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South African startup doot! is a social travel marketplace that facilitates cultural exchanges by connecting Japanese locals and travellers together to meet at a restaurant, speak English and enjoy the local cuisine.

Basically, users sign up to doot! and list themselves as either travellers or locals. Travellers list their nationalities, travel itinerary, the languages they speak, and what foods they would like to enjoy, while locals list the foods they would like to eat or “specialise” in, and their English level.

Locals and travellers can then view one another’s profiles, which are displayed in a slideshow on the website, and send requests to one another. Once requests are made and accepted, a chat opens between the two individuals where they can agree on a date, time and place to meet.

“At the restaurant, the traveller can expect to enjoy authentic food, avoiding the tourist traps, fully understand the menu, get insight into the local way of life, and have language barriers mitigated for them by the local. What some people may not know is that many Japanese restaurants – actually, many restaurants in Asia – don’t have English menus,” doot! co-CEO Brandon Josi told Disrupt Africa.

“So if you can’t speak or read Asian writing systems, eating out can be a stressful time. As a thanks for the food experience, travellers pay the local 500 yen – the cost of a beer in Japan – per person, per experience. As for the local, they’re able to practice English in a natural environment while earning some money, all in an enjoyable social setting.”

doot! was initially launched in December of last year, with the model based around the traveller earning money for providing English conversation opportunity to the locals. It pivoted in the middle of this year, however, with Josi saying the new model has been far better received by both parties.

Josi came up with the idea for the platform when travelling in Vietnam.

“I often had Vietnamese people coming to speak to me and asking if I had eaten yet. I didn’t know why at the time, but it turns out they were trying to practice English with me. The more I looked, particularly in my year in Japan, the more I saw and experienced this,” he said.

“At present, Japanese people pay between 700 and 1,000 yen to attend a single language exchange at a cafe or bar. Alternatively, they’ll pay thousands of yen per hour, every week, just to practice English with a native speaker outside of a classroom setting. The most dedicated will travel to an English speaking country for months at a time, spending hundreds of thousands of Japanese yen. And I was like, why are you paying for this? There are things that you, as a local, can offer travellers. Things they’ve always been looking for, and things they’re happy to pay for.”

This was how doot! was born, and though the model has changed, the concept remains the same. The self-funded startup has taken part in the Y Combinator Startup School, and was recently accepted into the Japan-based 500Kobe accelerator. Since its launch, it has received over 100 sign-ups, and is planning on expanding this through paid marketing and on-the-ground marketing in Japan.

“At present, we are following a slow launch plan. Since we are a marketplace, we only look attractive to the local side of the market when there are a large amount of travellers on the platform. So, we have been growing this amount with the aim of making it attractive to locals, knowing that it is likely that locals will sign up only when there is a likelihood that they can get their money’s worth out of doot!,” Josi said.

So far, doot! is active in the Japanese cities of Kanazawa, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, with locals paying a monthly, quarterly or annual subscription fee to be listed on the platform, but it is planning future expansion to China, South Korea, Vietnam, Italy and India.

“These are a few countries we intend to expand to in the mid-term, but there are many others in the long-term,” Kosi said.

“We built doot! with the intent of being globally applicable, so there are many countries we can expand into. We’ve been pondering about how to penetrate the African market, including South Africa since it is always nice to add value to your home market, but as the business model stands, other markets are looking more synergistic for now.”

The post SA social travel marketplace doot! connects travellers with locals in… Japan appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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Ticket reselling platform TicketTrade has launched in South Africa, claiming to be the country’s  first comprehensive platform allowing users to sell-on their unwanted tickets to any entertainment or sporting event.

TicketTrade offers an online secondary ticket marketplace where users can buy and sell spare or unwanted tickets safely, easily and fairly.  The platform aims to bypass scammers and ticket touts, and to avoid the inflated margins often associated with second-hand ticket sales.

Sellers simply search TicketTrade for the event they want to sell their tickets for, upload their PDF tickets, and set the price they want to sell the tickets for – although the price is capped at 120 per cent of the face value.  Once the tickets sell, payment is made into the seller’s bank account within three working days.

Similarly, buyers search the platform for a ticket, add it to their cart, pay directly on the site, and when payment has cleared the tickets are downloadable immediately.

“We wanted to create a platform that removed the stress associated with selling or buying a second-hand ticket. Worrying whether or not the tickets you bought are legit, or having to wait for an EFT to clear before sending your tickets to some random, are just some of the hassles we wanted to remove to make it as easy and safe as possible for fans to transact,”  says Jason Russell co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at TicketTrade.

The founders of TicketTrade say they are filling a huge void in the market – claiming they have no competitor offering the same comprehensive service; with the only options available limited to certain event brands, or international platforms unsuited to the local market.

