to switch their salary in order to gain access to a more efficient banking system. Capitec as a case study shows us that people want simplicity and value. Simple. com was also founded and established because of frustration with traditional banks. These new entrants are all about consumer centricity and building products based on customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs.

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Most incumbents spend years behind locked doors working on a digital product that they hope their customers will like. Name one bank that went out publicly to the market and their customer base and asked them â&#x20AC;&#x153;so, we want to build you the best banking app possible, what do you as our customers want us to include?â&#x20AC;? They are all too scared that their closest competitor might copy one of their top secret ideas. These new players on the block understand that it is all about getting a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) in the hands of their customers and then creating feedback loops to optimise it as quickly as possible. Atom is another great example on how to build a business that is personal, relevant and transparent, customers feel as if they have contributed to the outcome of the final product or service.

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The Rules Have Changed Another big challenge that the incumbents are facing are the legislations and regulations that govern the financial industry. This is often one of the biggest hurdles to innovation because legislation just canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep up with the enhancements from a technology perspective. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a matter of time. We are seeing these trends abroad â&#x20AC;&#x201C; things like digital FICA and a shift towards risk profiling versus a standard set of rules. Atom allows customers to login to their banking app using voice and facial recognition.

Pocopay boasts a sign-up process that takes less than 6 minutes, all processes facilitated through the app.

The digital banking market map below shows just how fragmented the financial landscape is becoming. If you have ever used Uber you will most likely never use a traditional cab service again in your life. Will this be the same scenario when it comes to your bank?

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Number26 (number26.eu) sums it up best: “Your bank account how it should be. Simple, fee-free and everywhere”. Another big difference you will notice with all of these new entrants is the fact that they don’t look, feel or sound like a bank. Watch out “old money” there are a lot of “new money” players entering the market.

KPMG compiled a list of the Leading Global Fintech Innovators for 2015 (fintechinnovators.com). It’s a long list. It is no longer a matter of whether the financial industry is going to be disrupted by companies taking advantage of technology, it is a matter of when. Are you ready for the new game and new rules?

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THE TECH OF FINTECH HOW THE TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION IS IMPACTING THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY

ULVI GULIYEV, HEAD OF CORE PLATFORM ENGINEERING, ZOONA

What Does it Mean? The subject of FinTech has been attracting plenty of attention. Although much has been written about it, the concept itself is somewhat ambiguous. The origin of the term can be traced back to the US-based consortium of bankers, researchers and government officials formed in the 90’s as an attempt to show the public that banks are willing to follow the path of technology-driven innovation. Subsequent to that, FinTech was used to refer to the computer systems implemented by financial institutions internally for the purpose of digitisation and process automation. These projects were the petri dishes of the early FinTech evolution. The global crisis of the mid-2000’s fundamentally eroded customers’ trust in financial service providers. Institutions were seen as the very antithesis of progress. In addition, armies of unemployed financiers flooded the job markets in search for something to do.

THE NEW BREED OF SOFTWARE VENDORS WILL BE SELLING THE NEW FLAVOUR OF “SNAKE OIL.”

These factors seeded the emergence of a multitude of start-ups, eager to disrupt the financial industry. The new marketplace adopted the old name and with time, FinTech came to represent the democratisation of finance, creativity, customer centricity and even socialeconomic change. This new breed of services has been the focus of much research. Investment bankers, financial analysts and government regulators alike are trying to understand the trend and predict its impact on the global industry. Opinions differ, but one sentiment is shared by all: it is an exciting competitive marketplace that has the potential to bring in a new reality for consumers. With that said, one part of the FinTech image remains blurry. Very little is understood about the way in which the evolution of computing technology has enabled it. Yet, having this understanding could help explain not just the secret behind the success of new ventures, but also the mystery behind the apparent inability of established financial institutions to compete in this market despite their existing market share and the access to substantially larger resources.

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Old Guard For the last 30 years the financial services industry has been the single largest purchaser of computer technology and as a result, has played a critical role in its evolution. Long before then, the financial industry itself was able to leapfrog – its evolution being propelled by advances in computing. The advent of credit cards in the 50’s, ATMs in the 60’s and electronic stock trading in the 70’s enabled financial institutions to obtain unimaginable market reach. In the 90’s, when mainframes, despite their rumoured demise, made the second coming, the financial industry was ready to embrace these powerful machines and apply them to a multitude of new purposes. The arrival of the first data recording systems made it possible to automate data analysis, which ushered in the age of the first FinTech ventures1. Sometimes however, evolution takes unpredictable turns. In the case of commercial line-of-business software, evolution was mostly driven by the search for the biggest payout. And as far as payouts go, large financial organisations with their bottomless pockets and insatiable hunger for the “magic bullet” made for the perfect target. Software vendors formed long lines in the lobbies of banks and insurance companies, offering their own unique brand of “best IT solution for the ambiguouslydefined problem.” The world was flooded with CRMs, ERPs, ESB, ECMs, MDMs and any other possible three letter acronym. The financial services industry swallowed them all, building unimaginable technical complexity in a process. New problems were invented to feed the beast, bigger budgets were approved for systems that would serve no purpose. Before anyone noticed, solutions became the biggest problem. Organisations found themselves being crushed by the crumbling mountains of legacy technology.

