Into Africa - by Wired Magazine

If you want to become extremely wealthy over the next five years, and you have a rudimentary grasp of technology, here's a no-brainer: move to Africa. Seriously.

The internet is only now arriving, and - with a billion people on the continent still mostly offline - there exists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the next Zyngas, eBays and Groupons for a huge untapped local market.

You need only to look at the map of huge broadband fibre-optic cables currently being laid on both east and west coasts, from Djibouti to Dakar, to understand how quickly and ambitiously an entire continent is being connected. It's like being back in 1995 again, and realising there might just be a market for an online bookshop or auction website.

Don't take my word for it: David Cameron is so keen to give British entrepreneurs a foothold that he recently took a delegation of CEOs to Nigeria and South Africa to highlight "one of the greatest economic opportunities on the planet".

The trip - featuring the bosses of firms such as Barclays and the Royal Mint, Vodafone and Virgin Atlantic - was hailed by Downing Street as "an historic visit to a continent with a trillion-dollar economy and the potential, according to the IMF, to grow faster than Brazil over the next five years".

Much of that growth will come from startups that bring the mobile internet to businesses and consumers who have until now been offline. That's why Cameron's team invited along the British founders of red-hot mobile-money business Monitise, a clever text-messaging system called Frontline SMS - and your own Digital Life columnist with his trusty notebook.

It was, admittedly, a surreal four-day schedule, taking in South Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa that, at the last moment, was squeezed to just two days and two countries (well, there was the small matter of a domestic phone-hacking crisis to distract the prime minister's attention).

But it was long enough to get a sense of the extraordinary opportunities - at a time when McKinsey and Ernst & Young are forecasting that £92bn will flow into Africa by 2015, and that consumer spending will reach £863bn by 2020. No wonder Helios Investment Partners could recently raise a £550m fund specifically targeting the continent.

So where could you make your own tech-based millions? A few obvious markets are primed for explosive growth:

Mobile money: Who needs banks if you can use your mobile to send and receive cash? More than a quarter of Kenya's GDP now passes through a phone-to-phone network called M-Pesa and, in Uganda, MTN Mobile Money has almost two million users.

As Cameron put it in a speech to Lagos Business School, "Today, mobile banking systems mean we can cut out the middlemen and make a direct impact on the lives of small farmers who can produce more food, feed their families, sell more food at the market and in turn purchase more seed."

E-commerce: You don't need a smart-phone, let alone a PC, to shop online. The American startup SlimTrader runs a service called MoBiashara, which lets African consumers shop by mobile on basic phones. And there are more than half a billion of those in Africa.

Business directories: The British startup entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski - formerly of UpMyStreet and Moo.com - moved to Cape Town a couple of years ago to run a bunch of firms for international media group MIH, including a Kenyan business directory, Mocality, that gave many companies their first online presence. Why? Because he wanted to be where the action was.

Health: Not only do mobile phones turn into blood-pressure monitors and ultrasound devices that can connect rural communities, they can also detect counterfeit medicines: the startup mPedigree works with pharmaceutical companies to let patients text codes on packs of antimalarials to receive confirmation that they're genuine.

Leapfrog tech: If a tiny fraction of, say, Zimbabweans have access to the "big" internet, then why not make the internet accessible via SMS on their 2G phones? That's what Econet Wireless Zimbabwe is offering its five million mobile phone subscribers, turning their mobile handsets into virtual smartphones with technology from ForgetMeNot Africa that turns e-mails and chats into text messages.

Now insert your own big idea here, and book your air ticket. Sure, Africa still faces huge hurdles - in South Africa, eleven million people live below the poverty line, and almost six million have HIV; in Nigeria, 110 million out of a population of 158 million live on less than £1 a day. But when one telco alone, Bharti Airtel, recently announced £8bn in African revenue, you know it's time to abandon our traditional assumptions.

As Cameron said in Lagos, "Which continent has six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world? Africa is transforming in a way no one thought possible 20 years ago... and suddenly a whole new future seems within reach."


And why shouldn't you have a profitable role in that future?

David Rowan is editor of Wired magazine.

SA stifles cash heists with hi-tech foam

Through a series of triggers polyurethane foam can be dispensed in less than a minute that then hardens within another minute

SARAH WILD

Published: 2011/04/05 06:37:07 AM

HOMEGROWN technology, which among other things gave the world razor wire and security gates, is being adapted to combat another crime — ATM bombing.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has developed a polyurethane foam-dispensing unit which it has dubbed Pudu.

The Pudu technology is also housed in the back of cash-in-transit vehicles, where the money is kept. Through a series of triggers and mechanisms, polyurethane foam can be dispensed in less than a minute. Within another minute, the foam hardens.

It has been partially responsible for the decline in cash-in- transit heists in SA and is now being marketed internationally.

The CSIR does research and development for socioeconomic growth in SA. Crime is a big deterrent to doing business in SA, and technology has a huge role in staying a step ahead of criminals.

"The technology has spinoffs," CSIR research and development outcomes manager Delon Mudaly says. "(For) ATM robberies … and cross-pavement carriers, we have developed a Pudu solution." Some of these products will be on the market within the next year, Mr Mudaly says.

"Around 1999-2000, SBV (a cash-in-transit company owned by SA’s four big banks) approached the CSIR for a solution regarding cash-in-transit heists, so the CSIR developed technology to solve the problem," he says.

"SBV is (now) the lowest-risk cash-in-transit company in the world, and this is partially due to our technology."

It takes about two days to cut the money out of the concrete-like substance, immobilising the area and ensuring that the valuables can be retrieved. "It also saves the lives of guards," Mr Mudaly says.

"Cash-in-transit heists are about intelligence and inside information. Robbers find out that vehicles are protected by technology (that) cannot be attacked, so there has been a drop in (cash-in- transit heist) events.

"They don’t understand the technology, but they know they can’t undo it."

The technology is exclusively owned by the CSIR, which has appointed the security equipment company QD Group as manufacturer and marketer of Pudu.

"There is one user in SA at the moment, SBV — they use it extensively," Graeme King, CEO of Midrand-based QD Group, said yesterday.

"At the moment, we’re manufacturing about 150 units a year. We’re marketing it to other companies in SA and elsewhere in the world, and we’ve had quite a bit of interest from the cash-in-transit industry worldwide."

There were other applications for the technology, Mr King said, which could be of interest to "anyone who has a safe or a vault". He said: "We’ve spoken to a few of the banks and there is some interest in the banking world in SA."

The interest in Pudu is not confined to SA.

"It is now marketed internationally," Mr Mudaly said.

He cited interest from European and Latin American countries. "And it’s been demonstrated in the UK and Brazil."

A unit can cost tens of thousands of rand but when millions are at stake, it is an investment many companies are willing to make to keep a step ahead of determined criminals.