“We believe everyone should be able to recoup costs for something they no longer need, and we believe TicketTrade is the right step towards creating a healthy secondary ticketing industry in South Africa,” says Deán de Klerk co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of TicketTrade.

The post TicketTrade launches SA’s 1st universal ticket reselling platform appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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Johannesburg-based team Authentic8 has been named winner of a competition run by Airports Company of South Africa and Wits University’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct for its identity management authentication solution.

Airports Company of South Africa and Tshimologong earlier this year launched a search for disruptive and innovative developers to come up with a suitable Single Sign On (SSO) access management system.

The competition has now concluded, with two finalists taking part in a hackathon. Authentic8 was named the winner, having delivered an SSO solution built on the OKTA collaborative development platform. The team received ZAR150,000 (US$11,000) and will undergo a seven-month incubation period at the Tshimologong Precinct to continue developing its solution. Team Wakanda, with its “bringing it together” solution, was second.

Shaun Randles, enterprise development manager at Tshimologong Precinct said the hackathon set out to streamline and develop a single system to manage access and authentication for all systems within the Airports Company South Africa environment, and to discover a new generation of technology-driven skills.

“Part of the role of the precinct is to support and grow the next generation of talent. We identified 50 impressive teams through the hackathon process, all of which had innovative solutions to the Airports Company South Africa access management system challenge,” he said.

Humbulani Netshieneulu, Airports Company of South Africa socio-economic development (SED) senior manager, was delighted with the outcome and said the company was excited about the Authentic8 solution.

“The prototypes presented by both winners demonstrated an innate understanding of the challenges we face and the best possible solution for our access management. Using a platform for enterprise blockchain, Airports Company South Africa is confident that together with Tshimologong’s guidance, Authentic8 will deliver a valuable solution,” he said.

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“We’re a geo-intelligence company. It sounds fancy, but what does that mean? Well, we make maps, but it’s really a lot more advanced than that.”

Indeed it is. Bernard Wright launched Geo Gecko in 2013 after working for nine years in the development and humanitarian sector.

“I got tired with the lack of innovation and making pretty, but non-decision-influencing, maps. So, I defected to the dark side of the private sector,” he told Disrupt Africa.

Geo Gecko aims to solve real world challenges using tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), satellite imagery, drones and cloud computing to provide evidence and insight in data-starved environments.

“We use satellites to monitor crop health, drones to assess flood risk in slums and sonar to map the base of lakes and rivers,” Wright said.

“We track poachers and the rangers chasing them in national parks. We fly drones over slums to identify flood prone areas. We use telecoms data to monitor movement of populations and finance. We use satellites to monitor the health of crops on three continents every week. A lot more than a map.”

The startup has acquired customers all over the world, which Wright attributes to the amount of valuable information it is unlocking for customers in a variety of sectors.

“The entire earth is recorded twice a day by satellites. These aren’t just pretty pictures. Data is locked in there ready to be released and analysed,” he said.

“We have a direct feed to the satellite companies and automatically pull images for our areas of interest to our server. There, our algorithms are automatically triggered. They generate information about each pixel in the image, like how much moisture is in the soil for a 3*3m square. This is then compared to the historical values so we can answer questions like, is it wetter now when compared with 6 months ago?”

Geo Gecko then makes this data available via its web maps and its data-as-a-service setup, so customers can integrate it into their own platforms.

“The agribusiness firm Olam uses our data to monitor their crops on three continents. We’re providing it to others who work with large networks of smallholder farmers. When it comes to smallholders the data is not perfect. If you show the results to a farmer with half an acre, he may not be impressed. But it is standardised, low-cost and frequently updated data which brewers and others with outgrower schemes need. We’re working on refining it further to identify harvest time, and how planting time correlates with rainfall,” Wright said.

“The frequency and resolution of satellite imagery is improving every day, as is machine learning to interpret it. The cost is dropping too. We’re building tools to simplify accessing this powerful intelligence for those who truly need it.”

He launched Geo Gecko in Uganda because “there are massive, economy changing things happening here”, yet big decisions are being made based on poor quality data, or none at all.

“We generate information, so decision-makers can act based on evidence. We use the only two sources of big data on the continent – daily satellite imagery and telecoms call data records,” Wright said.

Geo Gecko has been self-funded thus far, but is speaking to investors now it has a package of products and is ready to scale to new territories.

“We have a physical presence in Uganda and are planning to expand that to another country in East and Southern Africa soon. We’ll be keeping our HQ here in Kampala as it’s a great place to work and the talent pool is very decent,” Wright said.

“We’re not constrained by our physical location though. The beauty of using satellites as a source of data means that we can zoom in to anywhere on the globe and quantify what’s happening on the ground. I can tell you how much moisture is in the soil for a field in Brazil last week and how that compares with last year. We’re doing that now for large scale agribusinesses and people acquiring land.”