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A decade came and went, the age of the internet and smart phones brought in new laws of physics for commerce. It was just a matter of time before the privileged world of financial services industry was invaded by a new breed of players. They might have lacked financial experience, and did not necessarily have original ideas, but they had one critical advantage: access to the latest technology without the baggage of a decades-long pursuit of technological nirvana. So, the old guard was caught with an impossible challenge: being able to compete with nimble, hungry young businesses that could pivot on a dime in an attempt to stumble across the next great idea. Institutions responded the way institutions do – by institutionalising innovation. Relevant departments were formed, people were adorned with important new job titles and budgets were re-allocated. There was only one problem: no amount of well-funded institutional “innovation” can wish away decades of entropy that turned technology into an ugly monument to the bureaucracy-driven evolution.

The New Breed Ironically, many of the ideas that underpin the new FinTech market were born within the walls of old-style financial institutions. After all, these are the people that have been doing it for decades and understand the market better than anyone. The problem is, these innovations cannot be brought to life in that setting. And even though some of the financials are attempting to innovate by bypassing their internal IT structures, generally smaller businesses get there first.

1 Bloomberg, Reuters, Misys

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The ‘zoo’ of FinTech start-ups could be categorised in at least nine ways2. I like to think of them in terms of the big ideas that underscore their business models: 1) Reachers These are the businesses that bet on the ever-increasing reach of the internet. The most conventional of the bunch are utilising the reach to bring well-understood services such as banking, insurance and wealth management to mass markets3. Another kind is making use of the proliferating network of mobile devices to spread the idea of mobile wallets4. The most contemporary use of the reach is to adopt the model of social networking and utilise it for variety of crowdsourced financial services5. 2) Minimisers The premise of these businesses is based on the public sentiment that services provided by conventional financial institutions are too expensive, follow a very complicated process and generally take too long. So, they utilise the latest innovations in Digital User Experience in order to simplify customer interaction6 with the service provider, make the service itself cheaper7, remove the middle-man8 and automate most of the processes9. 3) Digitisers These businesses utilise opportunities made possible by the advent of bitcoin – they use the technology to offer digital currency10. 4) Shifters At the core of this exciting group is the drive to truly reinvent the way consumers perceive financial services. These businesses offer novel ways for customers to interact with financial institutions by changing familiar, well-established commercial models11. 5) Gamifiers The latest advances in the theoretical domain of Game Theory, and the latest developments in the supporting technology have enabled this breed of FinTech start-ups to approach the way consumers manage personal finance from the perspective of funpromoted high engagement12.

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6) Assurists In the true spirit of the democratisation of finance these businesses focus on providing their customers with commodities that are difficult to quantify – the feeling of trust and fairness13. 7) Segmenters Following the good-old business practice of covering a larger share of smaller markets, these start-ups constrain their consumer base by focusing their products on a particular, well-defined market niche. Some have chosen to target students, others cater for children14. 8) Artificialists The latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence and algorithmic reasoning have allowed businesses to apply advanced computing techniques in order to automate financial reasoning and remove human participation from the consumer’s interaction with the service provider. These businesses utilise algorithms to provide financial advice and facilitate transaction processing15. 9) Trail Blazers These businesses base their model on the same premise as the “Reachers” – the expanding network of mobile devices. The crucial difference is that “Blazers” are driven by the ambition to serve the vast underbanked communities in Africa and Asia. Besides being able to establish lucrative operations in a largely-unexplored markets, the model has a happy side-effect of promoting socio-economic development in impoverished areas16.

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What’s Next? So, what is next for FinTech? This is where I let my imagination run wild. There is always a chance that conventional financial institutions will figure out a way to crawl from underneath the rubble of legacy technology and join the FinTech revolution in a renaissance of institutional digital innovation. But my bet is on some sort of convergence, where old guard and new players will be able to form some sort of hybrid for the purpose of providing consumers with the best of both worlds: newage customer-centric service supported by the safety of regulated money vaults.

IRONICALLY, MANY OF THE IDEAS THAT UNDERPIN THE NEW FINTECH MARKET WERE BORN WITHIN THE WALLS OF OLDSTYLE FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS.

FinTech will for sure become a technology product, the new breed of software vendors will be selling the new flavour of “snake oil.” While the ever more strict constraints of regulation will be imposed on FinTech businesses, they will evolve and grow to become the new incarnation of “Elephants” to walk the financial Earth. The blazingly fast pace of the technology evolution will seed new opportunities on the fertile ground of FinTech. We will see the dawn of FinWear, where a multitude of wearable devices will endow us with the ability to transact at will. Next step, BioFin – with the advent of computer-augmented bio-wear we will convert our bodies into a walking transaction enabler. And, finally, when technology has evolved to read and interpret our emotions, EmoFin will enable us to transact implicitly. The world where you could purchase an item by merely liking it. What a truly dangerous world that would be.

