Good morning, folks… ??
Here is everything interesting in African tech that I found for you guys because I love y’all, but more importantly, I’m getting paid for it, $o…
The big guns.
The maker’s perspective – Philip Ese, from the Alat team, dropped an interesting report yesterday: 10,000 accounts opened in 3 weeks, with 80% being new Wema customers (lol), and those infamous bugs now under control.
+ More “perspective”, lmao.
+ I remember doing a quick search on Twitter, a week ago, and beyond Wema’s campaign tweets, it took me a while to find a +ve tweet about the product (which happened to be someone willing to try it out for the first time based off the bright-orange-pants march he had seen). So, if the bug fixes in the new report suggest anything, it is that Wema may have finally started focusing on what actually matters. ‘finally’ because more resources seemed to be expended in pushing a broken product than in actually getting shit to work since launch, which alienated some users.
+ Unrelated, but still on services that are taking the digital route, the Corporate Affairs Commission closed manual registration a few days ago in Kaduna, Abuja, Lagos, Enugu, and Port Harcourt. It will take only online applications in those areas now, which should be cheaper, faster and convenient as transactions can be conducted from anywhere.
Power to the people. Ghana is expected to generate excess energy set at a capacity of over 1,700 megawatts due to numerous operational power plants. According to Ghana’s Minister of Energy, Boakye Agyarko, they might have to start exporting energy by 2020 to neighboring countries when all the energy reforms have been completed. It’s mostly a bold numbers and forecast game, considering the total capacity distributed to households and businesses is 4,275 megawatts at the moment, which leaves them 12,000+ megawatts shy of the projected 16,400 – 17360 GWh, ~15,000 of which would be distributed to meet growing demands. So, by extension, this projection relies on the upper quartile, and that’s an unreliable metric in any kind of forecasting. Regardless, a certain neighboring country ?? could take a page out of the 42 power contracts behind Ghana’s power sector.
Witness me, I ride ? ?- No, there will be no chrome spray paint feature, which totally blows ?, but Uber is rolling out an integration with Snapchat in Nigeria, South Africa, and Ghana. This will give Uber riders access to custom exclusive Snapchat filters, including Uber ETA and Uber ride filters. These can be used to share trip information with other users. If the Uber rider is an existing Snapchat user, they will see a Snap card in the Uber feed.
Afrobytes is an annual international Tech Conference connecting businesses and technology leaders, founders, investors, and policy experts with the fastest-growing African tech startups. The inaugural conference will take place in Paris on June 8-9, 2017, at Le Medef. Find out more and register here.
+ In celebration of Africa Day, which was yesterday, here are three revolutionary inventions in Africa. Link
+ Africa maintains its position as the second fastest growing economy in the world. This report suggests that African economies will improve to average 3.4% growth in 2017 and 4.3% in 2018. Link
+ The Batman Equation – this won’t get you to stop hating math but I bet you it’s pretty sweet. Link
+ This blockchain startup, Bitland, is allowing individuals and groups to survey land and record title deeds on the service’s blockchain. Link
+ Aiivon Innovation Hub has finally opened to the public in Abuja Link
+ Nanjira’s Twitter thread on bridging the digital gender divide. ??♂️||??
+ DStv Media Sales has been fined R180 million for price fixing. Link
+ This Abuja-based service called Brandcoma wants to go up against ? Printivo to become the leading online printing marketplace in Nigeria. Link
+ Finally, my book + music + TV recommendations for the weekend and the public holiday in Nigeria, because I have great taste: Thomas Pikkety’s Capital + AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire (once it stops being a Mad Men clone later on, ?) + Sylvan Esso’s What Now.
The Greentree Startup Lab is providing access to funding, governance structure, financial planning, legal advice, and technical support to innovative businesses to scale rapidly. So if you are interested, apply here.
Upcoming events and deadlines
Lagos: V8 Social Media Marketing Training, May 26th. Link
Lagos: Code Pyramid Design Meetup, May 27th. Link
Deadline: Next Einstein Forum Ambassadors Programme Application, May 27th. Link
Abuja: The Abuja WeCode Hackathon, May 27th. Link
Lagos: ScholarX User Experience, May 27th. Link
Lagos: Startup Grind with Pradeep Pahalwani, May 27th. Link
Deadline: Fintech Hive Application, May 28th. Link
Deadline: Seedstars World Cape Town Application, May 28th. Link
Farewell, for the next three days at least.
That’s all for today. I won’t see you until Tuesday (thank God for public holidays), so have a great one being a couch potato and pinning it on being a millennial, as will I. ✌✌