Geo Gecko has a very varied client base.

“Around 50 per cent of our clients are private and 50 per cent are humanitarian, development, or government actors. International agribusiness firms, government, city authorities, commercial farmers and engineering firms. Never boring. We’re always learning something new like how the fall armyworm moves in order to track it via satellite,” he said.

The post This Ugandan startup uses satellites and drones to unlock information appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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South African fire safety startup Lumkani has partnered global tech firm Johnson Controls to install 5,200 fire detectors in Imizamo Yethu, an informal settlement in Cape Town.

Founded in 2015, Lumkani leverages proprietary hardware and a tech-enabled agent network to provide consumers living in informal settlements with insurance that protects against loss of life, shelter, and assets in the case of a home fire.

The startup, which closed a seed funding round featuring 4Di Capital, Accion Venture Lab and Lireas in June, bundles this insurance product with an Internet of Things (IoT)-connected heat sensor that detects fire in and around homes.

It has now partnered Johnson Controls to install 5,200 Lumkani fire detectors in Imizamo Yetho, covering 95 per cent of the homes in the area and providing safety for 14,000 residents and the broader community.

By combining Lumkani technology with insights from Johnson Controls, a higher performing solution is being delivered to informal settlements, helping to increase personal safety and mitigate loss of life, property and possessions.

“Lumkani uses heat detection to measure the incidence of fire in an informal home,” said David Gluckman, chief executive officer(CEO) of Lumkani. “All homeowners within range of the fire receive a text message alerting them to the potential danger and encouraging them to respond to the text to validate its presence.”

The post SA’s Lumkani installs 5,200 fire detectors in Imizamo Yethu township appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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Ghanaian fintech startup KudiGO has formally launched after a successful public beta phase, and is now closing in on a US$300,000 seed round as it expands into other markets.

KudiGO provides an integrated, mobile-based retail, payments, accounting and analytics engine for the consumer retail industry, providing a complete solution for businesses to receive payments, track inventories and build sound financial models based on past trends.

After over one year in public beta, it has now launched formally, with the goal of providing an all-in-one retail PoS for stores. The aim is for KudiGO to enable its customers to have verifiable records, business oversight, and easier access to capital.

The user-oriented solution takes into considerations network connectivity in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides an offline-online sync to help stores have their data backed up securely in the cloud.

“One of the key learnings over the beta period was the need to simplify the solution with a focus on usability by non-tech savvy users, while at the same time providing them with pertinent data on their business when they need it and in a format they can easily understand. This has led us to introduce a machine learning algorithm which does trend prediction, and provides this data to our users in a simple SMS with key information on things to do to improve their business,” said Kingsley Abrokwah of KudiGO.

Disrupt Africa reported earlier this year on the startup’s ambitious expansion plans, with KudiGO having already launched in Nigeria. It currently has over 300 businesses using its solution, resulting in more than 300,000 inventories being uploaded onto its system and over 5,000 orders being processed. Abrokwah said it was in the process of closing a seed round worth US$300,000 to facilitate further expansion, while it was also securing partnerships.

“With our recent strategic partnership with Interswitch Group to facilitate payment processing on KudiGO Storefront, we are on track to scale to Kenya and Rwanda in the first quarter of 2019 while at the same time growing our market share in Ghana and Nigeria significantly over the period,” he said.

The post Ghana’s KudiGO launches publicly, closes in on seed round appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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South African startup SA Florist has rebranded as Bloomable as it looks to expand its business to assist more local artisans.

Four years after winning funding on Dragons Den South Africa, SA Florist rebranded after making more than 50,000 deliveries and building partnerships with over 200 artisans.

The startup, which launched a programme to onboard township florists in March, has become Bloomable to dispel the notion that it is simply a florist.

“People think we’re a florist, but we’re not. We’ve been dubbed “Uber for florists” in the past, which is a good way to explain what we do. We are an online marketplace that connects people looking to buy fresh flowers and beautiful gifts, to the actual artisans who create them,” said newly appointed managing director Melissa Cumming.

Bloomable does not want to limit itself to flowers, with the rebrand designed to redefine the company in the market.

“Changing our name and brand was the perfect way to mark our collective recommitment to the company’s mission: to provide an e-commerce platform for local businesses to thrive on, to offer our customers the freshest flowers from local florists, and to keep a strong focus on developing and expanding our gifting business to empower even more artisans,” said Cumming.

The post SA Florist rebrands as Bloomable appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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All entrepreneurs operating in Africa should consider the opportunities and implications of blockchain technology, according to Kreean Singh, partner at South African blockchain hub and incubator Blockstarters.