2 FinTech 100 report http://fintechinnovators.com/ 3 AhongAn, Lufax 4 Bankable, Valuto, Yoyo 5 OurCrowd, Funding Circle, eToro, Equitise, Estimize, Fastacash, Fidor bank, friendsurance, MyMicroInvest, Syndicate Room 6 Oscar, Knip, Coverfox, Payrange, Simply Wall St 7 Wealthfront, Avant, Robinhood, TransferWise, StockSpot 8 Lending Club, Prosper, CircleUp, SocietyOne, FangDD, AngelList 9 Kabbage, Betterment 10 Coinbase, 21Inc, Coinify, Elliptic 11 Klarna, Motif Investing, Stripe, Affirm, Acorns, Ripple 12 Credit Karma, Stockpile 13 SecureKey Technologies, Traity, Trulioo, lex 14 Quifenqi, Keridtech, SoFi, OnDeck, goHenry, Osper 15 Personal Capital, policybazaar.com, LearnVest, Rong360, Wecash, Spotcap 16 Numoni, M-Pesa, Zoona

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HEY FINTECH ENTREPRENEURS DON’T FORGET THE WORKING CLASS

AN INTERVIEW WITH SECHABA NGWENYA, FINTECH ENTREPRENEUR & FOUNDER, CREDITABLE

Sechaba Ngwenya fused the age old practice of money lending with an innovative way of using technology – and Creditable was born. This product allows credit unions, lenders, businesses and individuals to give loans to anyone in a few simple steps. And it’s working. As a poly-entrepreneur, Ngwenya’s experience spans many years of relentless hard work and sheer determination coupled with a diverse skill set. The Heavy Chef team interviewed Sechaba to find out more about what he does: Q1

As a Fintech entrepreneur, what was your biggest challenge? The standard challenges any entrepreneur faces are always going to be fear and limited resources, like money and time. Other subtle challenges include personal reputation, strong partnerships and strong networks. Start-ups have their work cut out for them in this regard.

AFRICA IS EVER EVOLVING. TECH IS THE GREAT EQUALISER.

How does Creditable make use of technology in an innovative way to serve its purpose within the financial sector? Let me make it clear. We serve the working class and their families. It feels like technology companies as well as financial services providers are leaving these guys behind. We use technology to give them this access in a transparent, fair and dignified way. The last great technology breakthrough was internet banking. Banking products haven’t changed, just the delivery method. In other words savings products haven’t changed in 20-30 years or even short term credit. Creditable uses machine learning in order to develop products and services people actually want to consume and more importantly can afford to consume.

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In one of your earlier interviews with SME SA, you referred to Creditable as a business model for fair credit. Can you tell us a bit more about how the system works? We are not just about credit, Creditable is also about savings and investment products. Our model is simple. We partner with banks and/or credit providers and together we develop products that the working class can appreciate and use. Our channel is HR and payroll. Our process is like applying for leave – it’s easy, fast and convenient.

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What trends do you foresee for Africa’s Fintech industry? Everything going mobile and most things being decentralised. Blockchain in the house! Discover more about Creditable by visiting creditable.co.

What role do you believe disruptive technologies and services have in evolving the state of Africa’s economy? Africa is ever evolving. Tech is the great equaliser. My personal take is that young Africans can use their imagination to build tech that can change the world. We don’t have first world problems, we have real problems. So our problems are most peoples’ problems.

How has your target market received Creditable - have they adopted the technology with ease? Our first challenge was to rope in established financial institutions, our industry is heavily regulated. We need to partner with banks to offer our service. This was the first hurdle which took us two years to overcome. The next exciting step is consumer facing. We’ve done over 400 beta tests with end users. I suppose we can say technology adoption and the ease thereof has less to do with technology and everything to do with regulation.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs in the Fintech arena? Make friends and build strong networks.

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WE DON’T HAVE FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS, WE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS.

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AFRICA MOBILISED: THE INNOVATIONS THAT ARE RESHAPING THE CONTINENT

DENNIS BURFORD, TECHNICAL OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, COBI INTERACTIVE

A spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship is sweeping the continent, driven in no small part by a surge of enabling technology. The touch-point of this technological uprising is the mobile phone: a device serving as a communication tool, information resource, personal computing device, high-tech wallet and source of entertainment. In a continent still feeling the absence of a substantial legacy of built infrastructure, mobile phones and networks have offered a way to leap-frog into the connected world, and thereby improve lives. Africa’s widespread and rapid adoption of mobile is well documented. We’ve all seen the stats telling us that Africa has the fastest growth of mobile subscribers, that more people own mobile phones than have access to electricity, and that for some in Kenya airtime is a higher priority than food or transportation. In 2014, Toby Shapshak highlighted the drive towards mobile innovation in Africa, covering healthcare, education, and business. That pace of development has continued and today we’re seeing even greater contributions across all sectors.

WE’RE PRIVILEGED TO BE PART OF AN AGE OF INVENTION AND CREATIVITY

The great potential of Africa’s mobile savvy population is not lost on the tech giants of Silicon Valley. Facebook’s Free Basics programme offers access to certain mobile websites free of network data charges, allowing more people to access essential information from their phones. Google’s Android One project is producing quality Android smartphones, designed and developed by Google, and sold at an affordable price. Android One has recently expanded to cover several African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco. Network speeds are also improving rapidly, with 4G connectivity opening the way to video streaming and rich content sharing. LTE is available in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and of course South Africa, to name a few. On the back of these technological advancements, entrepreneurs and developers are building solutions that have a positive impact on people’s lives. A few examples are listed below.

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Healthcare mHealth apps like Peek Vision and Vula Mobile have helped to diagnose eye conditions in remote locations, thereby allowing patients to be screened and referred to doctors to receive the treatment they need. Many patients who were blind have had their sight restored after years of darkness.

Vula Mobile also includes a flexible referral and patient tracking system that has expanded to support several other medical specialisations such as HIV, Cardiology, Orthopaedics and Burns (Disclaimer: Cobi Interactive helped build Vula Mobile). HearScreen, a mobile app developed in Pretoria, offers a similar solution for hearing tests and provides clinically valid results at a fraction of the normal cost. Maternal health in South Africa and Nigeria is being improved through the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) and MomConnect, which are using mobile technology including SMS and USSD services powered by the Praekelt Foundation’s Vumi platform. Similar services are used to send reminders to HIV and Tuberculosis sufferers to take their medication regularly.

