| South Africa is fascinating - contrasting bad news and great innovation. Although there have been setbacks from recent government shenanigans the wheels of law
are turning (albeit slowly) and the ruling Zuma faction is daily
facing more and more resistance. In the meantime the weak rand makes SA cheap, and their interesting ideas enter the world market. Amazon has a strong presence in SA - and (this is generally a little known fact) EC2 was developed in South Africa[1] Locally, the Silicon Cape[2] initiative is aiming to create an environment where tech startups thrive, and
has grown to 10k members in 500 organisations. Ventureburn[3] has a lot on the startup scene in emerging markets, and a lot on South Africa in particular. The limitations and challenges of South Africa actually drives innovation. South Africa's (actually, Africa as a continent too) large informal and unbanked sector has led to a lot of fintech and mobile-banking related startups. Limited Internet infrastructure penetration leads to interesting ways to solve, say, the last-mile problem. For instance Flickswitch[4] has focused on greasing the wheels for those within the IoT and M2M market who use the GSM networks to address the last mile problem (disclaimer: I am one of the four original co-founders of and exited last year after being there for 9 years). Etc. It's a super market to explore, bigger than, say, Ireland, and more innovative than most. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-amazon-exposed-its-guts-the... [2] https://www.siliconcape.com/ [3] http://ventureburn.com/ [4] http://www.flickswitch.co.za |