Despite the global hype surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the technology and its potential applications are still in their early days, says Singh.  As such, the generation of young people currently in school will be the “real” users of blockchain.

“We believe the real blockchain users will be the next generation.  We’re just experimenting with the tech, really,” Singh says.

There is a huge variety of possible applications of blockchain technology, and the technology is still very much evolving.  All startups setting out in Africa today should bear this in mind, and consider how blockchain does and could relate to their business, Singh advises.

“The pace of development of this technology is very fast.  So it’s well worth your time as an entrepreneur to figure out how this can fit into your business model.”

He believes this applies to all startups – everyone should be investigating the use-cases of blockchains within their business; although he concedes there may not be a guaranteed use.

“Blockchains do not solve every problem, contrary to what has been hyped in the past year. Remember that blockchains are a technology, and just like a bakery does not need the internet to produce cakes – the internet simply enhances the customer experience -, blockchains are also limited in applicability,” Singh says.

In particular, startups should be aware of cryptocurrencies, he says.

“Ultimately, money is why we are in business. Cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, are a stepping stone in the evolution of money, and will someday and in some form replace the current fiat system. It is therefore important for all startups to start considering accepting crypto as a form of payment.”

Cryptocurrencies can help African startups navigate their way in an environment where access to capital and formal banking can be constraining.

“Cryptocurrency also allows a startup to instantly begin interacting with the world, and is not limited to the currency of the country in which the startup operates in. As customers move towards a cryptocurrency-type ecosystem, a startup would need to include cryptocurrency as a form of payment to meet the needs of their customers,” Singh says.

The post All entrepreneurs should consider blockchain in their business appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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Nigerian startup AMPZ.TV is rolling out a tool that connects sports stakeholders with likeminded people, information and opportunities.

AMPZ.TV was formed in November 2017 by Brenda Nwagwu and AbdulJabbar Momoh, who head teamed up to establish a channel for African grassroots sports, aimed at exposing talent and engaging with communities.

This led them to launching the AMPZ.TV mobile app, which is currently in beta testing and is due for public launch in the first quarter of next year.

Young sportspeople can set up sports-centric profiles listing their skills and experience, which allows them to find and apply for opportunities and events. Enthusiasts can share and consumer sport-related content, while scouts are able to source and assess talent.

“African talents have very limited or no access to information around sports opportunities. They currently rely on word of mouth with is very limiting,” Momoh said.

“Currently, there are no digital platforms servicing Africa’s talent pipeline, hence these youngsters are left to the faith of broad social media, which has proven to be ineffective to their cause of kickstarting a career simply because they are not getting the right eyeballs.”

AMPZ.TV looks to address these gaps, helping local and international scouts find talent and also ensure young sportspeople and their families are protected.

The startup was recently named winner of the female-focused GreenHouse Lab accelerator in Lagos, and raised an angel funding round in July. It is testing its solution in Lagos but believes it has pan-African potential.

“We are looking to touch base in other key markets, like South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Egypt, in no time,” Momoh said. Revenue streams include advertising, subscriptions and commissions on deals.

The post Nigeria’s AMPZ.TV rolls out tool for sports stakeholders appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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South African property rentals startup HouseME has partnered online classifieds website Gumtree to make its offering available to all landlords renting their properties through the Gumtree platform.

Founded in Cape Town in 2016, HouseME uses smart technology to connect and vet tenants, collect rent and digitally coordinate the complete viewing, administration and payment process.

Use of its platform costs landlords as little as 2.5 per cent of rental, with HouseME also offering a three-month rental guarantee which ensures landlords are paid on time every month, regardless of when the tenant makes the payment. It has already achieved a nationwide footprint and grown twelve-fold.

Landlords will now have access to all of the benefits of HouseME through the Gumtree platform, meaning Gumtree is now able to ensure landlords are connected with prospective tenants faster and through a rigorous vetting process which reduces the risk for property owners.

Ben Shaw, HouseME co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), believes the collaboration will offer users of the country’s biggest online classifieds website peace of mind.

“HouseME is excited to extend further value to South African landlords and assist in reducing the risks associated with property rental – of which late payments, defaulters and managing deposits are just a few,” he said.

“Our rigorous vetting process reduces risk for our landlords, ensuring they have quality tenants – a core reason that our product fits so well with Gumtree’s objectives. We are excited about this collaboration, and look forward to working with Gumtree as we serve a broad part of the market together.”

Claire Cobbledick, Gumtree South Africa general manager, said the site has 36,000 property rental listings, with all landlords on the platform standing to benefit.

“We know that linking up with HouseME will make life a lot easier, and more profitable, for many of the landlords who use Gumtree,” she said.

The post SA property startup HouseME inks partnership with Gumtree appeared first on Disrupt Africa.

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