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Education The availability of mobile devices in Africa brings with it the hope that educational resources and distance learning tools can be delivered via the mobile channel. While this is true, internet access and the associated cost remain a barrier. This is why initiatives like the Free Basics programme play an important role and need to extend to more content and services. Where internet access is available, educational material can be distributed via mobile. Not only to learners, but also to teachers to aid in their training and provide valuable resources. The Open University and the African Virtual University (AVU) are part of the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme. A focus for TESSA is to make resources more accessible from mobile phones, which are often the only means rural teachers have to access the internet. Indeed, the theme for this year’s annual AVU conference is “Integrating mobile learning to open up access to quality education and training opportunities in Africa.” In South Africa, where smartphones and internet access are more prevalent, phone and tablet based programmes are commonplace in schools. Ambitious plans have been put in place to provide tablets to public schools in Gauteng, for example. Vocational training is also benefiting from mobile technology. Several products and corporate training programmes provide tablet based video training, followed by assessment. Results are captured and aggregated to measure the progress of individuals and the group. Awards and gamification have been added to incentivise the learning.

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Low cost Virtual Reality experiences can now be provided with Google Cardboard. This has the potential to enhance the understanding of a topic by immersing learners in related virtual environments. At the University of Pretoria, VR is being explored to aid in training for high-risk mining activities.

Transport Public transport has benefited from the wider availability of information and reporting to commuters through mobile phones. Data from commuters is fed back into the system and used to provide more accurate predictions and routing.

THE GREAT POTENTIAL OF AFRICAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S MOBILE SAVVY POPULATION IS NOT LOST ON THE TECH GIANTS OF SILICON VALLEY.

In private transport, Uber is growing faster in some African cities than in major American and European cities, with innovations in service including cash payments in Nigeria. Partnerships are being forged with local operators and businesses to improve the offering.

Rapid growth in Uber usage. Weekly completed trips by city.

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Finance & Payments M-Pesa remains a compelling example of an African mobile tech success story. It continues to dominate mobile payments, money transfers and banking in Kenya and is now extending to neighbouring territories. Similar products are available in other countries with varying degrees of success. In South Africa, SnapScan is a popular mobile payment solution based on QR code scanning. Rivals such as FlickPay are also making an impact. Yoco allows card payments to be accepted by attaching a small card reader to a smartphone. In the near future contactless payments will become a reality as major retailers offer support for NFC payments. For merchants, phone and tablet based point-of-sale apps and corresponding cloud services are giving small and medium businesses the opportunity to streamline their operations. A major trend in Africa is to lower the barriers for loan and insurance applications by leveraging mobile phones and apps. Documentation and IDs can be photographed using the phone’s camera and uploaded directly as part of the application process, eliminating inconvenient and costly paper applications and travel to branch offices.

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M-PESA REMAINS A COMPELLING EXAMPLE OF AN AFRICAN MOBILE TECH SUCCESS STORY.

Crisis Response and Monitoring The Ushahidi platform, which originated in Kenya, has been used for several years as a data collection, mapping and response tool in crisis situations. It’s also been used for election monitoring in Kenya and Mozambique. Such is its success that it’s now used around the world, including recently to help manage the response to the earthquake in Kathmandu. Praekelt’s Vumi platform has been used to support citizen reporting and election monitoring in South Africa and voter registration in Libya. The crowd-sourced mapping platform, Open Street Maps, and a part of its community, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), have worked to create accurate maps in remote parts of Africa to support humanitarian efforts, such as the response to the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014. These areas were not covered sufficiently by Google Maps data. The maps produced by this effort are available offline on Android phones.

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Gueckedou, Guinea as seen in OpenStreetMap (left) and Google Maps (right)

What Next? There are countless other examples of innovation in mobile technology that are helping to transform the lives of people on a local, national and continental level. The momentum generated by these innovations will surely drive further development as others see the opportunities available to them. Who can predict what direction the future work will take? We’re privileged to be part of an age of invention and creativity, as our continent solves its problems with ingenuity. One cannot help but be encouraged by the energy, excitement and optimism of Africa’s mobile tech movement, and be inspired to join it.

A MAJOR TREND IN AFRICA IS TO LOWER THE BARRIERS FOR LOAN AND INSURANCE APPLICATIONS BY LEVERAGING MOBILE PHONES AND APPS.

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SIX TECH TRENDS THAT ARE DRIVING AFRICA FORWARD

Africa is an incredibly exciting and interesting place! Apart from its diversified cultures, traditions and landscapes, it is home to a base of consumers who are also diverse and complex. But the contexts that shape these consumers are significantly unique.

JOANNE REID, HEAD OF CLIENT SERVICES, WORLD WIDE CREATIVE

Africa’s urban topography is reflective of its social realities – from expensive suburbs to sprawling megacities, from rural living to communities of extreme traditionalists, from wealthy enclaves to poverty-stricken areas. In fact, the difference between African markets is perhaps greater than in any other continent. So while there is no such thing as an “African consumer,” there are definitely some trends that are being adopted across the board. A budding generation of technologists, coders and entrepreneurs are rising to solve their continent’s most pressing problems. Entire new industries around payment solutions, healthcare and power sourcing are springing up in in Kenya, Nigeria and other countries. Africa is widely accepted as having the second fastest growing mobile market. Infrastructural challenges, connectivity issues and limited accessibility created a need for mobile communication and that need is being met by innovation in the form of sustainable start-ups and tech-focused businesses.

WITH INCREASED MOBILE ACCESSIBILITY, COMES INCREASED ACCESSIBILITY TO THE INTERNET.

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IT News Africa identified six interesting technology trends that seem to be shaping the way for Africa in 2016 and onwards: 1

The Development Of Undersea cables The development of undersea cables has given rise to a new era in connectivity – especially when it comes to providing access to parts of the continent that were previously unreachable by traditional means. The internet is empowering Africans to enter the world of online business and entrepreneurship online. It is also creating opportunities for marketers and business people from the world beyond Africa, to engage with communities that were once unreachable.

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Mobile Money Dominating The Fintech Arena This in my opinion, is ingenious – especially for African countries who lack banking facilities and the means by which to access them. The idea of mobile money and the concept of being able to pay for things using your mobile has been adopted throughout. The most notable mobile money product, M-Pesa, is a branchless banking service, run by both Safaricom in Kenya and Vodacom Tanzania. The ‘M’ stands for mobile, while ‘Pesa’ is the Swahili word for money. Online research shows that M-Pesa is currently the most developed mobile payment system in the world. Proudly African.

The Active Roll Out Of Better Infrastructure In addition to undersea cable infrastructure, countries throughout Africa have actively pursued the rollout of infrastructure upgrades which has allowed more people to connect to the internet. These upgrades also mean new technology and greater alignment with the global drive towards greater connectivity.

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This has provided millions of citizens with immediate access to previously inaccessible medical equipment and care. From a medical point, this is truly ground-breaking. 6

Cheaper Smartphones With more and more mobile providers fighting for the place in the African sun, users are spoilt for choice in terms of available models and features. This competition has compelled manufacturers to introduce lower-priced smartphones with greater functionality, and this competition will continue to rise. With increased mobile accessibility, comes increased accessibility to the internet. These are huge growth opportunities for businesses and brands in Africa, and the chance to really do things differently. The key is to understand diversity, appreciate cultural differences and to think of Africa as a continent full of countries with many different needs, desires, skills and obstacle. It’s all about finding ways to tap into these opportunities. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for this beautiful place.

The Introduction Of Solar Power Solar power is vital to the power-generation strategies in many parts of Africa. The benefits are endless. For example, Samsung has rolled out classrooms that are entirely solar powered, supplying power to computers and internet access. The use of solar power is reshaping the continent – especially in rural areas.

Mobile Healthcare This innovation is allowing Africa to become a continent where access to medical care, records and ongoing treatment is indeed a possibility. Patients can receive medical information via mobile phones. Also m-Health makes use of mobile technology to an even greater extent, by developing traditional medical devices into mobile units that can be transported by doctors into rural areas.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERSEA CABLES HAS GIVEN RISE TO A NEW ERA IN CONNECTIVITY.

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HOW TO AUGMENT YOUR MARKETING MIX

JOHAN WALTERS, DIGITAL MARKETING SPECIALIST & FOUNDER, DIGITAL NARRATIVE

We all know that traditional marketing has evolved significantly. Having worked in the digital marketing industry for over a decade, I’ve seen new media continue to develop considerably. It’s important to know how AR marketing fits into the marketing mix, and how it can benefit your brand. With new media comes the need to learn new techniques. AR marketing is definitely something that companies need to educate themselves on if they want to stay in the game. AR is designed to encourage customer engagement and is relevant to almost every industry, ranging from tourism, automotive, financial, lifestyle and entertainment, retail and publishing. The common factor is that each business has a “digital story” to tell, and AR is able to deliver on that through customer engagement.

AR Within the Marketing Strategy At Digital Narrative, we refer to AR as ‘engagement marketing.’ AR’s primary function is engagement, and looking at international benchmarks, marketers can expect to achieve 80% engagement rates. Engagement in turn leads to conversion. Nowadays customers live a multi-device lifestyle, with the smartphone becoming the consumer’s lifestyle companion. AR marketing leverages this consumer behaviour to link your offline and online marketing activities by providing the platform, or the glue, that marries these two worlds.

AR CONNECTS SEAMLESSLY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA.

AR should be seen as a new channel and part of an integrated marketing mix. Our next step is to apply digital marketing best practices, such as centralised tracking and reporting. A single campaign tracking platform, such as Doubleclick Campaign Manager, gives the marketer the ability to do multi-channel reporting. This approach will enable us to see AR’s performance in context to your other channels such as print advertising, digital media, search, mobile and social media.

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It’s crucial to apply digital marketing measurements to AR, as it is measured in the same way. By integrating premium tracking such as Doubleclick Campaign Manager, one can measure the ‘AR exposure’ and the ‘response’ which means you are able to map where AR sits in the customer’s journey and gain valuable insights into customer behaviour across your marketing channels. As an intricate part of the marketing mix, AR has a host of engaging features, from connecting the consumer to the brand’s mobile friendly website, to a lead generation form and even m-commerce. Customers can also engage with AR Video or advanced features such as 3D models or Geo Location tags.

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Social Media and AR Marketing AR connects seamlessly with social media. As AR is still a new marketing channel, it is best practice to use your social channels to boost awareness and education surrounding the AR campaign. Use social media to show your “tribe” how easy it is to download the AR app, educate your customers on how to use it and allow them to engage with the campaign by making them aware of what’s interactive. You can allow users to share the AR experience directly from your AR execution on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram and welcome users to join the social conversation directly from within AR, all of which is trackable.

The Future of Augmented Reality Marketing The current overall trend is to produce AR content of high quality as it usually translates to better engagement with a campaign – a good AR execution has the following elements: • It should be relevant to the target audience. • The campaign should be entertaining and interesting to the audience. • It should offer an informative aspect. • It should offer exclusive content. • Most importantly, AR needs to be useful to the end user – if the user is not presented with multiple touch points that add value for them, the risk is that your AR app will be removed with the next app spring-cleaning. At the moment, we’re still in the infancy stage of AR marketing. The AR landscape will change in the next three to five years as smartphones become cheaper, technology improves and wearables are adopted. AR is set to become the new triple threat: combining video, social and online, all wrapped up in a package ready to unlock and connect the consumer’s online and offline worlds.

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WHAT DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAVE TO DO WITH SEARCH?

AN INTERVIEW WITH SHANE JOSEPH, HEAD OF SEARCH, WORLD WIDE CREATIVE

What is Artificial Intelligence? According to Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is technology that allows for computers to be as smart as humans in the sense that they can be “taught” and can then build on that “knowledge” by making connections. True AI is reserved for science fiction but in practice, “AI is used to refer to computer systems that are designed to learn and make connections.” Bear in mind that Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’ are often used interchangeably but sometimes the latter term is used to describe the type of artificial intelligence approach being employed.

What is The Hype About? Google’s machine learning is called RankBrain, which is part of Google’s overall search algorithm. This computer program assists the algorithm in sorting through billions of pages to deliver the most relevant results based on the query. According to Search Engine Land, RankBrain is the third most important ranking signal among content and links.

How Does this Affect Search? Expect more accurate results! Google’s goal is to deliver a good user experience through understanding user intent. RankBrain is likely to understand this better as it gathers and sorts billions of pages to deliver the most relevant query. RankBrain barely touches the surface of what true AI really is, but it shows you the power of machine learning, which transcends human ability.

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Customer Reviews Will Play a Bigger Role RankBrain understands real language. This changes the way we optimise using keywords as opposed to full sentences. By optimising using real language in full sentences we are not only able to optimise for text search, but for voice too, which is becoming increasingly popular with the use of mobile devices.

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Content Marketing There are two types of content marketing – onsite and offsite. Ever heard the saying content is king? What does that even mean? Onsite content should be of quality and relevance. It is content that users should be compelled to engage with and share. According to SEMrush, for effective content marketing you should always:

Paid Search Results Will Be More Accurate With screens getting smaller, there is less real estate for both organic and paid results. Ads will be served more relevantly as Rankbrain assists HummingBird in delivering the best results and in turn, delivers higher click-through rate.

How Can Marketers Keep Optimising for the Channel That Is Used During 80% of Marketing Activities? 1

• Curate your content into categories and keep related content available to users for better engagement • Network with bloggers and site owners in the industry or a related industry • Use competitor analysis and Google Trends to find the right search engine phrases for emerging markets • Upload branded content on sites such as YouTube and SlideShare

Link Building Most marketers frown nowadays when you mention link building. To some, link building is dead or it’s sooo 2008. Let me clear this up, link building is only dead for those who have been link building incorrectly for all these years. Here is how you should be doing link building in 2016 according to Travis Bliffen from SEMrush: • Identify targets that will help build a brand not just links • Find link markets that drive traffic and don’t just attract search engines

PERSONALISATION IS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR OF AI.

• Obtain social media mentions for the brand • Perform outreach campaigns for guest posts on authority sites • Identify hot topics using competitor analysis for guest posts and content marketing

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3 Local Search What is most relevant when you think about local search: NAP (Name, address and phone number)? Optimise your Google places listing with the same info you have on your website or store locator pages. Do not use PO Boxes or virtual offices. Why is this important? Because Google’s organic listings decreased from 10 to 7 and since then, has further decreased to as low as 3 results. What are the rest of the results replaced with? Well, four paid ads, local search results and the remainder are organic listings. What if you cannot get into the local search results? Use link building to get your citations into those results.

What should local businesses SEO include (according to SEMrush)? • Sign up for a Google Business listing • Find sites that provide citations (brand name, address and phone number) and build links to those citations • Keep citations uniform across all external sites • Perform competitor analysis to see what they are ranking for • Keep a spreadsheet of each citation and its URL Paid Search Campaigns Running PPC ads is always part of a good integrated marketing strategy. With the help of RankBrain, PPC ads are slowly being shown to the target market, saving you money on CPC, but most importantly driving better conversions. Looking at the above results, first prize is to have your paid ad listing, local search listing as well as organic listing to display for the same query.

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How can you take advantage of machine learning by optimising PPC campaigns? Travis Bliffen writes: • Always use paid campaigns along with organic traffic growth. • Tweak and optimise landing pages to improve quality scores and reduce costs. • Track and analyse campaigns to identify any poor performers.

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Mobile and Search Designing your website to be mobile friendly and responsive or adaptive is no longer an option, it is a requirement

Personalisation

eCommerce The most competitive space on the internet is eCommerce. The good news is that you no longer need to compete directly against big brands. The saying goes “If you can’t beat them, join them.” You can use them to rank your websites and gain visibility with potential traffic. An example of this is Amazon. It allows you to setup shop on their platform using their premium package. Amazon is actually a competitor of Google. Youtube, Facebook and Twitter can be used the same way. Add videos to Youtube, or posts to Facebook and Twitter, link them back to your website to gain more potential traffic and increase conversions. Other beneficial SEO tactics which we can leverage off Rankbrain for eCommerce websites are Rich snippets, reviews and Paid ads.

SEMrush claims that eCommerce optimisers should also: • Do competitor analysis to see what big brands currently rank for search queries. • Leverage big brands for your own brand visibility and sales. • Always keep content unique and optimized for sales and engagement.

Personalisation occurs when the user is logged into an email, browser or social account. Personalisation has been around for the longest time and is even more important now than it was 5 years ago. What is personalisation? It is a term used for search query results which are relative to some information obtained from the visitor/user which can be anything from search history or IP address to geographic location. Taking the user’s browsing history into consideration when a user is logged in, can dramatically change the results they view, even on different browsers. Another form of personalisation is when search engines rank a website more prominently if a user clicks on the same website for different search queries. Personalisation is an important factor of AI so you should consider the following when performing keyword research: •The user’s location and search history make a difference in ranking •Even a different browser can change the way search results are shown •Third-party analytics software must use different proxies to see results from different Google top-level domains, but they still can’t take user personalization into account •Engaging users and creating campaigns that help them remember your brand will increase your rank even within personalized results. (SEMrush: 2016) The above is not even a tip of the iceberg. The days of trying to manipulate search engines with spammy tactics are numbered. Following the fundamental SEO principles and integrating those with new platforms will be your secret to success.

• Use YouTube to gain visibility through How-To and Tutorials.

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THE REACT REVOLUTION

EVAN SUMMERS, PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT, SARATOGA

The Early Milestones Of JavaScript In 1995, Brendan Eich built “JavaScript” for inclusion in Netscape 2.0. In 2006, the “ECMAScript 4” standard was abandoned. It was an attempt to dramatically improve JavaScript, beyond the “ECMAScript 3” standard of 1999. In 2009, Ryan Dahl, a young indie developer, presented “Node” at JSConf. He took Google’s opensourced V8 JavaScript engine, added some I/O bindings for accessing the filesystem and network, and voila, JavaScript was the “universal” programming language, for browsers, servers and tools.

A Brave Node World In 2015, ES6 successfully implemented the ambitions of ES4, and this year ES2016 should demonstrate the new annual cadence of JavaScript standardisation. Today, The Babel transpiler enables the use of ES6 and even ES2016 even in browsers that only support ES5.

IN 2015, REACT BECAME THE POSTER-CHILD FOR “UNIVERSAL” JAVASCRIPT.

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JavaScript, being untyped, is well suited to small codebases. “Microservices” have emerged as a popular architecture, which is a great fit for Node. Otherwise, Microsoft’s TypeScript adds optional typing to JavaScript, which will probably be standardised into JavaScript in future. Atom (CoffeeScript) and VisualStudio Code (TypeScript) demonstrate that cross platform desktop apps can be developed using Electron, which is a based on Chromium and Node.

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Functional vs Object-Oriented

The Genesis Of React

“Functional reactive programming” is favoured by React and also TC39, the ECMAScript standardisation committee.

In 2011, Jordan Walke, an engineer at Facebook was building a complicated clientside widget. He found it was easiest to render the component in toto, from a given state, much like web servers do.

Stateless microservices have enabled scalability and resilience. Since then, multiple instances of the same microservice can be spun up. So “shared state” must be separated from the code, perhaps into Redis. Immutable objects and functional style programming, without “side-effects,” is preferred over OOP not least by the React community. Pete Hunt, the former React developer from Instagram, labels “shared mutable state” as “the root of all evil.”

The Problem With Web Apps Web servers accept a request and render an HTML page. This is a straight-forward approach: given some parameters, fetch some data, and render the components of the page. React does the same, both in the browser, and on Node. Interactive web components are traditionally implemented using jQuery, where we manipulate the DOM imperatively. Such components are difficult to debug, especially as their complexity increases.

Facebook engineers worked out an efficient DOM syncing mechanism via a “virtual DOM,” and voila – “React” became a useful technology adopted internally at Facebook. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram. Their engineers liked React for the Instagram.com website project. This encouraged Facebook to refactor out their own internal dependencies, so that React could be used as an independent library. And so Instagram.com was entirely built using React. In May 2013, React was opensourced.

The Backlash React’s anti-MVC approach of merging logic and presentation in JavaScript, was dismissed as “rethinking best practices.” For example, we are “just fine” using Angular to bind models to the DOM, even if jQuery integration is problematic.

It’s hard to reason about the current state of the DOM with any certainty, given the myriad of changes over time. Data is delivered from the server asynchronously, while the user interacts with views, which are bound to models, which effect other views. Productivity is so adversely affected on large projects, that Facebook invented React out of their own necessity to reduce complexity and boost productivity. We realise that imperative programming, where we tell computers exactly what to do, is inefficient. Surely we should be telling the computer what we want, and let it work out the details for us? This is what React does with respect to the DOM.

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Riding The Universal Wave React composes HTML elements into custom components via JavaScript code. These HTML “elements” and components are in fact React JavaScript objects that compose the “virtual” DOM. The virtual DOM is synced to the real DOM in an optimised fashion, which is the “magic” of React. React introduces JSX, which supports XML-style documents embedded in JavaScript, e.g. HTML, SVG etc. React espouses a declarative style of programming the user-interface, avoiding bi-directional data binding in favour of a more predictable uni-directional data flow called “Flux.” In 2015, Redux emerged as a leading “Flux” implementation, embracing the functional programming concepts of Elm, with awesome “timetravelling” debugging capabilities, whilst reducing the boilerplate of Flux. React was proving itself successful for “single-page” browser apps. But React also runs on Node. You can transition server-rendered components in the browser into dynamic components. As such, it supports “progressive enhancement,” the cornerstone of SEO. In 2015, React became the poster-child for “universal” Javascript. Netflix uses React even for embedded applications in set-top boxes and televisions, running their own stripped-down browser technology.

JavaScript Is All You Need The React community believes that JavaScript is the language for everything. Even for styles. Why introduce hobbled templating languages for HTML, or learn Sass or Less for CSS artifacts, when JavaScript is so great? With React you can build a website with what appears to be HTML elements and CSS styles, but which are in fact JavaScript modules.

The Game Changer In February 2015, React Native was announced at Facebook’s React.js Conf. It enables native iOS and Android development with React, using CSS styling conventions and Flexbox for layout. React Native enables unified product teams across the web, iOS and Android. For some mobile apps, 85% of code can be shared across these platforms, in particular the business logic and backend integration.

Join The Revolution React has challenged former “best practices” for UI development. It leverages JavaScript to boost productivity, unify product teams, and share code across the major platforms: web and native; desktop, mobile and embedded; client and server. That is the React Revolution. Visit https://facebook.github.io/react to join the revolution today. React can be used to render a specific feature on your site, so you don’t have to go “all in.”

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Timeline 1995 - Netscape 2.0 includes “JavaScript” 2009 - Ryan Dahl presents “Node” at JSConf 2011 - npm 1.0 release 2011 - Microsoft & Joyent port Node.js to Windows 2011 - Facebook deploys React 2012 - Instagram.com built with React 2013 - React opensourced by Facebook 2015 - React Native announced at ReactConf.js 2015 - ES6 standardised 2015 - Node Foundation created, releases v4, merging io.js 2016 - ES2016 to be standardised

Author Bio Evan is the lead developer of the IOL “Mini” project, and previously IOLmobile – an Angular app developed in 2014 and replaced by IOL Mini. He is based at World Wide Creative with the IOL team. He is a former enterprise Java developer and PostgreSQL DBA, now embracing JavaScript, Node, Redis and React. You can find him on Twitter @evanxsummers, and code on Github. com/evanx.

THE REACT COMMUNITY BELIEVES THAT JAVASCRIPT IS THE LANGUAGE FOR EVERYTHING.

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DOES YOUR COMPANY/CLIENT USE A MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORM?

1.7% YES, BUT I DON’T BELIEVE IT HAS BENEFITED US.

28.8% 22%

WHAT IS A MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORM?

NO, BUT IN FUTURE WE WOULD LIKE TO.

10.2% NO, WE’RE NOT INTERESTED.

37.3% YES, AND IT HAS IMPROVED THE EFFICIENCY OF OUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES.

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

DO YOU BELIEVE VR IS A FLEETING TREND OR A VALUABLE PART OF THE MARKETING MIX?

NOT INTERESTED IN USING VR 8.6%

IT’S VERY VALUABLE AND WE’D LIKE TO USE IT BUT DON’T HAVE THE BUDGET 48.3% VR IS INTERESTING BUT NOT APPLICABLE TO MY WORK 36.2%

WE’VE USED VR WITH SUCCESSFUL RESULTS 6.9%

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

WHICH OF THESE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES ARE USED BY YOUR COMPANY OR CLIENTS?

VIDEO MARKETING 62.7%

SEARCH OR DISPLAY ADVERTISING – 59.3%

BLOGGING PLATFORM – 52.5%

ANALYTICS – 91.5%

MOBILE MARKETING – 67.8%

LANDING PAGE TOOLS – 42.4%

LEAD MANAGEMENT – 45.8%

EMAIL MARKETING – 64.4%

CRM – 66.1%

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

WHICH OF THESE SKILLS DO YOU DEEM MOST IMPORTANT FOR DIGITAL MARKETERS TO HAVE?

SEO – 1.7% SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT – 5.1%

MEDIA PLANNING – 8.5%

CONTENT CREATION AND CMS MANAGEMENT – 18.6%

ANALYTICS AND REPORTING – 20.3%

STRATEGY AND RESEARCH – 45.8%

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

AS PART OF YOUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES, WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS DO YOU USE?

TWITTER – 98.3%

FACEBOOK – 64.4%

YOUTUBE – 55.9% LINKEDIN – 44.1%

INSTAGRAM – 35.6%

BLOG – 22.0% PINTEREST – 16.9% GOOGLE PLUS – 13.6 %

VIMEO – 8.5%

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

WHICH OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES DO YOU BELIEVE IS MOST EFFECTIVE?

LANDING PAGE TOOLS 1.7% LEAD MANAGEMENT – 5.1% BLOGGING PLATFORM – 5.1% EMAIL MARKETING – 5.1% CRM – 10.2% SEARCH OR DISPLAY ADVERTISING – 10.2%

MOBILE MARKETING – 15.3%

ANALYTICS – 22.0%

VIDEO MARKETING – 25.4%

ALL DATA SOURCED FROM THE HEAVY CHEF TECHNOLOGY SURVEY – MAY 2016

WATCH THIS SPACE HEAVY CHEF REPORT | VOLUME 6